A Living Islamic City: Fez and Its Preservation

This book is far from a blind or superficial call for a ‘return to the Middle Ages,’ but rather a call for a return to the sacred principles that underlie all sapiential traditions and arts, crafts, architecture and sacred lifeways to understand them in their integral nature. We are grateful that these important lectures have been made available as they make for a superb contribution to Burckhardt’s already published work on the city of Fez and Islamic art. Burckhardt concludes with a message conveying the transpersonal blessing crystalized within this sacred city, ‘let us not forget that there still exists in Fez what we would call a genius loci, or, more adequately, a barakah that will have the last word’ (p. 14). We end this review with the well-known verse of the Islamic tradition: ‘unto God all things are returned’ (3:109).-Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2021)