Course Introduction 4.614 Religious Architecture and Islamic Cultures, Fall 2002

4.614 is a course that I meant to have it as an introduction to Islamic cultures, and I am using it in a plural in here, through looking at one specific kind of architecture which, of course, would be the most related to what we would call Islamic culture, which is the religious architecture of those cultures. And I am using it in the plural because I do not want to convey the image that what we are looking at is a monolithic culture from beginning to end and it is the same in every place that professes Islam as a religion or that accepts Islam as a religion. So it is really a survey course that tries to use architecture, and a specific kind of architecture, in order to introduce to the undergraduate and to the uninitiated the idea of what makes a society or a culture an Islamic society or an Islamic culture through their religious practices within religious spaces and through their tastes and their favorite forms and decorative patterns and so on in these religious spaces. And what is the symbolic meaning and perhaps actually most of the religious meaning of these spaces and these decorative patterns, these structural solutions. Where are the influences coming from? How did this these cultures interact with each other or with cultures that are external to the Islamic world? How did these affect the development of the Islamic architecture of these cultures, and how, vice versa, sometimes they affected the cultures outside? The structure of 4.614 and the way it has developed over the years, although actually from the beginning I wanted it to be that way, there is a history and the history of architecture class. A typical session would start with me setting the tone for the period that we are in. So I would tell them about the major events of that period, who was doing what in terms of the important people because, of course, actually for pre-modern history we know more about the rulers than we know about the rule. So there is an introduction of which dynasty is ruling, where did they come from, what kind of culture they came from, what kind of idea and ideals they were looking for. And then we start introducing the monuments. And the monuments are introduced in relationship to their historic context and also in relationship to the continuum that is Islamic architecture. That is in every session I try to relate what they are looking at to something that they have either looked at before or something that I assume, and sometimes I assume mistakenly, that they know about. 4.614 is actually marked as a HASD class here at MIT which is, in a sense, a core curriculum in the humanities that is available for all the undergraduate students to take as a fulfillment of their humanities requirement. So it comes with a set of rules with it about how you expect students to progress in a class. And students are expected to produce between 20 and 25 pages of writing that are divided among four or five exercises. And they are supposed to take part in discussions related to specific topics within the class. And, at the end of the class, there is an exam. These are the three methods of evaluation. And the other aspect that I use in the evaluation is actually my exams are usually designed so that they are not a reflection of how much material the students have managed to memorize but how much ideas they have managed to internalize. The other thing that I try to do is actually, although it is a historic class, and I do want it to remain fully ensconced within the history of Islamic religion and cultures, I try to bring in current affairs into the class where I bring in parallels by drawing the student's attention. For example, now in Iraq, people are getting used to the names of the Iraqi cities. And we look at a few monuments in there, so I immediately make the contact in there and make the connection between what is happening in those cities today the students have heard about and what happened, say, in the 7th or 8th century in the same city. 4.614 is a course that is part of the courses that are sponsored and introduced into the Department of Architecture by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Which is a program endowed by the Aga Khan in 1979 to basically promote and support the teaching and research on Islamic architecture within the Department of Architecture. 4.614, in particular, is a rather successful class because it is a survey class, because it introduces a whole tradition from beginning to end. And because, as opposed to the usual class of survey of Islamic architecture in departments of art history, they usually stop with the last wave of grand monuments of Islamic tradition. I would say, for example, the 17th century Mughal architecture of India is where they stopped because what happened after is usually considered to be something that is much more influenced by the development in the West, especially in Europe. But I stopped, actually, with mosques that were built two years ago, three years ago, stuff like that. And I relate them to the first mosque that is now 1,500 years old. So I actually create a living tradition in the mind of the student. And, in a sense, this is the mark of the success of the class. One thing that I learned from having taught this course for all these years, and actually that is reflected in the way the course has been introduced on OCW, is less is better. Initially, of course, when I started teaching the course, I wanted to show as many buildings as possible. I wanted to touch upon as many areas as possible. Ultimately, I realized that if I can actually spend half an hour speaking about a small building and trying to show the students the intricacy of its architecture and its decoration and try to connect its very specific context, like what happened in the year of its building and stuff like that, the students will have a much better appreciation of the architecture than if you showed them ten buildings each with like ten slides and say, look, we covered now the Umayyad periods, for example. The students will come out of the class and say we have no idea what he was talking about. I am showing you how it is better to appreciate looking at buildings, understanding buildings within their context, relating them to their history, seeing them as a product of their history, but I don't want you to actually come out of the class and sort of like say the Umayyad period, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, these are the most famous buildings. This is not a Jeopardy program. It is actually a learning experience.