Brotherhood of the Towers: On the Spatiality of the Mamluk Caste

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked as an architect in Los Angeles and Damascus, and is a consultant for several design firms on projects in the Islamic world. Rabbat is the author of many books, most recently The Architecture of the Dead Cities: Toward a New Interpretation of the History of Syria (Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press, 2018), and Criticism as Commitment: Viewpoints on History, Arabism, and Revolution (Riad Alrayyes, 2015) both in Arabic; and a co-editor, with Pamela Karimi, of The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS (Aggregate, 2016). He is currently completing an intellectual biography of the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi and a book on the history of Cairo’s architecture and he is a frequent contributor to several Arabic-language newspapers.