Art, Architecture and the rise of Islam

"Islamic art did not slowly evolve from the meeting of a new faith and of a new state with whatever older traditions prevailed in the areas in which the state ruled; it came forth as suddenly as the faith and the state, for, whatever influences may have been at work in the building and decoration of early Islamic monuments, their characteristic is that they were built for Muslims, to serve purposes which did not exist in quite the same way before Islam." (1)

Selection and rearrangement of elements in new syntheses were at work in the historical development of the forms of Islamic art, culture and ideology. What specific elements constituted the building blocks of early Islam? In art and architecture, the paucity of archaeological and historical evidence, according to Ettinghausen and Grabar, produces an impression of the "poverty" of the past.

In the language and religious institutions of the pre-Islamic central Arabs we find notions, words and practices appropriated and developed by Islam from their previous rudimentary manifestations or conditions. Notions such as the haram or holy space, words such as masjdi, architectural elements such as the mihrab where indeed inherited from the ancestral past. Their forms, meanings and roles were extended and re-elaborated in the new religious system.

In what regards the architectural heritage and its limitations, as observed above, it is necessary, according to Ettinghausen and Grabar, to distinguish North, South and Central Arabia. Petra and Palmyra in the North, Yemen in the South and Oman in the South-East coast, as more developed trading and agricultural areas, are examples of remarkable buildings and urban centers of which we know the ruins or the traditions.

These examples together with the traditions of the Lakhmids in Iraq fired the imagination of the central Arabs in what regards the creation of secular buildings and monuments. We can observe, following Ettinghausen and Grabar, that an oneiric, imaginary architecture of ancient lore may be at the sources of some of the later accomplishments.

From Muhammad´s time the most important building to impact future developments was the house of the Prophet considered as the first mosque with its constitutive elements and spatial structures related to the needs of rituals and the social, cultural and symbolic uses it was made to serve.

 Marcelo Guimarães Lima

(1) Etthinghausen, R. and Grabar, O. The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650-1250, New Haven and London, 1987, p.