Jonathan Bloom can rightfully be considered the foremost authority on Fatimid art and architecture, having produced a steady stream of articles on the subject over the past twenty-five years. He is thus in a perfect position to produce a synthesis, and this is indeed an excellent survey of the material. Time and again he is able to cut through conflicting bodies of opinion and produce authoritative interpretations or offer new insights into problematic material.

The book discusses art and architecture, organizing it both chronologically and by material in a way that is appropriate and easy to follow. The writing style is aimed at the general reader, but for the specialist there is a suitable scholarly apparatus of footnotes. It is published in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, which in an anonymous note at the beginning disclaims official sanction of the author’s views. It is to Bloom’s credit that he makes no concessions to his patrons in discussing the murky origins of the Isma‘ili movement.

The first part of the book’s title leads one to expect that it is concerned with Cairo, the City Victorious, alone, but the subtitle makes it clear that the account includes Fatimid artistic patronage before they founded Cairo. Obviously something of a dilemma had to be resolved here—Cairo is geographically in North Africa, but in scholarship on the Islamic world it is more usually lumped with the Middle East. Tunisia, or its medieval near-equivalent, Ifriqiyya, was perhaps judged to be too narrow or too obscure for the title, but little outside of that area, apart from a few monuments in eastern Algeria, is relevant.

One of the most contentious issues in scholarship in the field is the extent to which patrons, artists, and the general public aimed at or were aware of symbolism in works of art and architecture. Bloom makes the good point that in post-Fatimid times some inscriptions were mutilated to disguise their objectionable Shi‘i content, but that we know of no case in which pictorial expression was similarly censored. The theme, as we shall see, is explored further at several points in the book, and suggests a more limited role for iconography than many have posited. A related question is the importance of the selection of Quranic verses on objects or monuments. The pan-Islamic, rather than exclusively sectarian, nature of this is emphasized early on.

Bloom argues convincingly for the importance of sea power in determining the location of the Fatimid capital, Mahdiyya. I had always been puzzled that the corner towers of its Great Mosque were designed as cisterns, a function that had no prototypes or progeny in mosque architecture. This suddenly made sense when I learned from the text that the Mahdiyya peninsula had no freshwater and that the whole town was dependent on cisterns. He also persuasively argues for the likelihood of there being originally an inscription on the portal of this mosque.

Many commentators on Fatimid art in Tunisia have tried to link it with later developments in Cairo or other parts of the Islamic world even further east. Bloom shows it is more likely that adaptation of the local Byzantine style was involved (e.g., in the stucco decoration of Sedrata), and that the model for many features of the round city of Mansuriyya would have been Madinat al-Zahra, in southern Spain, rather than Baghdad. Unfortunately most of the excavations of the relevant Tunisian sites such as Mansuriyya remain very poorly published. With the untimely death of Marianne Barrucand, it is not likely that matters will differ soon on this front.

Fatimid patronage in Cairo rapidly eclipsed earlier production, with Bloom understandably arguing that to some extent this artistic florescence can be explained as a distinctly Egyptian phenomenon, whose North African roots may have been overstated in earlier scholarship. Even before the Fatimids arrived, floriated Kufic, sometimes associated with them, had appeared. The example illustrated by Bloom, however (fig. 32), can hardly be said to have leaves and tendrils growing from the letters and filling the empty spaces between them; it is barely foliated, let alone floriated. A better example would be a tombstone dated 857 in the Islamic Museum in Cairo (Bernard O’Kane, The Treasures of Islamic Art in the Museums of Cairo, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006, fig. 36).

One of the greatest mysteries in Islamic art history is the covering up by al-Hakim of the minarets at his mosque with large square bastions. To Bloom is due the credit for providing a rational explanation for this: providing the mosque with multiple minarets with tiers of different shapes was a readily understood visual reference to the holy shrines of the Hijaz (Jonathan Bloom, “The Mosque of al-Hakim in Cairo,” Muqarnas 1 (1983): 15–36; 22–4, 27–8). When the sharif of Mecca in 1010 declared himself loyal to Palestinian rebels, and al-Hakim no longer controlled the holy cities, such was his embarrassment that he ordered these potent visual symbols to be covered up.

Subsequently, with the publication of his book on minarets (Jonathan Bloom, Minaret, Symbol of Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Bloom disavowed this idea; and since this is still a controversial topic, I will return briefly to the arguments that I published in detail elsewhere (Bernard O’Kane, “The Rise of the Minaret,” Oriental Art 38 (1992): 106–13).

Bloom argues against the presence of a minaret at the mosque of al-Azhar, citing Nasser Rabbat’s contention that a minaret there was increased in height in the early Mamluk period with no known Ayyubid patron, and therefore should have had a Fatimid patron. But he ignores Rabbat’s strongest argument for a minaret, the passage in Maqrizi, based on al-Quda’i, that says the mosque of the Qarafa (built in 976) was like that of al-Azhar, and had a portal with benches under a tall minaret. When discussing the mosque of the Qarafa, he does not mention this minaret (almost certainly original, since there is no record of this isolated mosque being restored by later patrons), although he does cite an article of Yusef Raghib that deals with the minaret in detail, correctly characterizing its tone as dyspeptic, but ignoring its arguments. Bloom notes that the women of the court had adopted Egyptian funerary practices in defiance of established Isma‘ili traditions, and shows that al-Hakim then followed the Fatimid women’s lead in building structures in the cemetery, despite earlier doctrinal disapproval. Why then should there not have been similar doctrinal change with regard to the permissibility of minarets, especially given the minarets already present in Cairo, and the competition they had from church towers? The appearance of minarets on the mosque of al-Hakim, built shortly afterwards, would thus fall perfectly into place, as would the plethora of later Fatimid minarets in upper Egypt and on the mashhad of al-Guyushi and the mosque of al-Salih Tala’i‘. The notable exception is the mosque of al-Aqmar, which lack Bloom explains is because it was “the only mosque erected by a caliph in this period.” But it was erected by a vizier, Ma’mun al-Bata’ihi. In fact, it is indeed possible that the involvement of the caliph was instrumental in the omission of a minaret here, but for a different reason: because it was adjacent to the caliphal palace. It was quite permissible for a muezzin to overlook domestic architecture, but not that of the royal family. In other words, secular rather than religious considerations may have mattered more to the dynasty.

Bloom points out that such was the demand for fine textiles under the Fatimids that flax growing replaced grain as the main crop; what I had not realized before was that this greatly increased the chances of famine, a recurring problem under the Fatimids. He aptly comments on the ambiguities in the status and function of Fatimid ceramic production, noting that the earlier theory that figural ceramics might have been encouraged by the dispersal of the Fatimid treasuries in the middle of the eleventh century can no longer be supported. He takes a similarly appropriately cautious approach to Fatimid metalwork, and argues convincingly against the book-cover theory for the Berlin ivory panels. He remarks that Fatimid Qurans, given the numbers mentioned in the sources, must still exist, and identifies a plausible candidate. An even more problematic group is the supposed Fatimid drawings, about most of which Bloom displays a healthy skepticism. He is equally convincing on the lack of the supposed doctrinal association that Kufic and geometric patterns are said to have had for the Fatimids.

Bloom notes that several scholars have proposed symbolic meanings for the decoration on the façade of the mosque of al-Aqmar, but remains skeptical, suggesting that we must first establish that earlier patrons were familiar with the practice of giving their monuments a symbolic meaning. But such is indeed the case with the minarets of al-Hakim mentioned above, and one feature on the Aqmar façade also strongly suggests that a symbolic meaning was intended: the door panel carved in stone. The imitation of a wooden door carved in stone is not a usual part of any other Islamic building’s decoration. This suggests that it probably had a symbolic meaning, and therefore other parts of the façade decoration may well have had one too.

Moving to woodwork, Bloom sensibly proposes on stylistic grounds that the lower part of the 1125 mihrab of al-Amir is an older work, and that only its inscription is contemporary. But the difficulties of dating by style in this era are emphasized by the panels that are found in the exactly contemporary mosque of al-Aqmar, which are also in an older style. Bloom offers insightful comments on the balance of design in the superb portable mihrab made for the Sayyida Nafisa shrine, although surprisingly missing from his discussion is the even finer mihrab of Sayyida Ruqayya. He suggests that the doors in Fatimid style from the Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio at Palermo were imported from Egypt. However, given that he notes subsequently that “the Fatimids had great need of European timber,” surely it would have been easier to import a craftsman trained in Fatimid style rather than wood that would have had to have been already exported.

With regard to other manifestations of the legacies of Fatimid art, his parallels of the mausoleum of al-Shafi‘i and the Dome of the Rock are extremely plausible. His suggestions of greater cultural links of the Zirids and post-Zirid North Africa and Sicily to al-Andalus rather than to Fatimid Egypt are also well argued.

I should emphasize that the areas of scholarly controversy mentioned above do not detract from the author’s achievement. To cover a range of two and a half centuries of art and architecture from Tunisia to Cairo and beyond in a balanced format that judiciously selects some for detailed treatment and with broad sweeps fills in the big picture elsewhere is an extremely impressive achievement. We are fortunate that this gap in scholarship has been authoritatively filled.