Mohammedan Architecture

cAbbisid Style.—The new dynasty of the `Abbasid caliphs, which founded Baghdad (762) and also Samarra (836), drew its chief support from the Arabs of Mesopotamia and the Per sians of Khorasan, and later from Persianized Turkish merce naries. In those countries, however, since the days of the Babylonian and Persian civilizations, building had been done mainly with bricks that were merely air-dried ; these were often covered with coloured glazed bricks of the same nature (Assur, Babylon, Susa). Moreover, on account of the shortage of build ing-timber and large ashlar, the vaulted style throve exceedingly, taking the form of the pointed arch, the ogee arch, and the dome on a circular tambour, led up to at the angles of the walls by small conical vaults (trompe-vaults). As, however, the dis position of the available spaces was strictly limited by the neces sity of equilibrating the thrust of the vault, the shape of the building tended to be very irregular, and this had to be corrected by sham facades. In the mosques of the 'Abbasid period ; e.g., the great Mosque and the Abi.i Dilif at Samarra, the Ibn Tulun mosque at Cairo, the mosque of Raqqa, etc., the plan previously customary was followed, but the pillars were replaced by thick columns with small false pillars at the angles, joined together by pointed arches, but the first named mosque did not yet possess arches. The panels of wall between them, framed by moulded stucco friezes, were discharged by similar, but smaller, arched windows, as were the intervals between the windows in the crenel lated outer walls. Owing to the small supporting power of the bricks, the minarets were massive, and were ascended by a spiral staircase.

Perso-Turkish Style.

On the downfall of the 'Abbasid caliphate and its supersession, first by Turkish "mayors of the palace," then by independent Turkish dynasties in Egypt and Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and Persia, India and Turkestan, the older architectural styles were entirely supplanted by the Persian vaulted style, except in north Africa. Rapidly increasing in number through pious foundations, the mosques had no longer to shelter such large congregations, and a new, purely Persian type, —nearly always established in connection with a theological col lege (Madrasa)—gained chief favour. In this style the court yard, used for ablutions but also for prayer, is surrounded not by pillared halls, but by two-storied arcades, behind which lie the monastic cells of the teachers and students; from the middle of each side, however, runs an immense hall, open to the front and roofed with a vault of ogee arches. Each of these halls serves as a lecture-room for one of the four faculties in theology and law, and one of them contains the mihrab and the minbar. These iwans, which are often twice as high as the adjacent parts of the building, are further emphasized by rectangular facades, splendidly ornamented and flanked by small minarets. A similar

but slightly shorter iwan serves as gateway, and indeed the main, iwan itself is generally also the entrance to the space behind it. This latter is crowned with a dome, narrowed in at the bottom, and contains the founder's tomb or the mihrdb. With their slender minarets, their magnificent iweins and gateways, and their lofty domes (often gilded), these mosques are among the most astonishing buildings of the East, the more so because their walls are almost always overlaid with a mosaic of dull or glazed bricks and faience plaques in glowing colours, arranged in lines of monu mental and cursive script, and with flower-arabesques recalling tapestry and anglepillars going up into rope-like tori, while golden "stalactites," i.e., rows of consoles projecting corbelwise one be yond the next, stand out from niches and under cornices and bal conies. Unfortunately these fairy-tales from the Arabian Nights are now almost all in a sad state of dilapidation. The most cele brated are the Blue Mosque at Tabriz, the Masjid-i-Shah at Mashad, the gigantic madrasas of Tamerlane at Samarcand, all of the 15th century; others, incorporated in older pillar-mosques or adapted to their plan and purpose, are the Great Mosque of Veramin (1322), that of Isfahan (1 th-14th centuries), the sepulchral mosque of the Imam Riza at Mashad (1418), and the Masjid-i-Shah at Isfahan (c. 1600).

The dome of the iwan mosque was originally developed in an other architectural type, the mausoleum. Reaching back to old Persian traditions, a favourite form of princely tomb in Persia from the loth to the 14th century was the sepulchral tower with a circular or polygonal ground plan, the classical examples of which resemble petrified nomad huts. A conical roof rested on a stalactite cornice, beneath which a band of inscriptions gave the name and titles of the deceased, and below a second row of stalactites or an overhanging penthouse the wall of the tower descended straight, or in vertical ripples like folds of stuff, or in architectonic gate like arrangements like tent-openings. The finest mausoleum of this kind is that of Mumine Khatun at Nakhichevan (Armenia), erected in 1186. In various sepulchral buildings, such as that of Harun-al-Rashid's wife Zobeide at Baghdad, we may remark the transition to the second type. Here the space set apart for the sarcophagus is surrounded by galleries with ogee arches on a quadrangular or octangular ground-plan, the bulbous and of ten pointed domes being raised on a tambour above the rest of the building, and flanked by minarets. Examples may be seen in the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar at Mery (1157), that of the Mongol Uljaita Khodabanda at Sultaniya (1316), those of Tamerlane and his family at Samarcand (15th century), etc.