"In the preface to this book, Samer Akkach describes his childhood experience of watching snowflakes from his window in Damascus. Looking at them, he had the feeling that the flakes were not falling, but that he was floating upward to higher realms. Reading his book has had a similar affect on me, giving the impression that I have been carried up into unutterably strange, but compellingly beautiful, realms of thought and imagination.
In the face of the worldwide homogenization of architectural education, it is salutary to be reminded that architecture wasn't always and everywhere designed solely to satisfy aesthetic, economic, functional and technological exigencies. In many times and places architecture expressed a human sense of the wonder and oneness of the world. Buildings fitted together with myths and cosmologies to convey that people and the cosmos belong together: humans belong in the world they inhabit; and the world belongs together with humans. In this context, buildings serve to mediate between the human as microcosm and the whole world as macrocosm, showing how they inter-reflect and harmonize...
Samer Akkach is one of a small band of architectural scholars who see it as their task to record and interpret these other architectures so that they do not sink into irrecoverable oblivion. He rescues Islamic architecture from amnesia. In his splendid book he applies his intimate knowledge of Arabic and the premodern Sufi texts to convey a lucid and richly detailed account of the manner in which Islamic architecture, in all its forms, from buildings to cities, gardens, landscapes and meta-landscapes, reflected the cosmos, and thus gave back praise. The book is masterful, and a major contribution to architectural scholarship...
Having relocated the discourse on architectural symbolism in the context of how Islamic (or, more particularly, Sufi) texts view the matter, Akkach then proceeds to give a panoramic view of Sufi thought as it relates to architecture. The view he opens up is so wide and so detailed that it is not possible in a brief review to give an account of the materials he covers, even in summary. It must suffice to say that the work comprises four chapters, each dealing with an aspect of 'order,' respectively the discursive, metaphysical, cosmic and architectural...
Akkach looks at concepts that are familiar in the Western literature on Islamic architecture and brings out new aspects, sometimes at variance with the conventional scholarly wisdom on these matters. By reference, for example, to the 'Land of Reality,' the 'Cities of Light' and Ibn Sînâ's 'heavenly landscape,' he brings out previously unrecorded aspects of Islamic orientation, architecture and landscape...
This is not a book for those who are used to skim reading... Nor is it for those who tremble in the presence of the unfamiliar. Akkach guides the reader into foreign territories of thought, where everything in the landscape is wholly unlike anything we are used to. In this sense, the shock of the old--premodern antiquity--becomes the shock of the totally new. If the past is a foreign country, then Akkach leads us into a country that is doubly foreign, because as well as being a country of the past, it is a past whose present, contemporary Islam, is equally unknown to many in the West... Akkach's book takes us into realms that, for many readers, will be radically unfamiliar. For those who can deal with the vertigo induced by an encounter with the wholly alien, the book will enhance understanding, to the degree that they will never again see Islam or Islamic architecture in the same way as they did previously. It is also possible that they will never again see Western architecture in quite the same way either."

Professor Snodgrass is the author of Architecture, Time and Eternity: Studies in the Stellar and Temporal Symbolism of Traditional Buildings (International Academy of Indian Culture 1990); The Symbolism of the Stupa (Cornell Uni. Press 1985); The Matrix and Diamond World Mandalas in Shingon Buddhism (Aditya Prakashan 1988, 2 vols) and co-author of Interpretations in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking (Routledge 2006).

"在这本书的序言中，萨米尔-阿卡奇描述了他童年时从大马士革的窗户看雪花的经历。看着它们，他有一种感觉，即这些雪花并没有落下，而是他在向上漂浮到更高的境界。读他的书对我也有类似的影响，给人的印象是我被带入了不可言喻的奇怪但令人信服的美丽的思想和想象的境界。

面对世界范围内建筑教育的同质化，提醒我们建筑并不总是和到处都是仅仅为了满足审美、经济、功能和技术的需要而设计的，这是有益的。在许多时代和地方，建筑表达了人类对世界的奇迹和一体性的感觉。建筑物与神话和宇宙论结合在一起，传达出人与宇宙同属一个整体：人类属于他们所居住的世界；而世界也属于人类。在这种情况下，建筑在作为微观世界的人类和作为宏观世界的整个世界之间起着中介作用，显示出它们是如何相互反映和协调的...。

萨梅尔-阿卡奇是一小群建筑学者中的一员，他们把记录和解释这些其他建筑作为自己的任务，以便它们不会沉入无法恢复的遗忘之中。他将伊斯兰建筑从失忆中拯救出来。在他这本精彩的书中，他运用他对阿拉伯语和前现代苏菲文本的深入了解，传达了一个清晰而丰富的细节，即伊斯兰建筑，从建筑到城市、花园、景观和元景观，以各种形式反映宇宙，从而回馈赞美。这本书非常出色，是对建筑学术的重大贡献......

阿卡奇将建筑象征主义的论述重新置于伊斯兰（或更具体地说，苏菲）文本如何看待这一问题的背景下，然后开始对苏菲思想进行全景式的介绍，因为它与建筑有关。他所开辟的视野是如此之广，如此之细，以至于在一篇简短的评论中不可能对他所涉及的材料作出说明，即使是摘要。我们只需说，这部作品包括四个章节，每个章节都涉及 "秩序 "的一个方面，分别是话语的、形而上学的、宇宙的和建筑的......

阿卡奇着眼于西方伊斯兰建筑文献中熟悉的概念，并提出了新的方面，有时与这些问题的传统学术智慧不同。例如，通过参考 "现实之地"、"光明之城 "和伊本-西纳的 "天国景观"，他带出了伊斯兰方位、建筑和景观中以前未被记录的方面......

这不是一本适合那些习惯于粗略阅读的人的书...... 它也不适合那些在陌生事物面前发抖的人。阿卡奇引导读者进入思想的异域，那里的一切景观都与我们习惯的东西完全不同。在这个意义上，旧的冲击--前现代的古代--变成了全新的冲击。如果说过去是一个陌生的国家，那么阿卡奇带领我们进入了一个加倍陌生的国家，因为它不仅是一个过去的国家，也是一个现在的国家，即当代伊斯兰教，对许多西方人来说同样不了解。阿卡奇的书把我们带入了一些领域，对许多读者来说，这些领域将是完全陌生的。对于那些能够处理好与完全陌生的事物相遇所带来的眩晕感的人来说，这本书将增进他们的理解，以至于他们再也不会像以前那样看待伊斯兰教或伊斯兰建筑。他们也可能再也不会以完全相同的方式来看待西方建筑了"。

斯诺德格拉斯教授是《建筑、时间和永恒》的作者。斯诺德格拉斯教授是《建筑、时间和永恒：传统建筑的恒星和时间象征主义研究》（国际印度文化学院，1990年）；《佛塔的象征主义》（康奈尔大学出版社，1985年）；《真言宗中的矩阵和钻石世界曼陀罗》（Aditya Prakashan，1988年，两卷）的作者，也是《建筑的诠释》的共同作者。设计是一种思维方式》（Routledge 2006）的合著者。