- Middle Period: the rise of Persian and Turkish poetry
Secular architecture
- Key People:
- Owen Jones
- Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī
- Related Topics:
- the arts
- Islamic architecture
- Islamic literature
Whereas the functions of the religious buildings of early Islam could not have existed without the new faith, the functions of secular Muslim architecture have a priori no specifically Islamic character. This is all the more so since one can hardly point to a significant new need or habit that would have been brought from Arabia by the conquering Muslims and because so little was destroyed in the conquered areas. It can be assumed, therefore, that all pre-Islamic functions such as living, trading, and manufacturing continued in whatever architectural setting they may have had. Only one exception is certain. With the disappearance of Sasanian kingship, the pre-Islamic Iranian imperial tradition ceased, and elsewhere conquered minor kings and governors left their palaces and castles. A new imperial power was created, located first in Damascus, then briefly in the northern Syrian town of Al-Ruṣāfah, and eventually in Baghdad and Sāmarrāʾ in Iraq. New governors and, later, almost independent princes took over provincial capitals, which sometimes were old seats of government and at other times were new Muslim centres. In all instances, however, there is no reason to assume that for an architecture of power or of pleasure early Muslims would have felt the need to modify pre-Islamic traditions. In fact, there is much in early Islamic secular architecture that can be used to illustrate secular arts elsewhere—in Byzantium, for example, or even in the West. If any new political or social entity is to succeed in preserving an identity of its own, however, it must give to its secular needs certain directions and emphases that will eventually establish a unique cultural image. This is what happened in the development of Umayyad and early Abbasid secular architecture.
Three factors contributed to the evolution of a new secular architecture. One was that the accumulation of an immense wealth of ideas, workers, and money in the hands of the Muslim princes settled in Syria and Iraq gave rise to a unique palace architecture. The second factor was the impetus given to urban life and to trade. New cities were founded from Sijilmassa on the edge of the Moroccan Sahara to Nīshāpūr in northeastern Iran, and 9th-century Arab merchants traded as far away as China. Thus, the second topic, to be treated below, will be the urban design and commercial architecture. The third factor is that, for the first time since Alexander the Great, a world extending from the Mediterranean to India became culturally unified. As a result, decorative motifs, design ideas, structural techniques, and artisans and architects—which until then had belonged to entirely different cultural traditions—were available in the same places. Early Islamic princely architecture has become the best-known and most original aspect of early Islamic secular buildings.
Palaces
There are basically three kinds of these princely structures. The first type consists of 10 large rural princely complexes found in Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan dating from about 710 to 750: Al-Ruṣāfah, Qaṣr al-Ḥayr East, Qaṣr al-Ḥayr West, Jabal Says, Khirbat Minyah, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Mshattā, Qaṣr ʿAmrah, Qaṣr al-Kharānah, and Qaṣr al-Ṭūbah. Apparently, those examples of princely architecture belong to a group of more than 60 ruined or only textually identifiable rural complexes erected by Umayyad princes. In the past a romantic theory had developed about their locations, suggesting that the remoteness of their sites expressed an atavistic hankering on the part of the Umayyad Arab rulers for the desert or at least the semiarid steppe that separates the permanently cultivated areas of Syria and Palestine from their original home in the north Arabian wilderness. This theory has been disproved, for every one of those has turned out to have been a major agricultural or trade centre, some of which were developed even before the Muslim conquest. Private palaces were built, notably at Al-Ruṣāfah, Qaṣr al-Ḥayr West, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qaṣr ʿAmrah, and Mshattā. Those must be considered as early medieval equivalents of the villae rusticae so characteristic in the ancient Roman period. Although each of those had a number of idiosyncrasies that were presumably inspired by the needs and desires of its owner, all those structures tend to share a number of features that can best be illustrated by Khirbat al-Mafjar.
That palace, the richest of them all, contained a residential unit consisting of a square building with an elaborate entrance, a porticoed courtyard, and a number of rooms or halls arranged on two floors. Few of those rooms seem to have any identifiable function, although at Khirbat al-Mafjar a private oratory, a large meeting hall, and an anteroom leading to a cool underground pool have been identified. The main throne room was on the second floor above the entrance. Its plan is not known but probably resembled the preserved throne rooms or reception halls at Qaṣr ʿAmrah and Mshattā, which consisted of a three-aisled hall ending in an apse (semicircular or polygonal domed projection) in the manner of a Roman basilica.
Next to an official residence, there usually was a small mosque, generally a miniaturized hypostyle in plan. The most original feature of those establishments was the bath. The bathing area itself is comparatively small, but every bath had its own elaborate entrance and contained a large hall that, at least in the instance of Khirbat al-Mafjar, was heavily decorated and of an unusual shape. It would appear that those halls were for pleasure—places for music, dancing, and probably occasional orgies. In some instances, as at Qaṣr ʿAmrah, the same setting may have been used for both pleasure and formal receptions.
Those palaces are important illustrations of the luxurious taste and way of life of the new Middle Eastern aristocrats, who settled in the countryside and transformed some of it into places of pleasure. This aspect of those establishments is peculiar to the Umayyad dynasty in Syria and Palestine. Outside this area and period only one comparable structure has been found—at Ukhayḍir in Iraq, which dates from the early Abbasid period. A number of princely residences of the Central Asian or North African countryside are still too little known but appear not to have had the same development. The other important lesson to draw from them is that few of their features are original. All of them derive from the architectural vocabulary of pre-Islamic times, and it is in the artistic traditions of the Mediterranean world that most of their sources are found, although the Mshattā throne room does have a number of Sasanian elements. For this reason, those palaces should be considered major examples of pre-Islamic secular architecture, for as interesting as they are, these monuments are not part of the Islamic tradition.
A second type of princely architecture—the urban palace—has been preserved only in texts or literary sources, with the exception of the palace at Kūfah in Iraq. Datable from the very end of the 7th century, this example of princely architecture seems to have functioned both as a residence and as the dār al-imārah, or centre of government. This dual function is reflected in the use of separate building units and in the absence of much architectural decoration, which suggests that it reflected an austere official taste. Although suggestions concerning the plans used are occasionally encountered in literary sources, this information is not sufficient to define those early urban official buildings of the Muslims. Nothing is known, for instance, about the great Umayyad palace in Damascus aside from the fact that it had a green dome.
Also poorly documented is a development in urban aristocratic buildings that seems to have begun with the Abbasids during the last decades of the 8th century. This involved the construction of smaller palaces, probably pavilions in the midst of gardens in or around major cities.
The third type of early Islamic princely architecture is the palace-city. Several of these huge palaces are part of the enormous mass of ruins at Sāmarrāʾ, the temporary Abbasid capital from 838 to 883. Jawsaq al-Khāqānī, for instance, is a walled architectural complex nearly one mile to a side that in reality is an entire city. It contains a formal succession of large gates and courts leading to a cross-shaped throne room, a group of smaller living units, basins and fountains, and even a racetrack. Too little is known about the architectural details of those huge walled complexes to lead to more than very uncertain hypotheses. Their existence, however, suggests that they were settings for the very elaborate ceremonies developed by the Abbasid princes, especially when receiving foreign ambassadors. An account, for instance, in Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s (died 1071) Ta’rīkh Baghdād (“History of Baghdad”) of the arrival in Baghdad of a Byzantine envoy in 914 illustrates this point. The meeting with the caliph was preceded by a sort of formal presentation intended to impress the ambassador with the Muslim ruler’s wealth and power. Treasures were laid down; thousands of soldiers and slaves in rich clothes guarded them; lions roared in the gardens; and on gilded artificial trees mechanical devices made silver birds chirp. The ceremony was a fascinating mixture of a traditional attempt to re-create paradise on earth and a rather vulgar exhibition of wealth that required a huge space, as in the Sāmarrāʾ palaces. Another important aspect of those palace-cities is that they became part of a myth. The walled enclosure in which thousands lived a life unknown to others and into which simple mortals did not penetrate without bringing their own shroud was transformed into legend. It became the mysterious City of Brass of The Thousand and One Nights, and it is from its luxurious glory that occasionally a caliph such as Hārūn al-Rashīd escaped into the “real” world. Even information on the Abbasid palace-city is inadequate; it was clearly a unique early Islamic creation, and its impact can be detected from Byzantium to Hollywood.
Urban design
Islamic secular architecture has left considerable information about cities, for systematic urbanization was one of the most characteristic features of early Muslim civilization. It is much too early to draw any sort of conclusion about the actual physical organization of towns, about their subdivisions and their houses, for only at Al-Fusṭāṭ (Cairo) and Sīrāf in Iran is the evidence archaeologically clear, and much of it has not yet been properly published. A huge task remains to be done of relating immense amounts of textual material with scraps of archaeological information scattered from Central Asia to Spain, such as the outer walls and impressive gateway preserved at Al-Raqqah in Syria. In general, it can be said that there does not seem to have been any idealized master plan for the internal arrangement of an urban site, in contradistinction to Hellenistic or Roman towns. Even mosques or palaces were often located eccentrically and not in the middle of the town. Extraordinary attention was paid to water distribution and conservation, as demonstrated by the magnificent 9th-century cisterns in Tunisia, the 9th-century Nilometer (a device to measure the Nile’s level) in Cairo, and the elaborate dams, canals, and sluices of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr in Syria. The construction of commercial buildings on a monumental scale occurred. The most spectacular example is the caravansary of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr East, with its magnificent gate.
The concern for palaces and cities that characterized early Islamic secular architecture shows itself most remarkably in the construction of Baghdad between 762 and 766–767 by the Abbasid caliph al-Manṣūr. It was a walled round city whose circular shape served to demonstrate Baghdad’s symbolic identity as the navel of the universe. A thick ring of residential quarters was separated by four axial commercial streets entered through spectacular gates. In the centre of the city there was a large open space with a palace, a mosque, and a few administrative buildings. By its size and number of inhabitants, Baghdad was unquestionably a city; however, its plan so strongly emphasized the presence of the caliph that it was also a palace.
Building materials and technology
The early Islamic period, on the whole, did not innovate much in the realm of building materials and technology but utilized what it had inherited from older traditions. Stone and brick continued to be used throughout the Mediterranean, whereas mud brick usually covered with plaster predominated in Iraq and Iran, with a few notable exceptions such as Sīrāf, where a masonry of roughly cut stones set in mortar was more common. The most important novelty was the rapid development in Iraq of a baked brick architecture in the late 8th and 9th centuries. Iraqi techniques were later used in Syria at Al-Raqqah and Qaṣr al-Ḥayr East and in Egypt. Iranian brickwork appears at Mshattā in Jordan. The mausoleum of the Samanids in Bukhara is the earliest remaining example of the new brick architecture in northeastern Iran. Wood was used consistently but usually has not been very well preserved, except in Palestine and Egypt, where climatic (extreme dryness of Egypt), religious (holiness of Jerusalem sanctuaries), or historic (Egypt was never conquered) factors contributed to the continuous upkeep of wooden objects and architectural elements.
As supports for roofs and ceilings, early Islamic architecture used walls and single supports. Walls were generally continuous, often buttressed with half towers, and rarely (with exceptions in Central Asia) were they articulated or broken by other architectural features. The most common single support was the base-column-capital combination of Mediterranean architecture. Most columns and capitals either were reused from pre-Islamic buildings or were directly imitated from older models. In the 9th century in Iraq a brick pier was used, a form that spread to Iran and Egypt. Columns and piers were covered with arches. Most often these were semicircular arches; the pointed, or two-centred, arch was known, but it does not seem that its property of reducing the need for heavy supports had been realized. The most extraordinary technical development of arches occurs in the Great Mosque at Córdoba, where, in order to increase the height of the building in an area with only short columns, the architects created two rows of superimposed horseshoe arches. Almost immediately they realized that such a succession of superimposed arches constructed of alternating stone and brick could be modified to create a variety of patterns that would alleviate the inherent monotony of a hypostyle building. A certain ambiguity remains, however, as to whether ornamental effect or structural technology was the predominate concern in the creation of those unique arched columns.
The majority of early Islamic ceilings were flat. Gabled wooden roofs, however, were erected in the Muslim world west of the Euphrates and simple barrel vaults to the east. Vaulting, either in brick or in stone, was used, especially in secular architecture. Domes were employed frequently in mosques, consistently in mausoleums, and occasionally in secular buildings. Almost all domes are on squinches (supports carried across corners to act as structural transitions to a dome). Most squinches, as in the Kairouan domes, are classical Greco-Roman niches, which transform the square room into an octagonal opening for the dome. In Córdoba’s Great Mosque a complex system of intersecting ribs is encountered, whereas at Bukhara the squinch is broken into halves by a transverse half arch. The most extraordinary use of the squinch occurs in the mausoleum at Tim, where the surface of this structural device is broken into a series of smaller three-dimensional units rearranged into a sort of pyramidal pattern. This rearrangement is the earliest extant example of muqarnas, or stalactite-like decoration that would later be an important element of Islamic architectural ornamentation. The motif is so awkwardly constructed at Tim that it must have derived from some other source, possibly the ornamental device of using curved stucco panels to cover the corners and upper parts of walls found in Iran at Nīshāpūr.
Architectural decoration
Early Islamic architecture is most original in its decoration. Mosaics and wall paintings followed the practices of antiquity and were primarily employed in Syria, Palestine, and Spain. Stone sculpture existed, but stucco sculpture, first limited to Iran, spread rapidly throughout the early Islamic world. Not only were stone or brick walls covered with large panels of stucco sculpture, but this technique was used for sculpture in the round in the Umayyad palaces of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr West and Khirbat al-Mafjar. The latter was a comparatively short-lived technique, although it produced some of the few instances of monumental sculpture anywhere in the early Middle Ages. A variety of techniques borrowed from the industrial arts were used for architectural ornamentation. The mihrab wall of Kairouan’s Great Mosque, for example, was covered with ceramics, whereas fragments of decorative woodwork have been preserved in Jerusalem and Egypt.
The themes and motifs of early Islamic decoration can be divided into three major groups. The first kind of ornamentation simply emphasizes the shape or contour of an architectural unit. The themes used were vegetal bands for vertical or horizontal elements, marble imitations for the lower parts of long walls, chevrons or other types of borders on floors and domes, and even whole trees on the spandrels or soffits (undersides) of arches as in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus or the Dome of the Rock; all these motifs tend to be quite traditional, being taken from the rich decorative vocabularies of pre-Islamic Iran or of the ancient Mediterranean world.
The second group consists of decorative motifs for which a concrete iconographic meaning can be given. In the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, as well as possibly the mosques of Córdoba and of Medina, there were probably iconographic programs. It has been shown, for example, that the huge architectural and vegetal decorative motifs at Damascus were meant to symbolize a sort of idealized paradise on earth, whereas the crowns of the Jerusalem sanctuary are thought to have been symbols of empires conquered by Islam. But it is equally certain that this use of visual forms in mosques for ideological and symbolic purposes was not easily accepted, and most later mosques are devoid of iconographically significant themes. The only exceptions fully visible are the Qurʾānic inscriptions in the mosque of Ibn Ṭūlūn at Cairo, which were used both as a reminder of the faith and as an ornamental device to emphasize the structural lines of the building. Thus, the early Islamic mosque eventually became austere in its use of symbolic ornamentation, with the exception of the mihrab, which was considered as a symbol of the unity of all believers.
Like religious architecture, secular buildings seem to have been less richly decorated at the end of the early Islamic period than at the beginning. The paintings, sculptures, and mosaics of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr West, Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qaṣr ʿAmrah, and Sāmarrāʾ primarily illustrated the life of the prince. There were official iconographic compositions, such as the monarch enthroned, or ones of pleasure and luxury, such as hunting scenes or depictions of the prince surrounded by dancers, musicians, acrobats, and unclad women. Few of these so-called princely themes were iconographic inventions of the Muslims. They usually can be traced back either to the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome or to pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia.
The third type of architectural decoration consists of large panels, most often in stucco, for which no meaning or interpretation is yet known. Those panels might be called ornamental in the sense that their only apparent purpose was to beautify the buildings in which they were installed, and their relationship to the architecture is arbitrary. The Mshattā facade’s decoration of a huge band of triangles is, for instance, quite independent of the building’s architectural parts. Next to Mshattā, the most important series of examples of the third type of ornamentation come from Sāmarrāʾ, although striking examples are also to be found at Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qaṣr al-Ḥayr East and West, Al-Fusṭāṭ, Sīrāf, and Nīshāpūr. Two decorative motifs were predominately used on those panels: a great variety of vegetal motifs and geometric forms. At Sāmarrāʾ those panels eventually became so abstract that individual parts could no longer be distinguished, and the decorative design had to be viewed in terms of the relationships between line and shape, light and shade, horizontal and vertical axes, and so forth. Copied consistently from Morocco to Central Asia, the aesthetic principles of this latter type of a complex overall design influenced the development of the principle of arabesque ornamentation.
Islamic architectural ornamentation does not lend itself easily to chronological stylistic definition. In other words, it does not seem to share consistently a cluster of formal characteristics. The reason is that in the earliest Islamic buildings the decorative motifs were borrowed from an extraordinary variety of stylistic sources: classical themes illusionistically rendered (e.g., the mosaics of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus), hieratic Byzantine themes (e.g., the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus and Qaṣr ʿAmrah), Sasanian motifs, Central Asian motifs (especially the sculpture from Umayyad palaces), and the many regional styles of ornamentation that had developed in all parts of the pre-Islamic world. It is the wealth of themes and motifs, therefore, that constitutes the Umayyad style of architectural decoration. The Abbasids, on the other hand, began to be more selective in their choice of ornamentation.
Decorative arts
Very little is known about early Islamic gold and silver objects, although their existence is mentioned in many texts as well as suggested by the wealth of the Muslim princes. Except for a large number of silver plates and ewers belonging to the Sasanian tradition, nothing has remained. Those silver objects were probably made for Umayyad and Abbasid princes, although there is much controversy among scholars regarding their authenticity and date of manufacture.
For entirely different reasons it is impossible to present any significant generalities about the art of textiles in the early Islamic period. Problems of authenticity are few. Dating from the 10th century are a large number of Buyid silks, a group of funerary textiles with plant and animal motifs as well as poetic texts. Very little order has yet been made of an enormous mass of often well-dated textile fragments, and, therefore, except for the Buyid silks, it is still impossible to identify any one of the textile types mentioned in early medieval literary sources. Furthermore, because it can be assumed that pre-Islamic textile factories were taken over by the Muslims and because it is otherwise known that textiles were easily transported from one area of the Muslim world to the other or even beyond it, it is still very difficult to define Islamic styles as opposed to Byzantine or to Coptic ones. The obvious exception lies in those fragments that are provided with inscriptions, and the main point to make is, therefore, that one of the characteristic features of early Islamic textiles is their use of writing for identifying and decorative purposes. But, while true, this point in no way makes it possible to deny an Islamic origin to fragments that are not provided with inscriptions, and one must thus await further investigations of detail before being able to define early Islamic textiles.
The most important medium of early Islamic decorative arts is pottery. Initially Muslims continued to sponsor whatever varieties of ceramics had existed before their arrival. Probably in the last quarter of the 8th century, new and more elaborate types of glazed pottery were produced. This new development did not replace the older and simpler types of pottery but added a new dimension to the art of Islamic ceramics. Because of the still incompletely published studies on the unfinished excavations carried out at Nīshāpūr, Sīrāf, Qaṣr al-Ḥayr East, and Al-Fusṭāṭ, the scholarship on those ceramics is likely to be very much modified. Therefore, this section will treat only the most general characteristics of Islamic ceramics, avoiding in particular the complex archaeological problems posed by the growth and spread of individual techniques.
The area of initial technical innovation seems to have been Iraq. Trade with Central Asia brought Chinese ceramics to Mesopotamia, and Islamic ceramicists sought to imitate them. It is probably in Iraq, therefore, that the technique of lustre glazing was first developed in the Muslim world. This gave the surface of a clay object a metallic, shiny appearance. Egypt also played a leading part in the creation of the new ceramics. Because the earliest datable lustre object (a glass goblet with the name of the governor who ruled in 773, now in the Cairo Museum of Islamic Ceramics) was Egyptian, some scholars feel that it was in Egypt and not Iraq that lustre was first used. Early pottery was also produced in northeastern Iran, where excavations at Afrāsiyāb (Samarkand) and Nīshāpūr have brought to light a new art of painted underglaze pottery. Its novelty was not so much in the technique of painting designs on the slip and covering them with a transparent glaze as in the variety of subjects employed.
While new ceramic techniques may have been sought to imitate other mediums (mostly metal) or other styles of pottery (mostly Chinese), the decorative devices rapidly became purely and unmistakably Islamic in style. A wide variety of motifs were combined: vegetal arabesques or single flowers and trees; inscriptions, usually legible and consisting of proverbs or of good wishes; animals that were usually birds drawn from the vast folkloric past of the Middle East; occasionally human figures drawn in a strikingly abstract fashion; geometric designs; all-over abstract patterns; single motifs on empty fields; and simple splashes of colour, with or without underglaze sgraffito designs (i.e., designs incised or sketched on the body or the slip of the object). All these motifs were used on both the high-quality ceramics of Nīshāpūr and Samarkand as well as on Islamic folk pottery.
Although ceramics has appeared to be the most characteristic medium of expression in the decorative arts during the early Islamic period, it has only been because of the greater number of preserved objects. Glass was as important, but examples have been less well preserved. A tradition of ivory carving developed in Spain, and the objects dating from the last third of the 10th century onward attest to the high quality of this uniquely Iberian art. Many of those carved ivories certainly were made for princes; therefore, it is not surprising that their decorative themes were drawn from the whole vocabulary of princely art known through Umayyad painting and sculpture of the early 8th century. Those ivory carvings are also important in that they exemplify the fact that an art of sculpture in the round never totally disappeared in the Muslim world—at least in small objects.
Assessment
There are three general points that seem to characterize the art of the early Islamic period. It can first be said that it was an art that sought self-consciously, like the culture sponsoring it, to create artistic forms that would be identifiable as being different from those produced in preceding or contemporary non-Islamic artistic traditions. At times, as in the use of the Greco-Roman technique of mosaics or in the adoption of Persian and Roman architectural building technology, early Islamic art simply took over whatever traditions were available. At other times, as in the development of the mosque as a building type, it recomposed into new shapes the forms that had existed before. On the other hand, in ceramics or the use of calligraphic ornamentation, the early Islamic artist invented new techniques and a new decorative vocabulary. Whatever the nature of the phenomenon, it was almost always an attempt to identify itself visually as unique and different. Because there was initially no concept about what should constitute an Islamic tradition in the visual arts, the early art of the Muslims often looks like only a continuation of earlier artistic styles, forms, subjects, and techniques. Many mosaics, silver plates, or textiles, therefore, were not considered to be Islamic until recently. In order to be understood, then, as examples of the art of a new culture, those early buildings and objects have to be seen in the complete context in which they were created. When so seen, they appear as conscious choices by the new Islamic culture from its immense artistic inheritance.
A second point of definition concerns the question of whether there is an early Islamic style or perhaps even several styles in some sort of succession. The fascinating fact is that there is a clear succession only in those artistic features that are Islamic inventions—nonfigurative ornament and ceramics. For it is only in development of those features that one can assume to find the conscious search for form that can create a period style. Elsewhere, especially in palace art, the Muslim world sought to relate itself to an earlier and more universal tradition of princely art; its monuments, therefore, are less Islamic than typological. In the new art of the Muslim bourgeoisie, however, uniquely Islamic artistic phenomena began to evolve.
Finally, the geographical peculiarities of early Islamic art must be reiterated. Its centres were Syria, Iraq, Egypt, northwestern Iran, and Spain. Of these, Iraq was probably the most originally creative, and it is from Iraq that a peculiarly Islamic visual koine (a commonly accepted and understood system of forms) was derived and spread throughout the Islamic world. This development, of course, is logical, because the capital of the early empire and some of the first purely Muslim cities were in Iraq. In western Iran, in Afghanistan, in northern Mesopotamia, and in Morocco, the more atypical and local artistic traditions were more or less affected by the centralized imperial system of Iraq. This tension between a general pan-Islamic vocabulary and a variable number of local vocabularies was to remain a constant throughout the history of Islamic art and is certainly one of the reasons for the difficulty, if not impossibility, one faces in trying to define an Islamic style.
