The architecture of the first Islamic centuries: the courtyard mosque with its forest of columns, the first minarets and mihrabs, and a new art of ornament built from Late Antique and Sasanian sources.
Islam arose in a land with little monumental architecture. The first mosque was the Prophet’s own house at Medina, built in 622: a square yard walled in mud brick, with a shelter of palm trunks and fronds along one side. When the Arab armies conquered Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Iran in the following decades, they found themselves the heirs of two great building traditions (the Roman and Byzantine world of columns, arches, mosaics and domes, and the Sasanian world of brick vaults, iwans and stucco), and the architecture of the new faith was made from both.
Under the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus (661–750) the new empire announced itself in two extraordinary buildings. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (completed 691–92) is a Byzantine martyrium in form, an octagon with a double ambulatory round a timber dome on a drum, sheathed inside with gold mosaics of jewelled trees and inscriptions, among the earliest dated Qur’anic texts. The Great Mosque of Damascus (706–715), built inside the enclosure of a Roman temple, fixed the type of the congregational mosque: a broad prayer hall of three arcaded aisles parallel to the qibla wall, cut by a taller transept leading to the mihrab, facing a great courtyard surrounded by porticoes.
The Abbasids (750–1258) moved the centre of the empire to Iraq and built in brick on a gigantic scale. Their round city of Baghdad has vanished, but at Samarra the Great Mosque of al-Mutawakkil (848–852), enclosing some 38,000 square metres, still has its spiral minaret, and the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo (876–879) shows the style at its most refined: pointed arches on brick piers, stucco ornament of vine scrolls turned into abstract rhythm, and a court of immense calm. Across North Africa the Great Mosque of Kairouan, founded in 670 and rebuilt in its present form in the ninth century, set the pattern of the western mosque: a T-shaped arrangement of wider aisles, a dome before the mihrab, and a massive square minaret opposite it.
The essential elements of the mosque were defined in this period: the courtyard (sahn) and the prayer hall (haram), the qibla wall and its mihrab niche, the pulpit (minbar), the minaret, and the enclosed area for the ruler near the mihrab (maqsura). Equally lasting was the attitude to ornament. Figural images were avoided in religious buildings, and designers developed instead the three great families of Islamic decoration (calligraphy, the endlessly growing vegetal scroll or arabesque, and geometric pattern), which would be developed for a thousand years.