Read an Excerpt

Western Islamic Architecture

A Concise Introduction with 139 Illustrations

Dover Publications, Inc.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

THE ORTHODOX CALIPHS (632–61)

Until they began their conquests, which by 661 had made them rulers of the areas now forming Palestine, Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the Arabs were innocent of any architectural tradition. The Koran, Surah 7, says, "God ... made for you, of the skins of cattle, houses that ye may find them light on the day ye move your quarters and the day when ye abide ..." Muhammad is also quoted as having said, "The most unprofitable thing that eateth up the wealth of a believer is building." The earliest congregational mosques for the Friday communal prayer were square enclosures surrounded by reeds or a ditch and oriented toward Mecca. Their essential equipment evolved slowly. The minbar, or pulpit (plate 30), was a raised chair first used by Muhammad at Medina so that crowds of the faithful could see and hear him. Its ascent by the caliphs who immediately succeeded him became part of their installation ceremony. Only after 750 did it become a pulpit used in all mosques.

The final conquest of the Sassanian Kingdom of Iraq and Persia was accomplished in 637 by Sa'd ibn al-Waqqas when he captured and sacked Ctesiphon, its capital. Sa'd, one of the Prophet's favorite followers and the descendant of an aristocratic Meccan family, then founded Kufa on the western arm of the Euphrates, south of Babylon. There, on the orders of the Caliph, Omar, he built a governor's residence, Dar al-Imara, adjacent to the qibla wall of the mosque (plate 1). When the structure was described to Omar he was so incensed that upon Sa'd's dismissal in 640 he is even said to have ordered it burned. Only the plan can be traced, but it is enough to explain why. A single north-south axis led through both enclosures to a court of honor with recessed porches or iwans in the center of each of its four sides. That to the south opened into a basilical hall terminated by a square, four-doored chamber, probably once domed. Sa'd had taken for himself all the royal symbolism of Sassanian kingship, and Omar was quite right in assuming that the symbol might soon become a reality. Sa'd retired from political life soon after; but temptation, aided by poor communication as the Empire expanded, was too much for many of his successors.

THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE (661–750)

After the defeat and death of Ali; the last orthodox Caliph, Mu'awiyah, first of the Umayyads, moved the capital of the Empire from Medina to Damascus. The ascent of the Umayyads, marked a period of relative materialism for Islam. Fond of poetry and wine, the Umayyads were aristocrats who soon abolished election to their office, preferring to appoint their sons or brothers. It was under them that two more characteristic pieces of mosque furniture were developed. The first was a windowed wall of wood or brick which surrounded the minbar and the caliph's place of prayer. This was called the maqsura (plate 86) and was introduced either by Mu'awiya in 664–65 or by Marwan in 683–85. In either case, the intent was to protect the caliph from attempts upon his life. The idea was soon taken up by the governors and spread from one end of Islam to the other. When, in 707–09, the Caliph alWalid rebuilt the mosque at Medina, formerly Muhammad's house, he introduced a niche, the mihrab, in the center of the qibla wall (plate 56). Because the niche had obvious affiliations with Christian architecture, it was at first opposed by the orthodox but, nevertheless, soon became universal. The mihrab is purely a directional symbol, and there may be more than one in any mosque. Nevertheless, the central mihrab, like an apse, gave even the earliest congregational mosques a strong axial emphasis.

The earliest surviving architectural masterpiece built under Islam is the Dome of the Rock, begun probably in 688–89 and completed, according to its dated inscription, in 691–92 by the Caliph Abd al-Malik. It stands in the Haram as Sharif (plates 2, 4), a great rectangular enclosure in an area of Jerusalem once occupied by the Jewish Temple but never built upon by the Christians. Near its center is the sakhra, the bare rock surface of the summit of Mt. Moriah, one of the most ancient sacred sites in the world and the traditional place of Abraham's sacrifice. Here, Abd-al-Malik built not a mosque in the tradition set by Muhammad's house at Medina, but a ciborium like a Christian martyrium.

The exterior walls are sheathed in quartered marble to the window line. Above, where there are now Turkish tiles installed in 1554, there were once glass mosaics which covered the drum of the great wooden dome as well. The dome, a twelfth-century replacement of the original, was probably, then as now, gilded. In the white Palestinian sunlight the structure glows like a jeweled reliquary. Four portals lead from the four cardinal directions into the first ambulatory where the dominant direction is horizontal, stressed by the very Roman combination of an entablature under arches. Beyond the inner octagon, space opens and one faces four, rather than three, arches unobstructed by entablatures (plate 6). Finally, the great upward thrust of the space beneath the dome enhances the sanctity of the site it protects. The geometric order of plan and elevation (plate 3) produces a satisfying sensation of harmony, aided by the luxury of the rich polychrome ornament of marble, hammered bronze, and mosaic. This is not an Arab building, but neither is it entirely Byzantine; the ambiguity may have been intentional.

The Arabs claimed descent from Abraham. Abd al-Malik's rival, the Caliph Ibn al-Zubayr who ruled at Mecca from 683 to 692, is said to have rebuilt the Kaaba as the Prophet had said it was in the time of Abraham. This was accomplished in 684, and the structure was ornamented with mosaics from a church in the Yemen. According to an early tradition, Abd al-Malik intended the Dome of the Rock to function as a rival Kaaba in order to transfer the hajj or pilgrimage from Mecca to Jerusalem, placing it on the site of Muhammad's ascent to Heaven. It has recently been pointed out that Muhammad's ascent is commemorated elsewhere on the Haram, and that Abd al-Malik, in fact, wished to recall the sacrifice of Abraham. The building itself echoes the Holy Sepulcher in the rhythm of its inner arcade (plate 5). Possibly, the Dome of the Rock was to have been a victory monument reflecting the theological and political situation of its own time and the hopes of Islam to gather to itself the two faiths which had preceded it.

When Damascus was taken in 635 the Muslims shared the temenos of the temple of Jupiter with the Christians, whose Church of St. John probably occupied the site of the temple proper. In 705 the Caliph al-Walid (705–15) purchased the church and destroyed it. He used the space of the temenos for his new Congregational Mosque, begun in 706 and finished in 714/15 (plate 7). On the south (in Syria almost exactly oriented toward Mecca) he built three aisles divided in the center by a transverse nave lighted by a clerestory and provided with a dome, originally wooden, over the center bay. Single riwaqs, or arcades, were also added to the north, west, and east sides of the temenos. The four ancient corner towers became minarets, the first in Islam. Finally, above the alternate columns and piers of the arcades and above a zone of quartered marble paneling around the walls of the temenos, were added a superb series of decorative mosaics (plate 8). The floral and architectural compositions with their mixture of formal oriental tradition and Hellenistic illusionism point here as in Jerusalem to a local Syrian tradition.

The mosque at Damascus is the earliest surviving example of the complete assimilation by the Muslims of foreign architectural elements and their new use of them to establish an environment specifically their own. The great court recalls Muhammad's house at Medina, but the rhythm of the surrounding arcades, where piers alternate with paired columns (plate 9), repeats that of the now-vanished atrium of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople. The central gable of the mihrab transept (plate 10) may echo a palace façade like that of the Chalki at Constantinople. Like the dome over the same transept, long a royal symbol, the architecture may here also have been intended to enhance the position of the Caliph as sovereign.

The Umayyad caliphs were, and remained, desert Arabs with nomadic habits. Self-indulgent and pleasure loving, they spent most of their time away from Damascus in semipermanent camps, or badiyas, where they maintained gardens and walled hunting preserves. In both the irrigation of their gardens and the use of game preserves they had probably adapted methods from the Sassanians before them. However, the bathing establishments which formed essential parts of such sites were based on late Roman models surely available then in Syria. Qusayr Amra, about 50 miles east of Amman in Transjordan, was built about 715 (plates 11, 12). It consisted only of a bath and an attached audience hall, once sumptuously ornamented with mosaics, marble, and frescoes. The proprietor's followers must have camped in tents. At Qasr al-Kharanah, not far away, a two-story residence is well preserved. It is dated only by an Arabic graffito of 711 in one of the upper rooms, but was probably built not long before.

The almost windowless enclosure is entered from the south through a split semicircular tower (plate 14). Two stairways give access to the upper floor symmetrically disposed about an open court (plate 13). To judge from its rich ornament, this was the piano nobile and, of its rooms, the most important is a formerly domed reception room with the only window in the building overlooking the entrance. The rest of this floor consists of a series of independent apartments for retainers or wives, and several more occupy the ground floor. These are called bayts, Arabic for house, and are of a type found only in Syria, Transjordan, or Palestine; never in Iraq. On the other hand, the rubble masonry—using liberal amounts of mortar—and the stilted, round arched windows suggest that the builders had a Sassanian background. Possibly also Sassanian is the presence of the domed chamber over the entrance. If the Umayyads did not practice the elaborate gate ceremonial of the later Abbasids they had at least already adapted an architecture appropriate to such ceremonies.

Khirbet al-Mafjar, in the Jordan Valley, was perhaps already under construction in 743–44. However, only the bath was complete and in use when the whole was destroyed, probably by an earthquake, in 747–48. The complex included a walled irrigated tract of about 150 acres. The immediate surroundings of the mansion consist of a roughly rectangular enclosure (plate 15), bounded on the east by the house itself; a mosque; and a very elaborate bathing establishment.

The bath is the most monumental of all such Umayyad structures. The entrance porch can be restored with fair accuracy from the remnants of its stucco and stone ornament (plate 19). A very complex system of borrowing and adaptation had clearly been going on, accompanied by a well-developed horror vacui and an interest in flat surface patterns in shallow relief which did not interfere with the simple massive form of the gate. The composition suggests a Roman triumphal arch; but the crenelations, dome, and statue of a caliph in the niche are all of Sassanian origin. The great hall of the bath supported an elaborate system of barrel vaults, clerestories, and domes on compound piers of stone, the whole rising from a mosaic floor of local Palestinian type. The curvilinear knots and interlaces of this mosaic (plate 16) became an inseparable part of Islamic architectural ornament. At the northeast corner was a room which must have served as a private audience chamber. A bench lined three walls, while the fourth was occupied by a deep niche with a raised mosaic floor. A reconstruction based on the fallen stucco ornament (plate 18) shows the sumptuous eclecticism which prevailed everywhere. The winged horses in the tondi set in the pendentives of the dome are Sassanian royal emblems. Western and oriental elements are combined, indicating the progress already made toward the creation of a new style.

Of the mansion, only the ground floor is preserved; but fragments fallen from above show that the state apartments, as at Qasr al-Kharanah, stood above the main entrance, where they surrounded a dome chamber which had a window of appearances in which the ruler could appear before his subjects (plate 17). The house was closely linked to its walled garden through a two-story portico with compound piers below. The domed pavilion over the garden pool, the richness of the ornament, the elaborate provisions for the reception of visitors, and the repeated use of architectural symbolism associated with kingship suggest that the owner was a very important person.

Possibly the last and certainly the most ambitious of all the Umayyad country seats was the unfinished palace of Mshatta whose construction was probably interrupted by the fall of the dynasty in 750. The palace stands about twenty miles south of Amman on the border between the ancient provinces of Syria and Iraq. The material is well-cut stone which is characteristically Syrian; but the brick vaults are more typical of Iraq, as is the plan (plate 21). An enclosure about 480 feet square is divided on the north-south axis as at Kufa into three parts. The center part, like Kufa, consists of an antechamber, court of honor, and basilical throne hall. The triconch throne room proper, probably adapted from a Syrian example (the Audience Hall of the episcopal palace at Bosra), was closely linked both in Rome and Byzantium with imperial architectural symbolism. The four bayts are also of Syrian plan, recalling Qasr al-Kharanah and Khirbet al-Mafjar. The wonderful carvings of the south façade, now in the Berlin Museum (plate 20), combine the six-lobed rosettes and octagons of Khirbet al-Mafjar with triangular "pediments" framed in continuous moldings. Persian and Hellenistic elements are inextricably blended in the deeply undercut sculpture, producing a flickering play of light and dark over the amber-colored sandstone.

THE EARLY ABBASID CALIPHATE (750–892)

The Abbasids overthrew the last Umayyad Caliph with the assistance of Persian soldiers and cavalry, thereby introducing a new wave of influence from the East. The second Caliph, al-Mansur (754–75), founded a new capital at Baghdad in 762. Nothing remains of this capital, but we know from contemporary descriptions that it was circular with four equidistant gates. In the center of an inner enclosure was the palace and a mosque. The palace was called either the Green Dome or the Golden Gate, after its principal components. We are told that the green dome stood at the end of an iwan, thus repeating the arrangement at Kufa. Probably the gate, which had its own dome of gold, was on axis with the iwan, also as at Kufa. The increased emphasis on the entrance is closely related to the more elaborate gate ceremonial adopted by the Abbasids, who revived the ancient custom of appearing before their subjects at a window above the main entrance of a palace, called the window of appearances.

Ukhaidir, a fortified country palace about 75 miles southwest of Baghdad, has a plan (plate 22) strikingly like Kufa's. It was probably built after 774–75 by Isa Ibn Musa, a nephew of the Caliph al-Mansur and the only important member of the Abbasid family known to have lived in exile. The outer enclosure is almost exactly the size of the outer square at Kufa, but the material—small flat stones set in abundant mortar—recalls that of Qasr al-Kharanah. Also like Kharanah the east, west, and south portals are formed from split semicircular towers (plate 23).

Flanking the Court of Honor and the throne complex are four bayts. Each consists of two similar apartments facing north and south and probably used seasonally. The T-shaped spaces, flanked by rectangular rooms and separated from the courts by triple arcades, descend from a very ancient Mesopotamian and Persian house type. The north façade of the Court of Honor uses several types of blind arcading (plates 25, 27) which, like the lobed arches, were to have continued importance in later architecture. The fluted dome appears for the first time in Islam in the first cross passage beyond the entrance (plate 26). The great hall with its vast elliptical barrel vault suggests that the brick source of its design was undoubtedly Sassanian (plate 24). An innovation, later to be of great consequence, is the semicircular vault over a rectangular niche by which the north door is framed.

The Umayyad al-Walid, in addition to the mosque at Damascus, also built a congregational mosque, al-Aqsa, on the Haram as Sharif in Jerusalem. This building, severely damaged by the earthquake of 747–48, was entirely rebuilt by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi (775–85) in 780. Al-Mahdi's mosque was in turn rebuilt in 1035 by the Fatimid Caliph as-Zahir, but he seems to have respected the main lines of the work of al-Mahdi, only reducing the number of aisles. This mosque occupies part of the south wall of the Haram as Sharif and is almost exactly oriented upon the Dome of the Rock (plate 2). The rest of the vast area, partly surrounded by arcades, corresponds to an immense sahn. Al-Mahdi's mosque had parallel aisles running north-south. The center was much wider than the previous version and was provided with a clerestory. Over the mihrab was a wooden dome (plate 28). Al-Aqsa, in its alignment on the Dome of the Rock, seems to have intentionally imitated the basilica aligned upon the Holy Sepulcher. Very probably the north-south aisles of the mosque at Cordoba of 785 were inspired by al-Aqsa (plate 29).

The Great Mosque at Qairawan, Tunisia, is considered the ancestor of all the other North African congregational mosques. It probably reached its present size under the Umayyad Caliph Hisham (724–43) to whose reign at least the lower portion of the minaret (plate 33) may belong. Since then there have been at least two complete reconstructions, the last by the Aghlabid Emir, Ziyadet Allah, in 836. The aisles, as in the al-Aqsa, run perpendicular to the qibla wall, from which they are separated by a cross corridor (plate 32). The masonry dome over the mihrab, which probably replaced an earlier wooden version, was added in 862 (plates 30, 31).

---

Excerpted from Western Islamic Architecture by John D. Hoag. Copyright © 2005 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---