Ottoman History Podcast - Architecture and Environment in the Medieval Maghreb

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

with Abbey Stockstill hosted by Chris Gratien | What is Islamic architecture? In this follow-up to our ten-part seires on The Making of the Islamic World, we explore that question with Prof. Abbey Stockstill, author of Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib. Our conversation centers on the imperial city of Marrakesh, which was shaped by two successive dynasties — the Almoravids and the Almohads — with two competing visions of Muslim religious and political life that left an indelible imprint on the Maghreb region from the Sahara to al-Andalus. As Prof. Stockstill explains, understanding the architectural legacy of these dynasties extends far beyond the confines of monumental features of mosques and minarets. Natural landscapes and agricultural spaces played an equally vital role in the built environment of medieval Morocco, which in turn influenced the development of architecture in what is now southern Spain during the last centuries of Islamic rule.    « Click for More »

Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. Today we're welcoming on the program one of my University of Virginia colleagues, Abby Stockstill. Professor Stockstill, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. A pleasure to be here. Abby Stockstill is an associate professor in the Department of Architectural History here at University of Virginia and the author of a fairly recent still fresh book titled Marrakesh in the mountains, landscape, urban planning and identity in the medieval Maghrib. More so than the standard Ottoman history podcast audience. This episode's really for the fans of our very popular and accessible survey of the

history of the Islamic world, called The Making of the Islamic World. And our interview really fills a couple gaps in that series that we left. One, the Maghrib didn't get as much attention as I think it deserves in that series. but two, the built environment also kind of took a backseat to more textual and visual sources in our survey of the Islamic world from the medieval to the early modern period. So, Professor Stockstill, I want to start things off by asking you the question that frames the first episode of that series. Our first episode was titled, What is Islamic Law, as an introduction to this question

of what is Islam for the general listener? So let me pose the same question to you. What is Islamic architecture? Where do we begin? That's the million dollar question in my field. How are we defining Islamic architecture? What does it mean in the 21st century? It is a term that really grows out of a lot of Orientalist scholarship, which defined the built environment through a strictly religious framework of the region where we found that architecture. But as the field has grown and as the field has grown, and as the field, has developed, of course, we see a much more complex picture. I mean, you look at the region that I work on, Islamic Spain and North Africa, and you see architecture that might fall under the ages of quote-unquote Islamic, but it is being built for a Jewish audience or it's being built for a Castilian Catholic monarch. Are we still going to call those Islamic monuments, Islamic architecture? Probably not. And yet, we engage with them fairly regularly in the field.

So when we talk about what Islamic architecture actually is, at this point, I think what we're talking about are a series of aesthetic principles that guide the choices that get made when a building is being built, the ornamental choices, the spatial choices. We talk about a preference for geometric and vegetal ornament, a preference for mixed media, so plaster, tilework, marketry, sort of all in the same, a visual plain, visual space, a preference for Arabic epigraphy. Those elements are frequently present, but they don't all have to be present, and they're inevitably going to look different based on the cultural context that you're talking about. My introduction to Islamic architecture was very much through the lens of critique of

Orientalist perspectives on the Islamic world, but it kind of centered on features of the quote-unquote Islamic city. A medieval city in the Islamic world from the Maghreb to Central and South Asia would have certain features, architectural features that people might look for, the monumental mosque, the bazaars and caravans arise, all these kind of mercantile spaces, other. charitable endowments. And of course, this is all very much tied to like our most monumental or narrow conception of the built environment. Can you help complicate that picture for us a little bit? Why is Islamic architecture more than just like the grand mosque of a particular imperial city? Sure. Well, like the term Islamic architecture, the term Islamic city is another one that has

kind of fallen out of fashion as the field has grown and developed. And yet, Yet I think it still has a lot of value when we think about not just the individual monuments themselves, but how they relate to one another and how they relate to the lived experience of those spaces, the people who actually inhabit and move through those spaces. The Islamic City is sort of a fascinating concept because its origins actually come from North Africa as an intellectual concept. The term is developed by the French Orientalist school that's based out of Morocco. And they're looking at cities like Marrakesh as their case studies, because these are cities that did not have a pre-Islamic fabric. They sort of emerge wholesale under the ages of Islam. And for those scholars, and we're primarily talking about like the 1920s thereabouts, for the those scholars, that was the Islamic city par excellence. You didn't have to deal with any sort of muddy

past, muddy late antique inheritances to get a picture of what we mean by the Islamic city. But of course, for most of the Islamic world, what we're talking about are these layered urban environments, where you have successive waves of occupation and building and destruction and rebuilding. So one of of the things that I think has made looking at the Magrib really difficult but also really important for the field by and large is thinking about the role that that region plays in the development of our field and in the terminology that we use and in thinking about why we expect a marketplace. Why do we expect a congregational mosque? Why do we expect a gubernatorial palace to be located somewhere nearby.

And it is largely because that is the material that was being looked at when that term developed. Right. And I think where we'll take this conversation as we go on is also towards a provocation about what is Islamic in the sense that the field has been grappling with. It's really anything that Muslims are people who live in a milieu infused by Islam consider tied to all the various. different things that Islam encompasses. And so Islamic architecture is going to be more than just what a particular Islamic ruling dynasty with a particular ideology, you know, how they're expressing themselves in that architecture or how urban life is constructed. We'll get to that, but I think this is a perfect point to introduce the specific case at the heart of your study,

Marrakesh. It's one of Morocco's four major cities that have been imperial centers at some point in history. Faz Rabat and... Mechness, perhaps. Mechnez, are the ones that come to mind. Situate us in Marrakesh. I know you spent a lot of time there. We've talked about it. You did a lot of field work.

Obviously, it is a beautiful place, but what makes it special in this time period you're focusing on, the El Moraevid and El Mouahed periods. One of the things that is so odd about Marrakesh is how much further south it is than these other cities. Fez, Mechness, Rabat, all at some point or another had contact or relationships in the antique period. They have Roman connections,

Carthaginian connections. They are cities that are built primarily as urban outposts. So they become trading centers, they become board. towns. They eventually become something more than that, obviously, but they're built with a very specific function of defining a boundary. Marrakesh really emerges as a center. When the El Mawarvids found the city in the middle of the 11th century, they are conceptualizing Marrakesh as a

central nexus point for their territorial home base, which is in the Sahara and the pre-Saharan. south of the Atlas Mountains, and the wider Maghrebloxa. So Marrakesh is their through line to Fez to what will eventually become Rabat, what is then Salé, to the coast, for example. So it is conceptualized wholesale not as a point of conflict or negotiation, but as a center in its own right. And it's a center that kind of suggests an orientation towards the South in this moment in the Maghreb. We, in a previous episode in our series, the El Moraavid's primarily came up as Al-Murabitun, who were integral to the spread of Islam across the Sahara in West Africa. You know, one of the things I loved about reading your book was learning a new word or learning a new term,

because they're increasingly hard to find. And you had this term genius loci. If I'm saying it correctly, it's a Latin term because we need Latin to express the idea. But it refers to the character of a place. Yeah. It's a really popular term in the field of architecture and really developed in this 1960s environmentalist scholarship. But it is talking about something. that is pretty pervasive across time and across space, which is how we relate to the environment

around us, how we relate not just to the built environment, but to the natural environment as well. And one of the things that is so clear to anyone who's ever visited Marrakesh before is how intimate that city is with its own natural environment. Now, physically, that largely comes from the fact that the city's major monuments and its wall system are all being constructed out of a local clay, which when it goes into the furnace to be fired into bricks turns this bright red color, which is why Marrakesh gets called the red city later on. But what happens is that you then see echoes of that color in the physical dirt, in the land around Marrakesh. and you start getting a sense of a city that responds to its environment.

It is also on a more macro scale built to establish a relationship with the high Atlas mountains, which ring the city just to the south. And on a clear day when there's not a whole lot of air pollution, the mountains appear just to float above the southern horizon. So they are a constant presence when you are in Marrakesh, which sits in this basin, this called the House Basin. So it is slightly sunken and the mountains are rising quite high above the city line. And a lot of the city structures are responding to that landscape.

You mentioned to me that, you know, your fieldwork didn't just require going to the archives in Morocco and some European cities as well. didn't just require visiting built spaces. It required hiking, right? It required... Yeah, there's a lot of time in the mountains. A lot of time in the mountains. I love that about this work because it's so true

when you spend time in a place that's close to the mountains, you feel in all sorts of ways how those mountains kind of shape the experience of the place. but in your study it's much more than just like how people might think about hot spots of tourism in the Mediterranean today or like cities in California. I think it's Santa Barbara where you just walk around in the beautiful mountains. The mountains are also integral to the political context of the dynasties that preside over

Marrakesh's efflorescence as an imperial capital, the Almoravids and El Mwahids. The high Atlas Mountains, the sort of chain that's running to the very south of Morocco, forms an integral component for both dynasties. For the earlier Almoravids, they are a barrier. They are something that they are constantly having to negotiate with. And that's because the El Moravids are based out of the Sahara. So the Atlas Mountains are kind of in their way, so to speak. They are a very physical boundary that they have to cross any time they need to communicate or conquer, right?

Marrakech is supposed to be a base for them to make that transition easier. And part of the argument that I develop in the book is that they struggle in the development of the city to actually make that function clear. For the El Mohades, the second dynasty, the dynasty that comes after the El Moravids, the mountains are their home base. So the al-Mohads are largely derived from a specific confederation of indigenous North Africans. We can talk about the term Berber, if you want, it's a complex and a fraught one. but the confederation that they come from are called the Masmuda, their home base is in the Atlas Mountains. They're a semi-nomadic tribe. Basically, their major industry is herding goats across the mountains. So they graze for part of the year and then they're housed for part of the year.

And when I was living in Morocco and when I was doing my field work in Morocco, one of the things that I was trying to understand was the relationship between Marrakesh as a capital for the Almohads, for an urban capital, and this tiny site that becomes a major point of patronage, Tin Mal, which is located about 45 kilometers to the south. It's in the height of the Atlas Mountains. And when you go and visit Ten Mal, it is incredibly remote. It is, you know, the road that leads out there from Marrakesh's hairpin turns all the way. It is inaccessible for part of the year due to the snow. And yet there are so many architectural echoes between Tin Mal and Marrakesh. And that was part of the argument that I was trying to understand was how that relationship worked. With the Almohads, I think what they're trying to do with Tin Mal and Marrakesh is really create this link to their homeland, to their ethnic homeland in particular, as a way of thinking about their own political future as being more stable than it actually was. I talk a lot about trying to keep

the empire in stasis. They're trying to create this constant moment where they are still at the height of their authority coming out of the Atlas Mountains coming from Tin Maul, but have all of the responsibilities and authority that being based at Marrakesha allows them. So we have two imperial dynasties, both indigenous to this region but in different ways, right? They preside over very large territories at their height, though. So can you, and by the way, as we'll explain, the al-Mohads are the like successors to the, El Moravids and very much competitors. Yes, and try to define themselves as distinct.

And so can you situate us in time? Like, what are we, what kind of world are we talking about when the El Moraids rise and build this imperial city in Marrakesh? And what happens in the centuries that follow? Yeah. So what you have to know about this period in North Africa is that it is a region of lots of small principal. We have the Taifa states in Al-Andalus, so all of these sort of city states across the Iberian Peninsula. We've got a number of competitive governorships and smaller dynasties across North Africa, but there's not a whole lot of large territorial control.

And in particular, for this point in the middle of the 11th century, we are also talking about a period in which there is an emerging sense of what we might call Berber identity, not as a universalist term, but a sense that indigenous North Africans are something distinct from those with an Arabic heritage. And this is because for centuries, this part of the Islamic world, at least ideologically, is dominated by essentially the Umayyad Caliphate, right, It has its origins in the very early Islamic period in the Mushraq, right. In the Arabian Peninsula. Right.

And so basically, you know, because of the Umayid influence, there is the sense that in order to lead, you have to have some claim to Arabic heritage. And that really comes to a head after the fitna in Al-Andalus, where we have the fall of that second Andalusia umayyed caliphate. And it gets blamed on indigenous North Africans who form a large part of the military. And because of that, there's the indigenous North Africans are getting a bad rap, let's say. And in response to that, you start seeing this kind of self-identification starting to emerge. And this is going to coalesce with Ibn Khaldun by the time we get to the 14th century. But the El Moravids and the Almohads are the first major dynasties to actually define themselves through this connection to their ethnic heritage.

They're not just defining themselves as having some sort of Arab ancestry. They're also speaking specifically to the tribes that they come from. The Sanhaja in the case of the El Moravids and the Masmuda, in the case of the Almohads, as an integral part of who they are. Which is to say this is also a period that because of the Arabophone bias of Islamic history can be easily misunderstood because, again, as you said, to the extent that these are people who are considered outsiders, the historiographical tradition is going to write about them in a particular way. And our listeners will be familiar with the analogous case going on in the other part of the Islamic world with the rise of Turkic or Persian dynasties throughout going through this same kind of transformation. With the exception being that the Turkic and Persianate dynasties have their own written records. And for the Almoravids and the Almohads, we are often looking for clues to, that dialect, what is now called tashlite, but that's just one branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.

It's an oral language. So we get glimpses of it in the Arabic sources through names, through vocabulary that gets commented upon, but we don't actually get many written records from the period. So when I talk about the kinds of sources that I use for this period, and any historian who works on this period is familiar with this, it's often like you're really reading between the lines. You're looking for the outlines of something that you're never going to get definitively. You're just trying to use these Arabic sources to get the parameters of what you're not going to find explicitly.

And while there's certainly intellectual production going on, right? Tons. And it is in Arabic. Yes. There's plenty of written sources, but they're always going to be one step removed. there's always going to be that that fact of translation that's happening from our 21st century standpoint. And all of this is sort of inevitably influenced by the metanarrative of Islamic history that is sort of put forth and very effectively spread eventually throughout the Islamic world in Europe, in Orientalism as well, from Ibn Khaldun. Right. He's inescapable. He is the gravitational center for this. Almost incontestable.

You know, historians, modern-day historians in the 21st century use Ibn Chaldun as a source of theory for understanding the history of the interplay between nomadic societies and settled societies. But who is he talking about? Exactly. Yeah. So let's talk about that. Ibn Khalduin is basing his work, at least partially, off the Almoravids and Almohads, and their rise to power and the trajectory of their dynasties. And yes, he has the benefit of hindsight.

And I think many historians, rightfully so, want to interrogate how much we depend on Ibn al-Dun for this period. How much are we experiencing a kind of confirmation bias by using. his work to talk about these dynasties. The tack that I wanted to take with my reliance on Imchaldun in this period is to understand what he was looking at when he writes about these dynasties. Why does he talk about nomadism versus urbanism? Why does he talk about Berber versus Arab? Why are those important distinctions?

And I think we can talk about the El Moravid and al-Mohad periods as a process of creation and expression that gets codified in Ibn Chaldoon. I really like Ibn Chaldun's analysis for them because I think his work kind of culminates the narrative that they themselves are built. So when he's talking about nomadism or being part of a rural community as being somehow more morally integral or morally upstanding and more righteous, he's actually talking about a process that gets theorized in the 9th century in writings about the idea of the city as a microcosm and the role of the ruler as a, as a, as a as needing to be a moral model for people. And that gets sort of transitioned in the El Mouravid and El Mohad periods as something to expand upon and to craft into a kind of framework for what's called the social contract. The El Mouravids and El Mohads are really keen observers of how North African society works. and what requirements are in place for a ruler? Who does a ruler have to be in order to be considered legitimate?

And they, particularly in the case of the Almohads, are able to translate that into an imperial vernacular. So tell us what that looks like a bit. Give the listeners a little bit of that, like, you know, I want to hear those architectural terms, Those little details of the buildings, the built environment. And we'll go, we'll go way beyond that. But how are those projects expressed in the built environment?

You know, there are two examples to my mind that jump out immediately. One is on the macro scale, thinking in a more urban context, and one is in the more microscale. With the microscale, what that might look like is the way the al-Mohads adjust the kibla prior to the rise of the elmoravids the kibla in Morocco had primarily been south-facing using an astronomical method that relies on the star soheila lozhen or canopas in the the Latin canon and the Elmorbids come in and they change it they are reliant on new methods of calculating the kibla and They are expressing a greater allegiance to the Abbasid, caliphate, and they shift it to be more in line with what we might expect an accurate Kibla to be facing.

Eastward facing. Yeah, more eastward facing using the Great Circle route. When the al-Mohads take over, they immediately change that back. They say, and that is actually in all of the Arabic sources, that is the first thing they do upon conquering Marrakesh is we are changing the Kibla back to the South. In fact, you can't even pray in Marrakesh after they've conquered it until they've changed the Kibla. They say all the prayers in the city are going to be illegitimate until we change the Kibla back to the South. And that's a really moral argument. That is a really moral justification for what is an incredibly violent power grab. But they are so adamant

about this that when they're building their own mosque, their own congregational mosque, about halfway through the process, they realize that the alignment is incorrect. And so they build a completely new prayer hall with an adjusted kibla in an arrangement that honestly makes it look like the minaret has been wedged in between these prayer halls. And readers can see the floor plans in the book or look them up online. but what you have are two prayer halls with a minaret wedged in between to adjust that kibla to be to be correct. So they are very, very serious about that moral imperative of having an accurate kibla and what accurate actually means in this period. Now on the more macro scale, what that looks like is civic architecture, civic planning. It's the unsexy stuff, right?

It's not the monument that gets all the tourism. It's things like water management. It's things like garden spaces. It's things like fountains throughout the city. It is providing for the general populace. And we see this happening at their other capitals as well, but nowhere is it more clear than at Marrakesh. Because Marrakesh is in an arid environment.

It doesn't get much rainfall. throughout the year, and yet it grows exponentially under the Almohads. So how do we square major population growth with a lack of water? Well, we know from the archaeological work that's been done on Marrakesh that, in fact, there was a very reliable source of water relying on snowfall coming from the Atlas. The Almohads are part of a large-scale effort to regulate water coming in from the Atlas through a system of irrigation channels known as Katara. And they basically build these channels at regular depths all the way from the Atlas to bring water subterraneously underground into the house basin where Marrakech is situated, where then comes up

above ground into channels known as Siggyz. And those channels then take water throughout the city. to irrigate huge garden complexes, to supply ablution fountains throughout the city, to provide drinking water for the city's population. That doesn't look very fancy, but it's really, really important, and it's part of being a morally upright ruler. Yeah.

I bet it did look pretty fancy, but again, this is the issue of when doing architectural history, If we focus on what's most visible today, we might miss most of the story of what the built environment looked like in the past. Exactly. In fact, the nicest looking monuments today are often probably the least important. It's the infrastructure that really mattered. So let's talk about Islamic architecture from the vantage point of the garden. You mentioned that, you know, a stone structure, we'd be looking for certain florist. or geometric designs, certain kinds of inscriptions that convey some sort of ideological message.

What does that look like in a garden? In a garden. In a garden. Plants and the infrastructure used to irrigate them. Well, so, yeah, obviously, we have to start with the water sources. So the major garden complex in Marrakesh is known as the Agdal. And it has this huge basin at the very center of it, which, not only irrigates the walled garden itself, but formed a site for mock naval battles and

swimming lessons for the general populace. And this is mentioned in the Arabic sources, right? Which is pretty remarkable. In terms of the plants, almost all of the plants that are being imported are productive in some way or another. Can we go back to the swimming lessons real quick? Yes, we can always go back to the swimming lessons. So I've actually recently read a book about the history of swimming, which is not something I ever thought about. But if you don't teach people to swim, they can't swim. They can't swim. Exactly.

You can't just pick it up. You'll drown. So what's going on with that? Is that because these are, you know, sort of southward political dynasties, the Mahads sort of coming from the Atlas Mountains, but they need to be ready for naval battle? Is it like training? They are. So they are thinking militarily. They are thinking about expansion into the Iberian Peninsula.

They're thinking about expansion eastward in the Mediterranean. And they are truly trying to prepare the populace for surviving on a ship, in case of a shipwreck, or how to react to the water when you're, like, landing off of a ship just off coast, right? Well, I always think of navies in this time as staffed by people who maybe are captives or hired from Mediterranean, like, regions where there's that naval knowledge. So I guess that's not totally the imaginary that's at play. We don't necessarily think of the Al-Mohad military as being primarily captive.

There is a strong component of jihad that comes out in the Almohad period. And that is, in fact, the sort of over-bearable. narrative about the Almohads is their emphasis on jihad. And that has particular resonance for them because of their somewhat heterodox belief in al-Mohadism and the belief of in Ibn Tumart, their spiritual founder as the Mahdi. And that becomes a requirement in their dynasty that you subscribed it to al-Mohadism as an ideology. So we're getting even more refined than just being Sunni or Shia or even Maliki, they are very particular,

at least in the early phases of the dynasty, that you have to subscribe to al-Mohadism. And because of that, their military, at least nominally, is all aligned behind this ideological push. So yeah, it is a largely local populist learning how to swim so that they can sail to Alondalus.

I mean, I think that detail is so important because we're talking about gardens, but when people imagine a garden, a garden can be a lot of things. It can. But it's both a spectacle, right? It's both ornamental, and it's also functional. Let's talk about the plants that are in this garden.

All of the plants that they grow there have a purpose, primarily for sale. So the income from this garden is huge. I think it's something like 50,000 dirham a year, which, given the fact that proto's had a fairly low price, is a huge amount. And that all goes back into the state coffers that then gets spent on further urban improvements. But we're talking about primarily orange trees and olive groves.

These are sort of foundational elements for cuisine in the region. But we're also talking about roses that get made into rose oil. we get the import of plants from across the Mediterranean and even further a field. As I have mentioned this to you before, but it was through the course of this research that I became fascinated with the field of archaeobotany. And if I've ever regretted my choice of study, I do kind of wish I could be an archaeobotanist. You should just do it. No better time than now. Exactly. Well, you know, the pollen analysis of these gardens tells us that it was extraordinarily complex. It tells us that they were importing plants from the Levant, from the west coast of India, and that they are trying to establish those plants to scale in these large garden complexes.

Tell us more about these plants because there's this whole argument in the history of the Mediterranean. world that the expansion of Islam and Islamic dynasties leads to the spread of plants. And a lot of these plants are initially like luxury statusable plants. Like oranges are not like people, these are totally different kind of oranges. They're not necessarily used for like just having a snack at work. They're like used in these refined products, aromas, flavors. We get orange blossom being used for aromatic effects. We get the oranges themselves being turned into preserves and into medicinal solves.

They have a wide variety of functions. And there's a lot of intellectual labor that gets associated with these garden spaces as well. I mean, the Al-Andalus is home to an entire body of agricultural literature that's getting written in this period about how to organize your garden, what direction it needs to face, what you grow where, and how and when to harvest it. The Almoravids, to some extent, to a lesser extent, and the Almohads, certainly to a major extent, are participants in that intellectual environment, where the botany and the agriculture of the period forms a major part of their economy, as well as of their kind of intellectual production. but when you ask about the kinds of plants that that are importing and that are shifting purpose, the one that comes most immediately to mind is jujube wood.

Jujube wood. Jujub wood. So what is that? So jujube is a plant that grows, it is a tree that grows primarily on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. And it has this reputation in the earlier medieval period. period as a medicinal plant. So it's grown in a couple of monastic gardens as a medicinal plant. You harvest the juju berries and you can make a sort of digestive oil out of them. But it's not really grown wide scale. It's as you said, considered kind of a luxury plant, something of an

oddity, like a showpiece that you might have in your garden. But it's not particularly widespread. And this is where I'll give the El Mouravids their due, because they are the ones who seem to import jujub, not for medicinal purposes, but for artistic purposes. So they actually use the jujub wood in major works of marketry and wood carving. There is a famous minbar, the pulpit that gets used in the mosque, a famous men bar that the El Moravids spawn. It's made in Cordoba, exported piece by piece to Marrakesh, where it is used. But the request for the Minbar comes from the Almorvid-Kalaf. And he and his court sort of use all of the resources at their disposal because of the expanse of their empire to import all of these luxury materials. So we get blackwood from sub-Saharan Africa.

We get Jujube wood coming from India. And all of that gets shipped to Kordoba where it's made into this Minbar. But what's really fascinating is that Jujube becomes a really popular artistic material after this. And we start seeing it used in lots of smaller works of marketry. And it becomes so popular that it ends up being naturalized in North Africa. We start finding wild patches of jujub trees throughout the Atlas. And that hadn't happened before. So this essentially Indian Ocean World Tree gets transplanted into the mountains in this moment.

Yes. And are they, you go there today, they're still. There's still, you can still find jujib trees in the Atlas. It is kind of a shrub tree. It's actually quite hard to distinguish from the argon. tree. What does the argon tree look like? So the argon tree, if anyone goes to Morocco, that's like one of the top souvenirs that people ask for is argon oil. Ah, yeah, they put it in shampoo. You're right. It's either it's going to be in your shampoo, it's going to be in your soap, you're also going to eat it. The

argon tree and the jub-jub tree, to my mind, and I'm not, again, I'm not an archaeobotanist as much as I wish I was, but to my eye, they do seem to resemble each other. a little bit. And so you can still find wild patches of Jujub throughout the High Atlas Mountains. So when you were explaining the ecological legacy of these two dynasties, we kind of ventured across the Straits of Gibraltar into Iberia, El Andalus during this period. I think in people's imagination of the time period we're talking about, the medieval period, plays a large role in what they imagine when they think of the Islamic world, and especially this part of the Islamic world, the western half of it.

But of course, it's kind of a historical, right? Like the center, we're making the argument here that, you know, Marrakesh is a political center. Very much so. It's not even just in Morocco. It's deep in Morocco. So the axis of this world that spans from the Iberian Peninsula through Morocco and into the Sahara and arguably across the Sahel into West. Africa is not running through modern-day Spain. Right.

Spain is an endpoint there rather than the central connective tissue. So can you talk about what this architectural tradition or ideology looks like as the Almohads move into Spain and start to leave their imprint on those cities? And in doing so, kind of disrupt this issue we grapple. with that today, ironically, the Islamic architectural heritage of Spain, which expelled its Muslim population centuries ago, looms so large in people's imaginations. Help us see it differently. The thing with this period is that for so long, as you say, it had been kind of positioned as a passive recipient of Andalusie culture, right? So all of the innovation, all of the

agency had been given to Al-Andalus and very little to the Maghrib. Ibn Khaldun, though he is Tunisian or born in what is modern-day Tunisia, comes from an Andalusie family. Exactly. Like most of the celebrated intellectuals. Exactly. And I think because of that impression combined with the sort of ravages of 19th and 20th century colonialism, right, when we look at the architectural record of what's left, Spain comes out looking better. Its monuments are better preserved. They're better studied. They're better published on. They're more accessible. One of the reasons I spent a year living in Morocco is that

it just takes a really long time to get access to many of the sites that I needed to look at in order to write the book. And yet, as we've already said, a number of times, right, it's often the architecture that doesn't look so pretty now, that actually is more fundamental to how we understand this period and the contributions that these dynasties have to make. So Morocco's contributions to this period, to my mind, are really about scale and about the relationship to the environment. And those are really subtle things to analyze. They are not a specific architectural motif. It is not a specific color or material. What we're talking about is a relational quality. So when I talk about scale, one of the key monuments that we find both in North Africa

and in Al-Andalus from this period are monumental minarets, these huge minarets that are really almost buildings independent of mosques themselves. We're not talking about those skinny Ottoman minarets. We are talking about a huge cuboid tower that has a number of rooms inside that are used for other purposes. They're used for astronomical observation. They're used for as lecture spaces. They are used as for sort of military or military or or defensive purposes as watchtowers as well. The Almohads build those both in North Africa as well as in Al-Andalus. They're incredibly consistent across their empire.

Those minarets will eventually become bell towers. So if you go and visit Seville, La Heralda, the symbol of the city, was originally an Almohad minaret. And it dwarfs any other monument within the city. What other cities in Spain can people see these hidden vestiges of the Almohads? Seville is the main one. There are some fortifications in Harz de la Frontera. That's an off-the-beaten-path gem to visit.

Some in Malaga as well. And used to be, there was some in Gibraltar as well, but those have been less well-preserved. Another one to mention that is quite famous is the Alhambra. And people tend to think of the Alhambra as a Nazareth monument, The Nazareths are a little bit later. They're 14th century primarily. The final Islamic dynasty of Islamic Al-Andalus.

Exactly. Yeah. They're the sort of the, they're the tragic dynasty, right? The ones that get kicked out in 1492. But the oldest structures on Asabika Hill are a date from the Almohad era. And like at Marrakesh are using local clay. to fire bricks that then take on a red color. And what is the Alhambra, but the red fortress?

Yeah, Alhambra in Spanish, but it literally means red. Right, exactly. We're talking about the red. So the Alhambra gets all of the fame and all of the reputation for being the red monument, but its earliest foundations, its earliest structures are dating from a period where, a dynasty is employing a technique and an approach highly local, highly, highly practical with

these bricks taken from local clay. But that's a technique that they'd already developed at Marrakesh, and we're already doing at Marrakesh. We've been talking to Professor Abbey Stockstill about the research for her book, Marrakesh in the mountains, landscape, urban planning, in identity in the medieval Maghrib, released with Penn State University Press. And throughout this conversation, I hope we've destabilized a lot of our listeners' understanding of what Islamic architecture signifies, what it can be as a topic of study, but also the region we've been talking about as well in all sorts of ways. It's been super fascinating.

Going off your last comment to conclude, I know that your new work is on color. Yes. Color as a subject of analysis is a very cool topic. What's the argument for putting the Islamic world building off your strengths at the center of inquiry? So it's funny that we're ending here because this question about redness and materiality, particularly coming from Marrakesh and Marrakech's relationship to the Alhambra is a question that I could not resolve in the book. and it was really frustrating me and that is what has led me

into this investigation of what color means and how we understand color in the medieval Islamic world there will be a chapter on red and the Maghreb will feature prominently but this project is really an inquiry into how language and color

inform one another so the major framework of the project is looking at that study, philological studies and grammar texts from the medieval period and trying to understand the connotations that those Arabic verbs carry over when they become colors. In the case of red and in the case of red brick, what we have with Arabic is a connotation of burning being carried over. And one of the things that I wanted to explain, is what that burning sensation is actually trying to communicate both materially, as in the case of firing bricks, as well as intellectually and philosophically, in the sense of burning and its relationship to prophecy.

So that is one example, but understanding color from a kind of critical distance, right? from a historical distance is really complicated because those terminologies are so fluid and flexible. And this is where the extensive work that's been done on Arabic grammar is so helpful, the kind of philological work that's been done. Because we do actually have a quite sophisticated understanding of how the Arabic language works, as it did most scholars of the medieval period. That was sort of the height of Arabic philology in that part of the world. And that is forming the basis for thinking about color on a monumental scale.

Now I'm not talking about the multicolored designs that we find on the interior, which is a different kind of looking. And there's wonderful work that's been done on that kind of aesthetics by people like Olga Bush and Golodunegipolu. I'm kind of stepping outside of the monument and thinking about the monument in relationship to the landscape and how a single building can take on one specific color and when it does so what that means. So monuments like the Alhambra that get identified with their color, but also thinking about the Kaaba and the concept of the green dome, the Kubut al-Hidra, which is sort of a problem within the field because we don't actually have. have any extant evidence. And I seem to keep doing this to myself. I tend to choose topics where the actual extant evidence is hard to come by or no longer existent. So I am a glutton for punishment in that respect. Sure. Well, pushing the boundaries of our knowledge for sure.

I mean, when you told me about this topic, like, it just struck me how salient color is in sort of the visual lexicon of orientalism. Colors that somehow conjure some sort of association with the Islamic world are so fundamental to its representation in the West. And so I think a study, like there's so little on the actual academic study of color in that context despite this imbalance. So I think it's going to be really fruitful avenue of inquiry. I'm sure it will have a beautiful cover on that book. Hope so. Not sure what color will be yet.

But we look forward to it. We thank you for coming on the program. Speaking with us, it's been a real pleasure talking to you about, and reading, by the way, this very engaging book, Marrakesh in the Mountains. I encourage our listeners to go track it down, seek it out if they've enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me. Thank you again, Professor Stockstill. And thank you all for listening. I'll remind you that we have a page dedicated to this podcast on the website.

for those of you who are listening directly through your podcast apps, you'll find a bibliography, some images, and links to other episodes related to today's topic. In particular, you'll find an easy access to our entire complete series on the making of the Islamic world with only some gaps, fewer gaps now after this conversation. That's all for this episode. Thanks again for listening and take care.