Islamic Piety And Dynastic Legimitacy: The Case Of The Shrine Of Ali B. Musa Al-Rida In Mashhad (10 -17th Century)
;advisor: Robert McChesney
Department Of History Of Art And Architectures, Harvard University, Massachusetts
: 2002
X, 271p.
: Ill
UMI Microform 3067387
Bibliography
Ph.D
, History of Art and Architecture
, Department Of History Of Art And Architectures, Harvard University, Massachusetts
In 203/818, Ali b. Musa al-Rida, eighth Shi'i Imam and heir apparent of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun, passed away in the Iranian province of Tus. Mashhad, the place of his burial, emerged as a site of visiation during the late tenth century, and assumed increasing importance in the religious landscape and economic life of eastern Khurasan. The large architectural complex, which grew around the tomb, still dominates the center of the old city today. This dissertation explores the formatin and implantation of this great sacred institution. It examines its evolution from the tenth to the seventeenth century, focusing on the economic, social, and political forces, which contributed to the production of its spaces. Challenging the Shi'i label usually associated with the shrine, this study proposes an alternative understanding of the shrine's sacred authority during the period under investigation. It argues that the main impulse for the survival of the shrine was linked to a class of sayyids, descendants of the Prophet, who assumed the shine's charismatic tradition, and appealed to a wide constituency, unfettered by ethnic and sectarian divisions. Under their stewardship, the shrine emerged as a polyvalent space, shared and sometimes contested, between Sunnis and Shi'is. The analysis of the shrine's architectural spaces unravels its many historical layers, proposing an interpretation for the spatial, institutional, and ideological structuring of the shrine at important historical junctures. The focus on the shrine's political patronage in particular reveals the process by which the shrine's sacred authority was appropriated and framed within divergent religious ideologies and narratives of political legitimation. Mostly an autonomous and self-governing institution between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, it became increasingly associated with political power in the post-Mongol period. Under the Timurids, the shrine became a signpost for Timurid power as legitimate rulers of the Islamic world. The Safavid Shahs, in turn, appropriated the shrine, casting it within an exclusively Imami Sh'i framework, and establishing the foundations of the shrine as it survives today.
معماری اسلامی
-- مشهد
Ali al Ridha Ibn Musa,Ninth Imam -818 or 19- Shrine - Dissertations