Book Review: Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments

For the truth about Byzantium, see Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.

“Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments, by Diana Darke, London: Hurst & Company, 2024. 480 pp., $29.99,” Reviewed by Robert Spencer, Middle East Forum, Summer 2025:

Darke, a former BBC broadcaster now living in Damascus, contributes to the cottage industry of books by Westerners that explain how Muslims deserve credit for the West’s achievements. In this case, Romanesque architecture is presented as another of the West’s illegitimate appropriations: “We claim it as our own, born of our own brilliance, but it is time to create a new word for the twenty-first century, Islamesque, in recognition that what we have hitherto dubbed ‘Romanesque’ owes its sudden genesis not to classical Rome, but to master craftsmen schooled in the Islamic tradition.”

To support this claim, Darke largely ignores the primary inspiration for Islamic architecture and the conduit through which many of its features—most notably the architecture of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire—inspired Western European styles.

Indeed, Byzantine architecture gets short shrift throughout the book. For example, she writes that Sicily “holds the key to unlocking the secrets of Romanesque architecture in Europe, since so many decorative features first enter the Norman repertoire on the island, all of them Arab and Islamic in origin.” Indeed, “in no other European location, not even in Andalusian Spain, was there such a thorough mingling of Arab and Norman peoples and cultures.” Yet, even as Darke quotes UNESCO’s statement that Sicily was the site of “a social-cultural syncretism between Western, Islamic and Byzantine cultures,” she ascribes Sicilian architecture entirely to Islamic influence, giving the impression that the Byzantines—despite ruling Sicily for two centuries—left no cultural imprint at all.

Examining several seventh-century English churches, Darke notes that “Rome at this time was under Byzantine rule, so many Byzantine influences passed into English church styles and practices.” Despite acknowledging this debt to Byzantium, Darke claims to have discovered “Islamic antecedents” in various architectural features—antecedents that, puzzlingly, have gone “unremarked” in the works of architectural historians.

Darke’s book holds greater value as an example of how 21st-century Western self-loathing has warped academic studies rather than as a useful exploration of medieval architecture.