Peyvand Firouzeh

Replicating the Ka‘ba in Medieval India

Peyvand Firouzeh is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Cambridge and author of Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India (Indiana University Press, November 2025). Her book was the recipient of The Barakat Trust Publication Award, College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund, The New Foundation for Art History Publication Subvention Grant, and the Persian Heritage Foundation Publication Grant. She studies the art and architecture of the medieval and early modern Islamic world, particularly the material cultures of Sufism and artistic connections between Iran and India and in the broader Indian Ocean world. Before joining Cambridge, she was Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney and held research and curatorial positions with the Getty Research Institute, Australian Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max-Planck-Institut) in Florence, the Forum Transregionale Studien and Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, and the British Museum.

The goal of the current project, "Replicating the Ka‘ba in Medieval India," funded by The Barakat Trust, is to carry out essential fieldwork in India in the field of premodern Islamic architecture. The project is focused on monuments in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century India that claim a relationship with the Ka‘ba through their epigraphy. Drawing on a close study of these monuments in situ that encompasses their epigraphy, form, and materiality, accompanied by an in-depth analysis of primary textual sources and photographic materials, the project will shed light on the understudied category of architectural copies of the Ka‘ba and deepen our understanding of material connections across the Indian Ocean.