Bees are considered the chief architects of the natural world. In premodern Islamic lands, writers such as al-Maqrizi (d. 1442CE) penned entire treatises dedicated to these minuscule winged insects, praising an ingenuity that “even the most astute engineer who uses a compass and a ruler would be proved incapable of replicating.” While bees construct honeycombs of perfect hexagons, humans, too, engage in the practice“apitecture”: that is, creating built forms to home and protect bee colonies. Some are small and appended to homes; others mounted on cliffs and trees; and still others are monumental abodes that could house twenty million of these social animals. Such is the case for the apiary of Inzerki, located in the Souss Valley in southwestern Morocco. Built in the sixteenth century and overseen by a collective of Amazigh (Berber) tribes, it functioned as a premodern “factory” for the large-scale production of wax and honey—the latter a prized sweetener and preserver bearing curative properties, and the former a material in high demand by and thus exported to Europe. Along with related bee texts and other apiaries, this talk presents the Inzerki beehive in order to explore the interface between wilderness and domesticity, animal and human architecture, biomimesis, and faunal industrialism. Above all, it focuses on Islamic “beekeeping,” the expression “keeping” used to identify various types of cooperative homing practices and forms. 

Lunch will be available before the lecture begins.

Professor Christiane Gruber is Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu Collegiate Professor of Islamic Art History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her scholarly work explores medieval to contemporary Islamic art. Among others, her areas of expertise include Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written three books and edited several volumes of articles. She also pursues research in Islamic book arts, codicology, and paleography, having authored the online catalogue of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress as well as edited the volume of articles entitled The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Her third field of specialization is modern and contemporary Islamic visual and material culture, about which she has edited several volumes and written over a dozen articles. Her recent publications include her book The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images and her edited volume The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World. Currently, she is working on eco-Islamic art and architecture as well as the visual culture of the Nation of Islam.

She has found great joy and purpose in founding and directing Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online since 2020.