This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition “Beyond Boundaries – Tents of the Islamic World” in cooperation with the Ethnography Museum, Hamburg, Germany in 2003. The objective of the show was to provide a fuller picture of the importance of tents within the Islamic world, demonstrating their lightness, openness and stability, based on pre-calculated tensile forces. The enduring nature of the tent offers us the opportunity to appreciate its form from many perspectives – architecture, art, history, technology and sociology.