The Development of Islamic Architecture

Julia Walker

As with the architecture of the world’s other major faiths, Islamic architecture
developed from surrounding traditions, with strong roots in the ancient world. Like
Christianity, the new religion of Islam found widespread appeal for its message of
tolerance and its promise of salvation for all those who believed in its doctrines and
practiced its rites. After the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Islam spread rapidly
throughout the Arabian Desert and expanded to Southwest Asia, Persia, and North
Africa. Consequently, Islamic architecture and Christian architecture developed along
parallel tracks in the lands of the former Roman Empire. As it developed, therefore,
Islamic architecture shared many of the forms and structural concerns of Byzantine,
medieval, and Renaissance architecture. However, unlike Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish
architecture, the category of Islamic architecture encompasses a range of urban and
architectural types that go far beyond the religious realm. In both its sacred and secular
expressions, Islamic building treats monumental and quotidian structures alike as worthy
of artistic design. To speak of Islamic architecture, then, one must consider mosques,
shrines, and other places of worship; expressions of royal authority like palaces,
fortifications, and monuments; bridges, roads, caravansaries, markets, and other
commercial forms; schools and universities; and a wide range of local and vernacular
traditions, including domestic architecture reflective of the structure of the traditional
model of the Islamic family. Today, a consideration of the architecture of Islam must also
take into account the production of non-Muslim architects and regions in which Islam is
not the dominant religion. Thus, the built environment of the Islamic world subsumes a
remarkably diverse set of building types, styles, and practices not easily reduced to
monolithic conclusions. At the same time, it is possible to reflect on persistent themes
and recurring ideas in the history of Islamic architecture.
In fact, one of these themes is the absorption and transformation of local ideas
into a clear Islamic form. The architecture of Islamic Spain is emblematic of the way in
which Muslim artists and patrons drew from regional ideas to create new, hybrid forms.
After the Abbasid massacre of the Umayyads in Syria, the young Abd-al-Rahman I fled
to Spain in the 750s. He designated himself the western emir, occupying lands where
Islamic groups had overthrown Christian Visigoths in 711. The city of Córdoba offered
not only the protection of its inland site, but also a well-established town plan in
continuous use since the Roman Empire, with bridges, roads, and sacred precincts
already securely in place. Its populace was cosmopolitan and multicultural, made up of
Sephardic Jews, Christians, and North African Berbers united under the centralized rule
of the emir. The city’s most significant work of architecture was the Great Mosque of
Córdoba (Figure 8.2-3) (known in Spanish as the Mezquita), which displayed the same
pluralistic incorporation of traditions and ideas as the population of the city itself. The
most unique feature of the mosque was its hypostyle hall, with its arcaded aisles running
parallel to the qibla wall. The double-tiered arcade seems to have been inspired by
Roman aqueducts, several of which survived in the region. The alternating brick and
stone of the voussoirs are enhanced with red paint to intensify the drama of this feat of
engineering. The decoration of the mosque is lavish, meant to recreate something of the
riches lost to the Umayyad dynasty during its expulsion from Syria. The walls of the
maksura are clad in polychromatic marbles and mosaics, executed by mosaicists brought
especially from Constantinople to complete the task.

Figure 8.2-3

The same Byzantine artists ornamented the interior of the dome in front of the mihrab
chamber, whose crisscrossing ribs and pointed arches are sheathed in mosaics in intricate
and varied patterns. The opulent decoration of the Great Mosque served not only as a
visual reminder of the authority of the Umayyad caliphate; it also offered the viewer an
impression of the treasures that awaited the faithful in paradise. Overall, the mosque is a
testament to the way in which the Islamic world developed striking and novel forms from
existing ideas. Just as the various architectural traditions in Córdoba influenced the
design of the Great Mosque, so did this monumental building impact the architecture of
the Christian west; the pointed arch, for example, would become a significant motif in
Gothic architecture.
Though the mosque in Córdoba is relatively distinct from the city around it,
another Great Mosque, the Masjid-e-Jami in Isfahan, Iran (Figure 12.1-3), is unusual in
how it is incorporated into the urban fabric. Positioned at the intersection of several
important pedestrian paths, the structure was an important public site as well as a sacred
space. Built and remodeled over several centuries starting in the 700s, the mosque bears
four iwans with an enlarged qibla iwan flanked by two minarets—a type that was to
become the standard in Iran—and a dome in front of the mihrab. Each iwan is framed by
a pointed arch and embellished with oversized muqarnas added in the thirteenth century.
The surface of these walls was decorated with elegant tile work arranged in abstract
patterns and verses from the Quran. The vivid blues and whites of the tile were meant to
have an ethereal quality, suggesting a world of lushness and orderly beauty far beyond
the city’s walls. Though the interior of the mosque was reserved for the sovereign, these
elaborate iwans would have been visible to members of the public visiting the royal
precinct. At the end of the sixteenth century, Shah Abbas I transferred the Safavid capital
from Qazvin to the more centrally located city of Isfahan.
 Figure 12.1-3

Therefore, despite its monumentality and splendor, the mosque became only one building
in a complex of structures needed to carry out royal functions in the city. A new royal
palace was thus fronted with a sweeping maydan for public ceremonies, including
imperial rituals that were revived by the Safavids from ancient models in order to
legitimize their authority. For example, the king made a public performance of playing
chovgan (a team sport played on horseback, somewhat resembling polo) in front of
hundreds of subjects, a practice that linked his sovereignty both to past dynasties and to
divine ordination. A garden district for royal use abutted one end of the complex, with
fragrant flowers and plants serving as an analogue for paradise, which the Quran
describes as a luxurious garden. Within these gardens, flowing water and ample shade
provided a serene respite from the hot sunlight of the rest of the city. As with the tile
cladding of the iwans at the Great Mosque, the gardens reinforced the a set of binaries
that were key to Islamic life in Isfahan, drawing parallels between the hubbub of city life
and the tranquility of the paradise to come.
In contrast to the highly decorative quality of the surfaces in Isfahan, other
significant Islamic structures express monumentality by other means. For example, the
Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali (Figure 9.3-9), originally constructed in the fourteenth
century and rebuilt in 1907, achieves extraordinary sculptural effects without recourse to
this rich language of ornament.

Figure 9.3-9

The largest mud construction in the world, the mosque depends on the abundant sunlight
of the region not only for its structure, but also for its visual impact. The mosque is made
up of thousands of bricks, which are formed by skilled masons and then baked in the sun
for durability. Timber beams run through the building to increase the stability of the
stacked mud bricks, extending through the walls at roof level to act as decorative
elements. These wooden beams not only create an interesting echinated effect on the
exterior; they also produce a play of dark shadows along the smooth walls of the structure
that changes throughout the day. This sense of endless variation continues on the interior
of the building. The main hall of the mosque contains a forest of columns supporting the
roof, a West African Islamic tradition descended (as with the Great Mosque of Córdoba)
from Egyptian hypostyle halls. Skylights set into the thick ceiling admit light into the
interior, but the hall’s proliferation of interim supports means that this light maintains a
highly specific character. Rather than flooding the interior with a diffuse glow, the light
in the Great Mosque is atomized in small, intense pockets, and changes with the position
of the sun throughout the day. The effect is complex and mysterious, heightening the
sacred quality of the building. In fact, this theme of mutability permeates virtually every
aspect of the mosque’s structure. The use of mud brick requires that all building surfaces
be re-plastered annually to protect the building’s integrity, a task that is accomplished via
a week-long community festival. Consequently, the shape of the building changes
slightly from year to year. In an urban landscape mainly comprising small adobe
residential buildings, the mosque has remained a strong visual statement and a node of
civic activity for many centuries.
In recent years, Islamic architecture has come to encompass the complex concerns of the
many parts of the world in which Muslims now live. The French architect Jean Nouvel,
among others, has continually identified Islamic architecture as one of his most important
influences. In the Institute du Monde Arabe (Figure 20.2-4), which opened in Paris in
1986, 240 light-sensitive apertures automatically open and close to control the amount of
sunlight entering the building.

Figure 20.2-4

Though these lenses irresistibly suggest the workings of a camera, the real source, for
Nouvel, is in the Islamic latticed window known as the mashrabiya. The building thus
synthesizes traditional climate-oriented strategies with up-to-date technology to create a
structure that is remarkably subtle in its Islamic references. Similarly, the Burj Khalifa in
Dubai (Figure 20.2-24), completed in 2010, has attracted most interest for its
participation in the global rivalry over “supertall” buildings; at a height of nearly half a
mile, it has remained the tallest building in the world, despite heated competition from
other structures. Given these staggering statistics, it is no surprise that the skyscraper’s
virtuoso structural engineering has overshadowed the way in which its architecture is
distinctly Islamic. Designed by the American architect Adrian Smith for Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill, the structure attempts to contextualize the international form of the
skyscraper in Dubai by referencing local traditions; for example, the triple lobes clustered
around a central core are reminiscent of the hymenocallis flower that grows in the region
of the Persian Gulf. Smith's telescoping skyscraper is also meant to evoke the gently
tapering form of the spiral minaret and to provide a similar visual function, marking a
nexus of Islamic identity that is visible from miles around in the flat desert landscape.
Though Nouvel and Smith are both non-Muslim architects, these examples reveal the
nature of contemporary architectural practice, in which the global and the local attain a
curious (and delicate) synthesis.
 Figure 20.2-24

For Further Reading

Babaie, Sussan. Isfahan and its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi'ism and the Architecture of
Conviviality in Early Modern Iran. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Bloom, Jonathan, and Sheila Blair. Islamic Arts. London: Phaidon Press, 1997.

Elleh, Nnamdi. African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation. New York:

Holod, Renata and Hasan-Uddin Khan. The Contemporary Mosque: Architects, Clients,
and Designs since the 1950s. New York: Rizzoli, 1997.

Michell, George, ed. Architecture of the Islamic World: Its History and Social Meaning.
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.