"Ahmar in the Maghrib: Landscape, Identity, and Color in the Islamic West"

Abstract

The medieval Islamic west, comprising present-day southern Spain and much of North Africa, is distinguished by a preponderance of the color red (aḥmar) in its architecture. In this talk, Dr. Stockstill explores why that is, and questions what it means when one color predominates over any other in a monumental setting. She traces the color’s increasing usage from the Almohad dynasty’s capital at Marrakesh—commonly referred to as “the red city” (madīnat al-aḥmar)—to the Nasrids’ famed red fortress in Granada, the Alhambra, as a facet of eschatological attitudes toward prophecy and jihad. Although contextualized by the region’s particular historical circumstances, the color’s usage should be understood as grounded in medieval works of optics and philology, part of a complex aesthetic milieu that pervaded the Arabic-speaking world.

Abbey Stockstill is Associate Professor and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Chair in Architectural History at the University of Virginia. Her recent book, Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), traces the city’s developing morphology as an expression of a dynamic ethnosocial conceptualization under the twelfth-century Almoravid and Almohad dynasties. Her current work, a critical theory of color in the architecture of the medieval Arabic world, has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the J. Paul Getty Museum
 

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