Muqarnas41- Muqarnas 41

Muqarnas 41 begins with Professor Gülru Necipoğlu’s remembrance of His Late Highness Prince Karim al-Hussaini Aga Khan IV (1936–2025), who in 1979 established the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and MIT. The volume features groundbreaking research on topics such as early Ottoman silk banners decorated with gold and silver, as well as silk carpets made for the tomb of Shah Abbas II; it also contains part II of an article on the Alhambra’s House of Paintings, which analyzes the exceptional figurative paintings on that building’s second floor (see Muqarnas 40, pp. 69–102, for Part I). Other articles reassess the paintings of the British Library/ Chester Beatty Akbarnāma and compare medieval zawīyas in the Maghrib and Anatolia. Authors include Walid Akef, Íñigo Almela, Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Gwendolyn Collaço, Heike Franke, Tuba Kurtuluş, Sarah Molina, and Nur Sobers-Khan. We are also honored to publish in this volume the last article by Catherine B. Asher (1947–2023), professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota and a longtime member of the Muqarnas advisory board.