The essays in this volume are revised versions of papers presented at the symposium "Historiography and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the 'Lands of Rum," held in May 2006 under the auspices of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, with a generous grant from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva.1 The idea for the symposium was born in 2002 through the happy coincidence of our individual preoccupations at the time: Sibel Boz-dogan with nationalism and architectural historiography in early republican Turkey, and Gulru Necipoglu with Orientalism and a critical rethinking of surveys of Islamic art and architecture.2 During our many exchanges we observed a basic connection between our pursuits that would eventually become the premise of the symposium, namely, how the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centurv Orientalist discourses that informed the very constitution of the field of "Islamic art and architecture" by Western European scholars were often mirrored in and entangled with the nationalist narratives of local scholars in predominantly Muslim geographies, both of them doing injustice to the actual complexity of premodcrn histories before the advent of modern nationalisms.