SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Islamic civilisation is famous for its garden culture. From the earlier centuries of Islam, the gardens of the Caliphs in Samarra in Iraq and Madinat al-Zahra' in Spain exemplify not only the integration of architecture and garden, but also the importance to statecraft of gardens and vistas of the landscape. In synoptic views of Islamic garden culture, the large ensembles of palatial gardens like these are conflated with later and better preserved early modem Islamic gardens from Mughal India and elsewhere, imparting monumentality, geometric regularity, and immutability to an archetypal ‘Islamic garden’, pinioned by paradisical symbolism.1 2 In this article, I would like to examine Islamic garden culture in the medieval period (11-13th cs), an era lying between the centralised empires of early Islam (8-10th cs) and the gunpowder empires (Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans) of the early modem period (16-18th cs). In doing so, I would like to suggest a multiplicity of meanings, not to mention influences, guiding the astonishing proliferation of gardens, hunting, and chivalric culture in medieval Islamdom and the eastern Mediterranean in this period. In this article, the proliferation of an informal suburban garden provides a dynamic linking extra-paradisical concepts with garden-making, gardens and landscape exploitation, and Islamic and Christian cultures alike.