Other Art and Architecture

As the new culture borrowed from its milieu in most of the other areas that I've discussed in earlier posts, so too with other art and architecture the early Muslims were influenced by the art and architecture (and its exponents) that (and who) already existed in the region they occupied. We know, for example, that an 8^th Century Arab poet raved about a Sasanian palace (now a ruin) at Taq Kisra in Iran. Islam required that certain adjustments be made, however, so that an Islamic style developed along the lines required. The architecture and decoration of the Mosque, for example, were necessarily unique in their orientation, in the absence of depictions of animals and in the decorative application of Qur’anic verses (naturally in Arabic script), geometric patterns and heavenly garden motifs.

The building of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus in the early 8^th century to be the most magnificent in the Islamic world in its day (partly by Byzantine craftspeople), for example, both continued the local use of the dome and yet is an early example of the uniquely Islamic use of the decorative garden theme from the outside and the plan of the Mosque followed the plan of Muhammad’s house (and Mosque) in Medina. Materials clearly used symbolically to emphasise the importance of the Mosque included gold and other precious materials already used for similar purposes before the advent of the Islamic Era. The minaret used for the call to prayer was built later in several iterations and the Mosque is, typically, co-located with a major souk.

Other major Mosques that show the variety of styles according to region and time period include the Ibn Tulun, Nasir Muhammad, al-Azhar, Rifa’i and Sultan Hasan Mosques in Cairo, the Qairawan Mosque in Tunisia, the Qarawiyyin Mosque in Morocco, the Samarra and Kasimiyyah Mosques in Iraq, the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque in Delhi with its famous Qutb Minar Minaret, the Shah Mosque in Iran (with its famous muqarnas work) and other Iranian Mosques, the Sultan Ahmad Mosque in Turkey and other Mosques in central Asia and Moorish Spain.

Other arts were influenced by the extensive trading networks of the Arabs as well as the rulings of various religious scholars. Figural depiction of animals and humans is often frowned upon but it is by no means absent from secular buildings such as palaces. Music also was ruled upon differently depending on where one was and the purpose to which it was put. Even the alleged prohibition rule on the depiction of Muhammad has not actually been an all-time hard and fast rule in all of Islamic history in all places.

And with great material success, great art and architecture has been achieved in the Islamic world probably often despite the admonition of brave clerics that the ostentation was something that smacked of the sin of pride in the things of this world. The Taj Mahal (the Place of Mahal), the mausoleum devoted to the memory of Mahal, a wife of a secular ruler of India, and Al-Hambra palace in Spain are classic examples along with the mosques of the extraordinary beauty for which that sin of pride has arguably been responsible. Many decorated Qur'ans also rival the famous Bibles produced in the Western monasteries and the arts associated with the decoration of carpets and china ware are also rightly regarded as superlative expressions of a confident and flourishing civilisation.