Architect, poet, professor H Masud Taj is on an India tour to talk about Sinan, Istanbul's foremost architect, who has arguably built more than
H Masud Taj, Adjunct Professor at Carleton University in Canada, was mentored in architecture by Hassan Fathy and in calligraphy by David Hosbrough. His talk on “Sinan:Architect at the Centre of the World” in Delhi drizzled with anecdotes of Ottoman empire’s most celebrated builder, and how history and politics were fertile soil for some of Istanbul’s lasting monuments. Excerpts from an interview:
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You taught architecture simultaneously at Sir JJ College of Architecture, Rizvi College and Pillai college in Mumbai
Yes, while running an architectural practice in Bombay and consultancy in Delhi besides being a fortnightly op-ed architectural columnist. Now I teach in Canada, practice in India and research in-between in Europe and Turkey. For instance this year the University’s Faculty of Public Affairs, showcased the research and photography I did while reading medieval buildings and Don Quixote, in Toledo, Spain.
In your next book on the Seven Muslim Wonders & the Making of the Modern World, which are the sites you will be exploring?
Those that I have visited in Agra, Cairo, Cordoba, Granada, Isfahan, Istanbul and Mecca. If you add Jerusalem that is eight but one of them is latent in all others just as the sound of alif is latent in all letters of Arabic.
And where do you see the intersections?
Seven mnemonic monuments embody civilizational ideas. Buildings are books that someone forgot to burn; they await a reading and then paradigms begin to shift and you see the world anew and hopefully the reader will too. For instance, satellite images show that the original Taj Mahal complex extended much further at both ends: across the Yamuna to the royal Mughal garden with a reflecting pool that reveals why the Mughals called it Rouza-e-Munnawara: The Illuminated Tomb (Taj Mahal is a misnomer). However, the real action of the complex was at the other end: the quadrant bazaar as a node of the global Muslim network of an ‘ethically driven commerce’, of poet merchants and Sufi merchant brotherhoods.
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