2013 Seminar

Muslim Ritual and the Chinese Building System

This lecture explores what happens when a monotheistic, aniconic, foreign religion needs worship space in China, a civilization in which images had been worshiped in temples and caves for hundreds of years before the arrival of Islam. The unique convergence of Muslim ritual and the Chinese building system is explained through extant mosques from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as well as a few Muslim tombs. Mosques on China’s southeastern coast, famous mosques in the cities Xi’an and Beijing, and little known mosques in Henan province and Muslim autonomous counties of China are all included in this seminar.

Nancy S. Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania where she has taught since 1982. She received her PhD at Harvard in 1981 where she was a Junior Fellow from 1978-81. Steinhardt taught at Bryn Mawr from 1981-1982. She has broad research interests in the art and architecture of China and China’s border regions, particularly problems that result from the interaction between Chinese art and that of peoples to the North, Northeast, and Northwest.