Is There an “Islamic” Practice for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage?

Abstract

This discussion features an ongoing conversation that seeks to reveal the way that preservation practices arise from or react to uniquely “Islamic” articulations of material and immaterial cultural traditions. Although the aim of this debate is to further ethical cultural heritage preservation practices, it reveals a tension between two intellectual debates within critical heritage studies: on the one hand, a concern for the study, articulation, and stewardship of alternative heritage preservation approaches and, on the other hand, a concern with a tendency in heritage preservation to Orientalize “non-Western” heritage preservation practices as forcefully distinct from long-established “Western” practices.