1. ISLAMIC ART

2. Dome of the Rock, 687-692, Jerusalem
A simple octagon is surmounted by a graceful, slightly pointed dome. The shape is repeated in the delicately pointed arches used throughout the building, in the surrounding courtyard, in the blind arcade and windows of the exterior, and in the two concentric ambulatories around the Rock. The pointed arch offers great advantages over its round counterpart, since it can be designed in almost any proportion, thus freeing the architect from the tyranny to that inconvenient quantity pi in working out his calculations. ... The pointed arch later found its way to the West where it was employed in the late 11th century in Romanesque architecture. The exterior was restored in the 16th century and tile replaced the original mosaics. The interior’s mosaics have been preserved. Islamic practice does not significantly distinguish interior and exterior decor. The splendor of infinitely various surfaces is given to public gaze both within and outside buildings.

3. The Dome of the Rock resembles San Vitale in Ravenna in its basic domed octagonal design. It is not a typical plan for a Mosque. It was designed to allow the Muslim pilgrims to walk around the Sacred Rock.
The first great achievement of Islamic architecture. Monumental sanctuary erected as a tribute to the triumph of Islam, upon their conquest of Jerusalem from the Byzantines. The sanctuary was erected on the traditional site of Adam’s burial, of Abraham’s preparation for Isaac’s sacrifice, and the Temple of Solomon which the Romans had destroyed in 70 AD. It houses the rock from which Muslims later came to believe Muhammad ascended to Heaven.

4. Great Mosque at Damascus, 705-11, Damascus, Syria
Like the Dome of the Rock, the Great Mosque of Damascus owes much to the architecture of the Greco-Roman and Early Christian East. It is constructed of masonry blocks, columns, and capitals salvaged from the Roman and Early Christian structures on the land al-Walid acquired for his mosque. The courtyard is bounded by pier arcades reminiscent of Roman aqueducts. The minarets, two at the southern corners and one at the northern side of the enclosure, the earliest in the Islamic world, are modifications of the preexisting Roman square towers.
Great Mosque at Damascus, , Damascus, Syria
The grand prayer hall, taller than the rest of the complex, is on the south side of the courtyard (facing Mecca). Its main entrance is distinguished by a facade with a pediment and arches, recalling classical and Byzantine models, respectively. The facade faces into the courtyard, like a Roman forum temple, a plan maintained throughout the long history of mosque architecture. The Damascus mosque synthesizes elements received from other cultures into a novel architectural unity, which includes the distinctive Islamic elements of mihrab, mihrab dome, minbar, and minaret.

5. An extensive cycle of mosaics once covered the wall of the Great Mosque. In one of the surviving sections a conch shell niche supports an arcaded pavilion with a flowering rooftop flanked by structures shown in classical perspective. Like the architectural design, the mosaics owe much to Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine art.Characteristically, temples, clusters of houses, trees, and rivers compose the pictorial fields, bounded by stylized vegetal design, familiar in Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine ornament. No zoomorphic forms, human or animal, appear either in the pictorial or ornamental spaces. This is true of all the mosaics in the Great Mosque as well as the mosaics in the earlier Dome of the Rock. Islamic tradition shuns the representation of fauna of any kind in sacred places.

6. The Great Mosque of Cordoba, 786-987, Cordoba, Spain
The additions followed the original style and arrangement of columns and arches, and the builders maintained a striking stylistic unity for the entire building. The hypostyle prayer hall has 36 piers and 514 columns topped by a unique system of double-tiered arches that carried a wooden roof (now replaced by vaults). The two-story system was the builder’s response to the need to raise the roof to an acceptable height using short columns that had been employed earlier in other structures. The lower arches are horsehoe-shaped. In the West, the horseshoe arch quickly became closely associated with Muslim architecture. Visually, these arches seem to billow out like sails blown in the wind, and they contribute greatly to the light and airy effect of the Cordoba mosque’s interior.
The Great Mosque of Cordoba, , Cordoba, Spain
Begun in 784 and enlarged several times during the 9th and 10th centuries, it eventually became one of the largest mosques in the Islamic West.

7. The caliph al-Hakam II (r
The caliph al-Hakam II (r ) undertook major renovations to the mosque. His builders expanded the prayer hall and added a series of domes. They also erected the elaborate maqsura, the area reserved for the caliph and connected to his palace by a corridor in the qibla wall. The Cordoba maqsura is a prime example of Islamic experimentation with highly decorative multilobed arches. The builders created rich and varied abstract patterns and further enhanced the magnificent effect of the complex arches by sheathing the walls with marbles and mosaics.

8. The same desire for decorative effect also inspired the design of the dome that covers the area in front of the mihrab, one of the four domes built during the 10th century to emphasize the axis leading to the mihrab. The dome rests on octagonal base of arcuated squinches and is crisscrossed by ribs that form an intricate pattern centered on two squares set at 45° angles to each other. The mosaics are the work of the same Byzantine artists responsible for the maqsura’s decoration.

9. To many the supremely original creation of Islamic architecture will always be the Alhambra, the palace built by the Nasrid kings on a lofty rock above Granada in southern Spain in the 14th century, only a century and a half before the Moors were expelled from this last European fortress by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. The founder of the Nasrid dynasty began the complex in 1238 on the site of a pre-Islamic fortress. Successive rulers expanded it, and it took its present form in the 14th century. Literally a small town extending for about half a mile along the crest of a high hill overlooking Granada, it included government buildings, royal residences, gates, mosques, baths, servant’s quarters, barracks, stables, a mint, workshops, and gardens.
Alhambra Palace, , Granada, Spain

10. The palace unfolds through three separate sections linked by corridors
The palace unfolds through three separate sections linked by corridors. Each section, a series of rooms arranged around a courtyard, had a special function in Nasrid times. The first, the Mexuar, was where the sultan conducted business, heard petitions, and received his ministers. Few passed beyond it and the small but beautifully articulated Cuarto Dorado, or Golden Court, which was possibly a waiting area for visitors. The Court of Myrtles, with its long pool of water and delicately columned arcades, led to the so called Hall of the Ambassadors. This, the largest room in the palace, was the throne room, as Arabic inscriptions on the walls, such as ‘I am the Heart of the Palace’, attest. The vaulted wooden ceiling is inlaid with seven tiers of interlacing star-shaped patterns, in an allusion to the seven heavens mentioned in the Koran. Beyond lines the most celebrated part of the palace, the private retreat of the sultan and his family. It centers on the Court of the Lions, which takes it name from the 12 spouting lions that encircle the pedestal and basin of the central fountain. It is graced at its eastern and western ends by pavilions, and is divided by axial pathways into four gardens. During the Nasrid period the flower beds lay just below the paths, so that a stroller would have seen a carpet woven with flowers instead of threads. It is surrounded on all sides by ornately carved arcades ornamented with more than 100 slender columns.The palace floors are covered in cool marble, and its walls are encrusted with ceramic tiles and a delicate tracery of calligraphy or carved and painted stucco. In this quarter of the palace are 10 more fountains, all in interior spaces, some delivering their water into the four channels that run out into the center of the court. The design delineates a perfect world, invoking the universal idea of four rivers of paradise and also the specifically Muslim idea of heaven as a place of ‘pavilions beneath which water flows.

11. The Alhambra was a sophisticated pleasure palace, an attempt to create paradise on earth. Although the buildings offered views to the valley and mountains, the architecture of the Alhambra also turned inward toward its lush gardens, the Muslim vision of paradise as a well-watered, walled garden (the English word for paradise comes from the Persian term for an enclosed park). The so called Court of the Lions in the Alhambra was a private retreat built by Muhammad V (r ) in the late 14th century. At its heart is the Court of the Lions, a rectangular courtyard named for a marble fountain surrounded by stone lions.

12. Muqarnas Dome, Hall of the Two Sisters, Alhambra Palace
The ceiling of the Hall of the Two Sisters, a part of the private section of the palace, is a dome which rests on an octagonal drum supported by squinches and pierced by eight pairs of windows. The ceiling is covered with some 5000 muqarnas, an intricate carved stucco decoration which forms tier after tier of stalactite-like prismatic forms.

13. During this period there was a growing influence on the Islamic civilization by the expanding empire of the Ottoman Turks. This is a grand example of a new development in Islamic architecture, i.e., the madrasab (originally designed by the Seljuk Turks in Persia), a building intended for religious and legal instruction (because the two were fused in the Islamic theocracy). The first such combined theological seminary and law school seems to have built in Persia about The architectural requirements were a customary central sahn (Arabic name for the open interior courtyard of a mosque; it usually has a pool in the center) and separate quarters for each of four schools, each school to be administered by on of the four orthodox Muslim sects. The solution was a series of cells for each school at one of the four corners of the sahn; in the center of each face of the sahn a spacious prayer hall separated one school from its neighbor. These halls, with one side entirely open to the court, were known as iwans; the iwan on the Mecca side, of course, contained the mihrab and the minbar. The arches of the iwans, however, were always sharply pointed, and their majestic open spaces dominate the sahn. Once established, the madrasah became the model for all large mosques in Persia.
Madrasa-mosque-mausoleum complex of Sultan Hasan, 1356, Cairo, Egypt

14. Qibla wall with mihrab and mimbar, main iwan (vaulted chamber) in the
Sultan Hasan Madrasa-mausoleum-mosque, , Cairo, Egypt

16. Mosque of Suleyman I, 1550, Istanbul, Turkey, Architect: Sinan the Great
Sinan began his career in the army and was chief engineer druing the Ottoman campaign and siege of Vienna. He rose through the ranks to become chief architect for Suleyman (r ), whose reign marked the height of Ottoman power, sponsored a building program on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire.
The influence of the Hagia Sophia on this design is apparent both from the exterior and from the interior. The Ottoman rulers converted the church to a mosque and added the four minarets which now grace the corners of the building. Sinan did not simply copy the great church of Justinian. During his time as the Ottoman architect, his designs regularized and elaborated the plan of the Hagia Sophia. The plans were square rather than elongated and reflected a genuine central plan.

17. Sinan (c1491-1588) was the most famous of the Ottoman architects
Sinan (c ) was the most famous of the Ottoman architects. He perfected the Ottoman architectural style, which utilized a basic domed unit. “It could be multiplied, enlarged, or contracted as needed, and almost any number of units could be used together. Thus, the typical Ottoman building of Sinan’s time was a creative assemblage of domical units and artfully juxtaposed geometric spaces. Sinan’s efforts to overcome the limitations of a segmented interior found their ultimate expression in the Mosque of Selim II (the son of Suleyman) at Edirne, which had been the capital of the Ottoman empire from 1367 to 1472 and where Selim II (r ) maintained a palace. The gigantic spherical dome that tops this structure is more than 102 feet in diameter, larger than the dome of the Hagia Sophia. It crowns a building of great geometric complexity on the exterior and complete coherence on the interior, a space at once soaring and serene. In addition to the mosque, the complex housed a madrasa and other educational buildings, a burial ground, a hospital, and charity kitchens, as well as the income-producing covered market and baths. ... The interior seems superficially very much like Hagia Sophia’s, an open expanse under a vast dome floating on a ring of light. The mosque, however, it a true central-plan structure and lacks Hagia Sophia’s longitudinal pull from entrance to sanctuary. The arches supporting the dome spring from eight enormous piers topped with muqarnas (complex squinches). Smaller half-domes between the piers define the corners of a square. Windows at every level flood the interior’s cream-colored stone, restrained tile decoration, and softly glowing carpets with light.
Mosque of Selim II, , Edirne, Turkey, Architect: Sinan the Great

18. Taj Mahal Agra, India, 1648
The best known of all Islamic monuments is the Taj Mahal outside Agra in northwest India, erected by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jehan from 1623 to 1643 as a tomb for his favorite wife, the beautiful Mumtaz Mahal, and later for himself. But the mausoleum itself, including the lofty platform on which it stands and its four delicately tapering minarets, immediately suggests a different spiritual realm. All are constructed entirely of snowy marble, smooth but not polished, so that its crystals both absorb and radiate the intense Indian sunlight. While the basic principle, a central block surmounted by a pointed dome, derives eventually from such buildings as the Madrash of Sultan Hasan, every effort has been made to dissolve the sense of mass.The four iwans have been transferred to the exterior, opening up the four faces of the block. The corners are cut to provide four new diagonal faces creating as much void as solid.

19. The Taj Mahal, 1623-43, Agra, India
Although it is as high as a modern 20-story building, the Taj Mahal is so superbly proportioned, and so carefully positioned in its formal garden on the banks of the Jumma River near Agra, that it appears delicate, hovering, almost dreamlike. Built of pure white marble from Makrana, encrusted with jewels and exquisitely detailed, the building reflects differing atmospheric nuances throughout the day and season.
The entire park, enclosed by lofty red sandstone walls with ornamental gateways inlaid with black-and-white marble, covers an area larger than that of St. Peter’s in Rome and its entire Piazza. The central mausoleum is flanked by two mosques also in red sandstone and marble.

20. Manuscript Illuminations
The art of book production flourished in the later Islamic centuries. Islam’s emphasis on the study of the Koran created a high level of literacy among both women and men in Muslim societies. Books on a wide range of subjects were available, although even books modestly copied on paper were fairly costly. Libraries, often associated with madrasas, were endowed by members of the educated elite. Books made for royal patrons had luxurious bindings and highly embellished pages, the result of workshop collaboartion between noted calligraphers and illustrators.

21. Persian Carpets
Since the Middle Ages, carpets have been the Islamic art form best known in Europe. Knotted rugs from Persia, Turkey, and elsewhere are highly prized. Intricate Persian designs evoked the gardens of paradise. Rugs and mats have long been used for Muslim prayer, which involves repeated kneeling and touching of the forehead to the floor. 20

22. Parts of this presentation are used under the
Fair Use Exemption of U.S. Copyright Law.
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