The impact of the faith on the arts occurred rather as the fledgling culture encountered the earlier non-Islamic world and sought to justify its own acceptance or rejection of new ways and attitudes. The discussion of two examples of particular significance illustrates the point. One is the case of the mosque. The word itself derives from the Arabic masjid, “a place where one prostrates oneself (in front of God).” It was a common term in pre-Islamic Arabic and in the Qurʾān, where it is applied to sanctuaries in general without restriction. If a more concrete significance was meant, the word was used in construct with some other term, as in masjid al-ḥaram to refer to the Meccan sanctuary. There was no need in earliest times for a uniquely Muslim building, for any place could be used for private prayer as long as the correct direction (qiblah, originally Jerusalem but very soon Mecca) was observed and the proper sequence of gestures and pious statements was followed. In addition to private prayer, which had no formal setting, Islam instituted a collective prayer on Fridays, where the same ritual was accompanied by a sermon from the imam (leader of prayer, originally the Prophet, then his successors, and later legally any able-bodied Muslim) and by the more complex ceremony of the khuṭbah, a collective swearing of allegiance to the community’s leadership. This ceremony served to strengthen the common bond between all members of the ummah, the Muslim “collectivity,” and its importance in creating and maintaining the unity of early Islam has often been emphasized. There were two traditional locales for this event in the Prophet’s time. One was his private house, whose descriptions have been preserved; it was a large open space with private rooms on one side and rows of palm trunks making a colonnade on two other sides, the deeper colonnade being on the side of the qiblah. The Prophet’s house was not a sanctuary but simply the most convenient place for the early community to gather. Far less is known about the second place of gathering for the Muslim community. It was used primarily on major feast days, such as the end of the fasting period or the feast of sacrifice. It was called a muṣallā, literally “a place for prayer,” and muṣallās were usually located outside city walls. Nothing is known about the shape taken by muṣallās, but in all probability they were as simple as pre-Islamic pagan sanctuaries: large enclosures surrounded by a wall and devoid of any architectural or ornamental feature.

Altogether then there was hardly anything that could be identified as a holy building or as an architectural form. To be complete, one should add two additional features. One is an action, the call to prayer (adhān). It became, fairly rapidly, a formal moment preceding the gathering of the faithful. One man would climb on the roof and proclaim that God is great and that men must congregate to pray. There was no formal monument attached to the ceremony, though it led eventually to the ubiquitous minaret. The other early feature was an actual structure. It was the minbar, a chair with several steps on which the Prophet would climb in order to preach. The monument itself had a pre-Islamic origin, but Muhammad transformed it into a characteristically Muslim form.

With the exception of the minbar, only a series of actions were formulated in early Islamic times. There were no forms attached to them, nor were any needed. But, as the Muslim world grew in size, the contact with many other cultures brought about two developments. On the one hand, there were thousands of examples of beautiful religious buildings that impressed the conquering Arabs. But, more important, the need arose to preserve the restricted uniqueness of the community of faithful and to express its separateness from other groups. Islamic religious architecture began with this need and, in ways to be described later, created a formal setting for the activities, ceremonies, and ideas that had been formless at the outset.

The prohibition against images

A second and closely parallel development of the impact of the Islamic religion on the visual arts is the celebrated question of a Muslim iconoclasm. As has already been mentioned, the Qurʾān does not utter a word for or against the representation of living things. It is equally true that from about the middle of the 8th century a prohibition had been formally stated, and thenceforth it would be a standard feature of Islamic thought, even though the form in which it is expressed has varied from absolute to partial and even though it has never been totally followed. The justification for the prohibition tended to be that any representation of a living thing was an act of competition with God, for he alone can create something that is alive. It is striking that this theological explanation reflects the state of the arts in the Christian world at the time of the Muslim conquest—a period of iconoclastic controversy. It may thus be suggested that Islam developed an attitude toward images as it came into contact with other cultures and that its attitude was negative because the arts of the time appeared to lead easily to dreaded idolatry. While it is only by the middle of the 8th century that there is actual proof of the existence of a Muslim doctrine, it is likely that, more or less intuitively, the Muslims felt a certain reluctance toward representations from the very beginning. For all monuments of religious art are devoid of any representations; even a number of attempts at representational symbolism in the official art of coinage were soon abandoned.

This rapid crystallization of Islamic attitudes toward images has considerable significance. For practical purposes, representations are not found in religious art, although matters are quite different in secular art. Instead there occurred very soon a replacement of imagery with calligraphy and the concomitant transformation of calligraphy into a major artistic medium. Furthermore, the world of Islam tended to seek means of representing the holy other than by images of human beings, and one of the main problems of interpretation of Islamic art is that of the degree of means it achieved in this search. But there is a deeper aspect to this rejection of holy images. Although the generally Semitic or specifically Jewish sources that have been given to Islamic iconoclasms have probably been exaggerated, the reluctance imposed by the circumstances of the 7th century transformed into a major key of artistic creativity the magical fear of visual imagery that exists in all cultures but that is usually relegated to a secondary level. This uniqueness is certainly one of the main causes of the abstract tendencies that are among the great glories of the tradition. Even when a major art of painting did develop, it remained always somehow secondary to the mainstream of the culture’s development.

Both in the case of the religious building and in that of the representations, therefore, it was the contact with pre-Islamic cultures in Muslim-conquered areas that compelled Islam to transform its practical and unique needs into monuments and to seek within itself for intellectual and theological justifications for its own instincts. The great strength of early Islam was that it possessed within itself the ideological means to put together a visual expression of its own, even though it did not develop at the very beginning a need for such an expression.

One last point can be made about the origins of Islamic art. It concerns the degree of importance taken by the various artistic and cultural entities conquered by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries, for the early empire had gathered in regions that had not been politically or even ideologically related for centuries. During the first century or two of Islam, the main models and the main sources of inspiration were certainly the Christian centres around the Mediterranean. But the failure to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul) and to destroy the Byzantine Empire also made those Christian centres inimical competitors, whereas the whole world of Iran became an integral part of the empire, even though the conquering Arabs were far less familiar with the latter than with the former. A much more complex problem is posed by conversions, for it is through the success of the militant Muslim religious mission that the culture expanded so rapidly. Insofar as one can judge, it is the common folk, primarily in cities, who took over the new faith most rapidly; and there thus was added in early Islamic culture a folk element whose impact may have been larger than has hitherto been imagined.

Those preliminary considerations on the origins of Islamic art have made it possible to outline several of the themes and problems that remained constant features of the tradition: a self-conscious sense of uniqueness when compared with others; a continuous reference to its own Qurʾānic sources; a constant relationship to many different cultures; a folk element; and a variety of regional developments. None of those features remained constant, not even those aspects of the faith that affected the arts. But while they changed, the fact of their existence, their structural presence, remained a constant of Islamic art.