The Alhambra, the palace complex of the Nasrid sultans (r. 1230–1492), perched on a hill overlooking Granada, is—along with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Taj Mahal in Agra—one of the iconic monuments of Islamic architecture. Romantically beautiful, with its stuccoed halls and courtyards, sparkling fountains, and lush gardens looking out on the snowy Sierra Nevada and the verdant vega of Granada, it is also the most visited tourist site in Spain, with 2.4 million visitors in 2014. Felix Arnold, a senior research fellow of the German Archaeological Institute in Madrid and a trained architect and archaeologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Spain, Egypt, and Syria, places the Alhambra in a continuous tradition of palace building in the western Islamic lands—principally Spain, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, but also, tangentially, Sicily, Libya, and even Timbuktu—between the ninth and nineteenth centuries.

The good news is that Islamic Palace Architecture in the Western Mediterranean, the first book ever on the subject, provides invaluable access to much of the literature on the surviving physical and textual evidence for the region's approximately seventy-five palaces. In many cases, Arnold has drawn new plans, often based on his own investigations. He focuses primarily on the Iberian Peninsula, although he also touches upon the much less published sites of North Africa. To judge from the more than 550 titles in his bibliography, Arnold is an indefatigable researcher.

The book is divided chronologically into six chapters, the first of which covers the “formative period” in the ninth century and the appearance of the “broad hall,” the wide room opening onto a courtyard that was a characteristic feature of palatial and domestic architecture in the western Islamic lands for centuries. The second chapter focuses on the tenth century, when two rival caliphates with pretensions to …