The original Minaret before the war

The destroyed minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo

Islamic art is complicated and utterly unique–quite unlike other religious art. We sent bwogger Romane Thomas to explore an intimidatingly titled lecture on architecture in ancient Aleppo, and here’s what she took away.

“We begin to think about things when they’re gone.”

Thus unfolded the first lecture in the Disrupting Unity and Discerning Rupture Series, organized by Avinoam Shalem, Professor of Islamic Art at Columbia. The speaker, Yasser Tabbaa is an independent scholar and a Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis. After graduating with a diploma from NYU in Art History, Tabbaa studied Islamic art in Aleppo, Syria, which was the topic of his lecture. Shalem introduced the speaker by relating his work to recent events and explained that “although the ruins of monuments are often observed with nostalgia, the ruins of Aleppo’s monuments are meant to make us fear for the future.” He explained that vandalism, the desecration of monuments, occurred alongside barbarism. Focusing on the tragedy of destroyed monuments, he commented, did not take away from the tragedy of lost lives and that “we should not be afraid to address them together.”

Accordingly, Tabba’s lecture treated the subject of architecture as a testimony of sectarian rivalries and was titled “The Remaking of Aleppo under Nur al-Din and the Early Ayyubids.” After a brief description of the history of Aleppo, Tabbaa described the person of Nur al-Din, a ruler of Syria during the Zengid Dynasty from 1146 to 1174 and a devout Sunni Muslim. Instead of boring the crowd with a historical analysis of the period, and in a feat demonstrating great patience, Tabbaa walked us through the analysis he had done of important monuments in Aleppo, including the Minaret of Great Mosque of Aleppo, the Shrine of Mashhad al-Muhassin and the madrasas. Showing remarkable passion for his research, Tabbaa presented the inscriptions on each of the monuments, which proved that the constructions were often financed by both Shi’ite patrons and Sunni patrons. He also explained that the rivalries of the Shi’ite and Sunnis in Aleppo manifested themselves in the architecture of the city itself, with some monuments being primarily for Shi’ite use and others keeping their Sunni patronage.

Tabbaa retained the attention of his audience by telling stories about the period. He recounted that under Nur al-Din’s anti-Shi’ite rule, the city sprouted madrasas (Islamic schools) in various parts of the city in order to spread the Sunni faith. When Nur al-Din fell ill, the Shi’ites took the opportunity to destroy some of the madrasas and to change the prayers to include Ali. However, to the Shi’ites’ dismay, Nur al-Din recovered and grew so angry that he threw one of the men responsible off of the Great Minaret of Aleppo!

Tabbaa talked with great passion about Aleppo’s cultural heritage and showed us multiple photographs and reconstructions of how each of the monuments had looked in the past. When a picture of the Great Minaret of Aleppo came up on the screen, he told the audience that the Minaret was, at the time, one of the tallest in the Islamic world, towering at over 45 meters and attracted a wide audience. He regretfully stated that “of course it is all but a pile of rubble now”, in reference to impact of the war on monuments.

Great Mosque Court via Wikipedia Commons

Umayyad Mosque, Aleppo via Wikipedia Commons