Vortrag: Safa Mahmoudian über frühe islamische Gartenkunst.
11. November 2025
16:15 - 18:00 Uhr
KU Linz: Hörsaal 1
Paradise – as a mythical-religious point of origin, an idealized living space, and an eternal object of longing – has long shaped conceptions of ideal space and the good life. Whether religiously motivated or secularly imagined, the idea of a better world finds expression in imagery and architectural visions that go far beyond purely functional or aesthetic concerns.
This lecture series “(Re)Constructing Paradise: Religious and Transcultural Perspectives on Ideal Spaces" focuses on spatial designs that understand architecture as an expression of social, religious, and political orders – as imagined worlds that create community, represent power, and materialize transcendent ideas of a better world.
Attendance is free - no registration required! / Eintritt frei - eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich!
Gardens of Paradise? Rethinking Religious Symbolism in Early Islamic Gardens
Safa Mahmoudian (Wien)
Scholarship on the history of gardens in the Islamic world has long been shaped by two influential paradigms: one that assumes continuity from a pre-Islamic Persian prototype, and another that casts gardens across a vast and diverse geographical area – from al-Andalus to Mughal India – as unified "Islamic" gardens defined primarily by their supposed religious symbolism. A central argument underpinning both has been the claim that the ideal garden for Muslims represented the Qur’anic Paradise, often associated with the fourfold layout and the philological genealogy of pairidaēza to firdaws.
This lecture re-examines the foundations of these narratives. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, it considers the extent to which gardens of the early Islamic period were imagined as paradisiacal and explores instead the interplay of topography, climate, cultural borrowing, and aesthetic taste. By questioning essentialist models of continuity and religious symbolism, this talk highlights the need to view early Islamic gardens as dynamic landscapes situated within diverse environmental and cultural contexts.
About the Speaker
Dr Safa Mahmoudian BA M.Sc. is an art and architectural historian specializing in Western Asia from the early Islamic to the early modern periods. She is Principal Investigator of the project "Travelling Gardens", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, landscape, and socio-cultural dynamics, with particular attention to water systems, gardens, and palatial spaces. She is the author of Palace Gardens in Lower Mesopotamia: 8th to 11th Centuries (Edinburgh University Press 2024) and The Story of Fadan Mādī [a main water canal]: Life, Architecture and Urban Spaces along a Canal in Safavid Isfahan (Rawzana 2017, in Persian).
Dr Mahmoudian has held academic positions at the University of Oxford, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Vienna. Her work has been supported by several major research grants and was awarded the Grete Mostny Prize in 2022.