Islamic Gardens and Landscapes

Western admirers have long viewed Islamic gardens as an earthly reflection of the paradise promised to believers. D. Fairchild Ruggles states that this is a simplistic view that disregards the complexity and diversity inherent in Islamic garden art and takes the reader on a long journey through the gardens of the Islamic world.

Just as Islamic culture is historically profound and multifaceted, so is the history of its built environment. Islamic gardens, which initially had more practical and "utilitarian" purposes such as organizing the environment according to needs, taming nature, increasing soil fertility, and creating a legible map for the distribution of resources, became carriers of aristocratic taste, imperial splendor, and multi-layered symbolism in examples such as the Alhambra Palace and the Taj Mahal.

Whether belonging to a modest house in the city or a magnificent walled palace, all Islamic gardens shared a fundamental commonality: the four-part plan called chahar bagh. This geometric principle, of which Ruggles presents dozens of examples from all corners of the Islamic world, from Cordoba to Marrakesh, Cairo to Istanbul, Tabriz to Delhi, like meter in poetry and maqam in music, constrained design possibilities, forcing patrons and architects of gardens to be creative.

Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, which draws from extensive literature on the subject, as well as poems, travelogues, agricultural manuals, and garden depictions in miniatures, is an impressive book in its scope and surprising in what it teaches.

*D. Fairchild Ruggles, Professor of Landscape History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign