"Islam and Marble" was written by Michael Greenhalgh, who retired in December 2005 as The Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History at the Australian National University. The work concentrates on examples of the use of marble throughout selected periods of the history of the Islamic world, focussing on some of the great centres such as Damascus, Cairo, Agra and Cordoba, and with an appendix on Saddam Hussein's interest in marble. Nearly all the illustrations for this publication come from Professor Greenhalgh's 500,000+ collection of digital images, some of them the result of his long-standing interest in the re-use of Roman antiquities during the Middle Ages and later in the West.
Pointing out that Islam now occupies large tracts around the Mediterranean where the ancient Romans built lavishly in marble, he explains that any consideration of mediaeval re-use of the antique architectural heritage has to look not just at Western Europe and Byzantium, but at Islam as well, which took the lead in building in marble at various junctures. Realising the importance of Islam for the re-use of Roman antiquities, the images for this monograph are the result of a career travelling through and documenting monumental architecture around the Mediterranean, including many of the monuments of Islam in North Africa, Spain and the Middle East. The Mosque of Mutawakkil at Samarra

The monograph is provided on paper with an accompanying CD-ROM. The printed book itself is well illustrated in full colour, and it also appears in an identical and fully-searchable electronic version on the CDROM. But marble can be a lusciously attractive material, and many of the digital images used in the book have been cut down to fit the printed page. Hence the main purpose of the CDROM is to offer many more images than could appear in the paper version, together with a viewer allowing the user to examine the often intricate and ornate detail of the marble artefacts by zooming in and out using a web browser as a "window."

"Islam and Marble" is principally a study of architecture, but also examines the mechanics whereby the adoption of a prestigious material by a vigorous new culture is used to proclaim messages of triumph and sophistication to fellow Moslems and also to Christian competitors in commerce, culture and war. "Beauty is the splendour of truth", wrote Saint Augustine (supposedly), and the builders of Baghdad or Samarra would surely have agreed - as would today's visitors to Cairo or Agra, Kairouan or Cordoba.