A new art for a new empire
Islam began in Arabia with the Prophet Muhammad. In 622 he moved from Mecca to Medina, the event called the Hijra, from which the Muslim calendar is counted. Within a century the caliphs who succeeded him ruled from Spain to Central Asia. They inherited lands full of Roman, Byzantine and Persian buildings, and they used their craftsmen and techniques to create something new.
The Umayyad dynasty, which ruled from Damascus between 661 and 750, built the first great monuments: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, finished around 691-692, and the Great Mosque of Damascus, built between 706 and 715. Both used gold mosaics in a tradition shared with Byzantine art. In 750 the Abbasids took power and moved the capital east, to Baghdad, founded in 762, while a branch of the Umayyads survived in Spain.
The mosque
The first mosque was the courtyard of the Prophet’s house in Medina, with a shaded area on the side facing Mecca. Its essentials stayed: an open courtyard and a covered prayer hall, often a forest of columns, with a wall facing Mecca called the qibla wall. In the centre of that wall a niche, the mihrab, marks the direction of prayer; beside it stands the minbar, the stepped pulpit; outside rises the minaret, from which the call to prayer is given.
On this model each region built in its own way. At Córdoba in Spain, the mosque begun in 785 by Abd al-Rahman I has rows of horseshoe arches in red brick and white stone. At Samarra in Iraq, the Abbasid Great Mosque of 848-852 had a minaret climbing in a spiral ramp.
The beauty of writing
For Muslims the Qur’an is the word of God revealed in Arabic, so writing it beautifully became an act of devotion and the highest of the arts. The early angular script called Kufic appears in mosaic bands on buildings and in manuscripts. One of the most famous is the Blue Qur’an, made in the ninth or tenth century, with letters of gold on parchment dyed deep blue.
Geometry and plants
Alongside writing, Islamic artists developed patterns built from geometry, stars, polygons and interlacing lines, and from stylised plants whose stems and leaves can continue for ever, later called arabesque. These patterns could cover a wall, a book cover or a bowl, and they suggest an order that has no beginning and no end.
What about images?
The Qur’an warns against idols, and later traditions of the Prophet’s sayings, the hadith, discouraged making images of living beings. In mosques and on the Qur’an, figures of people and animals were left out, and God was never shown. Outside religious spaces the picture was different. In the desert palace of Qusayr Amra, in today’s Jordan, an Umayyad prince of the early eighth century had his bath hall painted with hunters, musicians, dancers and even a zodiac.
Objects for daily life were also decorated. Potters in Abbasid Iraq in the ninth century invented lustreware, a glaze with a metallic shine that imitated gold.
Islamic and Christian art kept borrowing from each other. In twelfth-century Sicily, Muslim painters decorated the wooden ceiling of a Norman king’s chapel, the Cappella Palatina in Palermo.
Where to see it
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Great Mosque of Córdoba and the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia are among the best-preserved early monuments. Collections of early Islamic art can be seen at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Sources
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline, “The Umayyad Period (661-750)” and “The Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258)”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Quseir Amra”.
- R. Ettinghausen, O. Grabar and M. Jenkins-Madina, Islamic Art and Architecture 650-1250 (New Haven, 2001).
- J. Bloom and S. Blair, Islamic Arts (London, 1997).
