This splendidly illustrated book provides a meticulous documentation of the restoration of one of the finest works of medieval Islamic woodwork surviving today. Restoration began as a result of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1992 exhibition “Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain” in which the minbar (pulpit) of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh was featured in the catalogue but, due to its fragile condition, could not suffer transport for display in New York and Granada. In 1996–97 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Moroccan Ministry of Cultural Affairs, assembled a technical team to clean, stabilize, and support the object on a new steel frame and base. The project provided a rare opportunity to analyze the history and craftmanship of the minbar, and the result is this publication with historical essays by Jonathan Bloom, Ahmed Toufiq, and Stefano Carboni, with reports on the structure and restoration procedure by Jack Soultanian, Antoine Wilmering, Mark Minor, Andrew Zawacki, and El Mostafa Hbibi. The cleaning of the wooden surface inlaid with colored wood and bone marquetry revealed an inscription providing the date 1137 as the year that the minbar’s manufacture was begun in Cordoba, under the command of the son of...