Stealing from Muslims

Diana Dark is a cultural expert in the history of architecture and art. Her interest in early human civilization and the world’s first buildings led her to study the Arabic language at the University of Oxford, and to trace the traces of Eastern religious urban landmarks, especially in historical Syria, over a period of decades starting from the 1970s, which resulted in this book. It is an expression of an interest in Middle Eastern architecture that took a whole life in which she was allowed to explore many urban models, in which she accumulated many observations, and made manyFrom comparisons, it reached important results that do justice to Arab, Islamic/Christian architecture, and put it in its historical perspective. She wanted it to be a “necessary and important correction” after the contemporary European mentality turned inward and its strong hostility against immigrants fleeing their countries, as she indicates in the introduction to the book (p. 19). Thus, Dark champions historical truth at the expense of nationalist considerations, which makes her an honest art historian. Based on this integrity, she “never aims to discredit architecture.”Europe and its many brilliant achievements,” but rather to “show that no one can claim “ownership” of architecture, just as no one can claim “ownership” of science,” as she put it (p. 529).