A01=Simon O'Meara
Author_Simon O'Meara
Category=AGA
Category=AGR
Category=NHG
Category=QRP
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Islam
Islamic Architecture
Islamic Art
Kaaba
Middle Eastern History
Religion
Product details
- ISBN 9781399548571
- Dimensions: 170 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The most sacred site of Islam, the Ka?ba (the granite cuboid structure at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca) is here investigated by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.
Simon O’Meara is an architectural historian of early to pre-modern urban Islamic culture, with a methodological interest in using the discourses of Islam to explore Islamic visuality and understand what scholarship can struggle to accommodate or see. He is Lecturer in the History of Architecture and Archaeology of the Islamic Middle East at SOAS, University of London.
