Architecture with Islamic Heritage

Life in cities like 9th and 10th century Cordoba in Spain and Baghdad in Iraq was a pleasurable experience. This was high civilization with free education and health care plus public amenities like baths, bookshops and libraries lining the paved streets, lit at night. Rubbish was collected on a regular basis by donkey cart and some sewage systems were underground.

Neighbourhoods were peaceful, with houses off main thoroughfares, connected by narrow, winding and shade giving streets, all within earshot of the local mosque. All business and trade was kept to the main streets and public squares. Gardens, both public and private, were an imitation of Paradise with attention and care to details.

Huge water raising machines could be seen pumping water from rivers into the fields and to the cities. The fountains of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, still use the six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old water systems devised by Muslim engineers.
Advances in architecture, particularly in arch and vault buildings, saw huge mosques and crevice spanning bridges. Domes and minarets dominated the skyline and were so impressive that returning crusaders took these ideas, and sometimes the Muslim architects themselves, with them to build on European soil.

Town Planning

A Beautiful Mosque

Just as traditional towns now have certain features like market squares, houses of worship, and parks, Muslim towns were also designed according to the local population’s needs, based on four main criteria: weather and landscape, religious and cultural beliefs, Sharia law, and social and ethnic grouping.

The city had to stick to the rules of Sharia in terms of physical and social relations between public and private realms, and between neighbours and social groups. So the law, for example, set the height of the wall above the height of a camel rider, so a passenger couldn’t see into a property.
Urban areas grew in zones. The main mosque was at the centre, with a souk or market next, then a citadel near an outer defensive wall surrounding residential quarters, all joined by an intricate street network to the outer wall. Then there was life outside the wall.

The souk was split into areas for spices, gold, fish, perfume and other goods, with items such as candles and incense being sold close to the mosque. There would also be booksellers and binders nearby too. In the souk and near the mosque was a central area for social gatherings, administration, trade, arts and crafts, hammam baths and hotels.

The citadel, much like a Western castle, was the palace of the governor, surrounded by its own walls. It was a district of its own, with its own mosque, guards, offices and residence. It was usually in a high part of the town near the outer wall.

Neighbourhoods clustered around mosques and couldn’t be further than the muezzin’s call to prayer. Even though the residential quarters seemed quiet, they were hives of activity and had a quality of life based on closeness from personal ties, common interests and shared moral unity. Being densely packed, each had its own mosque, school, bakery and shops. They even had their own gates, which were usually closed at night after Isha’a and opened every morning at Fajr.

All this was surrounded by a well defined wall with a number of gates, and outside the wall were cemeteries. A weekly market was also just outside the main gate with most animal souks, as were more private gardens and fields.

The most elaborate city of its day, the New York of the 9th century, was Cordoba. The ‘… physical sides [of Cordoba] reveal an ingenious and inventive Muslim culture. They were clearly driven to improve on the past, to modernize the city and make it a better place to live in, not just for the rulers but for everyone…. There were dozens of libraries, free schools, and houses had running water, and what’s more, the streets were paved and they were lit, the kind of amenities London and Paris wouldn’t have for seven hundred years’ said reporter Rageh Omar presenting the BBC’s An Islamic History of Europe.

The streetlights were oil burners and lanterns, lit at sunset, and each city district employed people to maintain them. Litter was also collected on the back of donkeys, who took it outside the city walls to special dumps. The streets were drained by a system of great sewers and cleaned daily, and the sewage was in a network of canals which mostly ran immediately below the ground. A few were open and located in the middle of the street for quick cleaning and draining.

During this time Paris was known as ‘The Muddy’ because pedestrians were blocked by heaps of steaming offal and garbage, with pigs scavenging through courtyards and streets!

Architecture

Symbol of Islamic Architecture

For Muslims, architecture had to get across a number of ideas, like Allah’s infinite power, which was shown in repeated geometric patterns and arabesque designs. Human and animal forms were rare in decorations because Allah’s work was matchless. So instead, highly stylized foliage and flower motifs were used. Calligraphy then added a final touch of beauty to the building by quoting from the Quran, while large domes, towers and courtyards gave a feeling of space and majestic power.

The decoration of these buildings really concentrated on visual aesthetics, because although Islam opposes unnecessary spending, it doesn’t oppose having a comfortable life or enjoying it, as long as people live with the boundary of Allah’s law and guidance. This all means Muslims don’t have to live miserably. The Muslim wisdom ‘Strive for your earthly life as you live forever and strive for your hereafter as you will die tomorrow’ really sums up the Muslim attitude to architecture too; if you’re going to make it, make it modestly and beautifully.

The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne possesses the highest, earthquake-defying minarets in the whole of Turkey. It is the work of master architect Sinan, who was the architect for the Ottoman Empire. He designed and built a staggering 477 buildings during his long career in the service of three sultans in Turkey during the 15th century, acknowledging the importance of harmony between architecture and landscape, a concept which did not surface in Europe until the 16th century. His Turkish designs revolutionized the dome, allowing for greater height and size – an outstanding advance in civil engineering which later became his trademark.

Muslim architecture often has environmentally friendly features. To reduce smoke pollution from the thousands of candles and oil lamps, Sinan designed the interior space of the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul (1550-1557) so that the soot was channelled by air circulation into a filter room before being discharged into the city. The collected soot was conveyed into a water fountain, where it was mixed and stirred to produce high quality ink that was used in calligraphy. This ink also repelled bugs and bookworms, which prolonged the life of the manuscripts.

A famous building which many do not realize is Islamic is the Taj Mahal, in India, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal who died while giving birth to their fourteenth child. This is called the ‘teardrop on eternity’ and was finished in 1648, after using precious and semi-precious stones as inlay and huge amounts of white marble that nearly bankrupted the empire. The Taj Mahal is completely symmetrical – except for the tomb of the emperor which is off-centre in the crypt room below the main floor.

Design that complies Islam

More really amazing Islamic architecture includes the Cathedral Mosque in Cordoba, Spain and the Alhambra Palace in Granada. All of these really fascinate the people today, and the Taj Mahal just pips the Alhambra at the post for the most visitors with 3 million a year, while the Alhambra draws 2.2 million or 7,700 people a day.

Bookshops
‘Buy books, and write down knowledge, for weather is transitory, but knowledge is lasting.’ – Arabic Proverb.
The idea of a big bookshop having a coffee shop and regular speakers is not new. The celebrated bookshop of Ibn al-Nadim, the 10th century bibliophile and bookseller, was said to be on an upper story of a large building where buyers came to examine manuscripts, enjoy refreshments and exchange ideas. In the Muslim world, a thousand years ago, as well as there being massive public and private libraries, there were also bookshops. An average bookshop contained several hundred titles, but larger bookshops had many more on offer. Al-Fihrist, the catalogue of books that Ibn al-Nadim sold, listed more than sixty thousand titles on an unlimited range of subjects.

With paper, waraq in Arabic, came the profession of Warraq. The title Warraq has been used for paper dealers, writers, translators, copiers, book sellers, librarians and illuminators. The profession of the Waraqeen is generally believed to have started shortly after the introduction of the art of papermaking in the Muslim world. Baghdad was probably the first major city where the warraqi bookshops first appeared, and as the manufacture of paper spread, the number of these bookshops increased dramatically throughout the Muslim world.

Kutubiyyin is a Moroccan name for bookbinders or book merchants, who set up their bookshops, libraries and copyists and scribes in a district of 12th century Marrakech, Morocco. This district was a street with a hundred bookshops and libraries, fifty on each side. Such activity reached its zenith during the reign of Yaqub al-Mansur, who constantly encouraged the spread of book printing and promoted general reading activity. There’s a story that tells how one day a celebrated literate man named Ibn al-Saqr who, during the eight months siege of Marrakech, left his house to buy some food for his hungry family, but ended up spending all his money on buying a book instead.

Public Baths
‘Indeed, Allah loves those who turn to Him constantly, and He loves those who keep themselves pure and clean.’ Quran (2:222)
The bath house, or hammam, was a social place and it ranked high on the list of life’s essentials. The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) said ‘cleanliness is half the faith’. Hammams then were elaborate affairs with elegant designs, decor and ornamentation. Under the Mamluk and Ottoman rule, they were especially sumptuous buildings in their rich design and luxurious decorations, furnished with beautiful fountains and decorative pools. It’s believed that the hammam is the origin of most of the health and fitness clubs and retreat centres spread over the modern world.

Baghdad bathhouses were ‘… the most sumptuous of baths… that… appear to the spectator to be black marble…. Inside each cubicle is a marble basin fitted with two pipes, one flowing with hot water and the other with cold.’ – Ibn Battuta, 14th century traveller.

Beautiful Gardens
‘Gardens under which rivers flow to dwell therein and beautiful mansions in gardens of everlasting bliss.’ Quran (9:72)
For Muslims, gardens have always been a constant source of wonder and enchantment, because plants, trees, animals, insects and all of nature are a blessed gift of Allah and a sign of His Greatness. Islam permits us to use, enjoy and change nature, but only in ethical ways, so Islamic gardens were designed to be sympathetic to nature, and gardens to this day enjoy an elevated status in a Muslim’s mind.

Gardens such as Eden were repeatedly described in the Quran as places of great beauty and serenity, and as ideal places for contemplation and reflection. These heavenly paradises were recreated and spread across the Muslim world, from Spain to India, mainly from the 8th century onwards. About one hundred years later, the Abbasids innovated designs of their own. From then on, gardens with geometric flowerbeds, shallow canals and fountains were built everywhere in Islamic Persia, Spain, Sicily and India to provide peaceful seclusion from the outside world. Just a look at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain or the Taj Mahal in Agra, India proves this.

Gardens were not only for meditation; many had a practical function, and Arab rulers collected plants. These kitchen gardens not only supplied food, they also gave rise to a type of Arabic poetry known as the rawdiya, the garden poem, which conjured up the image of the Garden of Paradise.

Fabulous Fountains
‘Surely the God-fearing shall be among gardens and fountains.’ Quran (51:15)
Fountains soothe the two senses of sight and sound at once. They are an integral part of many gardens today, just as they were a thousand years ago in the Islamic world. Then they were a display of ultimate wealth, as water was scarce, and a water display was regarded as a thing of wonder. Fountains became cornerstones of Islamic art and architecture and one of the best examples is the fountain in the Lion Gardens of the Alhambra, Spain, which is nearly a thousand years old. It was commissioned by Sultan Mohammed V for the Court of Lions, and built between 1354 and 1359.

The fountain has a round basin, encircled by twelve lions carved from marble that originally would have been richly painted, mostly in gold. The lions represent the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. Water was carried to them by aqueducts from the surrounding mountains, and it flowed from their mouths via an elaborately timed system of channels in the floor.

Each hour one lion would produce water from its mouth, giving the impression of twelve months elapsing as though they were twelve hours. The sense of timelessness created was highly significant, because the magnificent palace was considered as a paradise on earth, and time in paradise is non-existent as the dwellers live in eternal happiness.

At the edge of this great fountain is a poem written by Ibn Zamrak. This praises the beauty of the fountains and the power of the lions, but it also describes their ingenuous hydraulic systems and how they actually worked, which baffled all those who saw them. To this day the system has remained exactly the same. It is just gravity and water pressure.
‘… are there not in this garden wonders that Allah has made incomparable in their beauty, and a sculpture of pearls with transparent light, the borders of which are trimmed with seed pearl? Melted silver flows through the pearls, to which it resembles in its pure dawn beauty. Apparently, water and marble seem to be one, without letting us know which of them is flowing.’ – Part of the Lion Fountain poem by Ibn Zamrak.

Reference:
1001 Inventions; Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization
Rihla (The Journey): Travels of Ibn Battuta
BBC 4: An Islamic History of Europe