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Paper abstract:

My paper investigates the urban and architectural history of the Registan square in the center of Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan. Three monumental madrasas (residential colleges for Islamic higher education) constructed from the early 15th century to the mid-17th century delineate this rectangular square. The first and oldest madrasa on Registan is the Ulugh Beg madrasa, built around 1420 by Ulugh Beg, the prince-governor of the Timurid dynasty (ca.1370-1507). The second and third structures are the Shir Dor madrasa and the Tilla Kari madrasa. Both were commissioned in the post-Timurid period by Yalangtush Bahadur (d. 1655), the Uzbek general-governor of Samarkand, who served the Bukharan khans. My research seeks to understand the formation of the Registan as both a physical and conceptual space during the Timurids and its transformations in the post-Timurid era.

As one travels throughout historic cities of Central Asia—such as Samarkand and Bukhara—the madrasa clearly dominates their urban landscapes positioned at the centers of towns or other important nodes of cities. And yet, existing scholarship has overlooked the madrasa’s urban ubiquity, a feature that makes Central Asian cities unique. What did it mean to build multiple monumental madrasas in urban and commercial centers during the 16th-18th centuries? How did the structures, decorative and epigraphic programs, and a host of written documents which record the foundation and social lives of these Central Asian madrasas challenge earlier understandings and expectations of the Muslim educational institution? My research examines Samarqand’s Registan as a case study, situating its evolution against the backdrop of changing architectural/urban typologies in the eastern and central Asian Islamic lands.