Mohammedan Art

MOHAMMEDAN ART. At the death of the prophet Mo hammed in 632, his conquering Bedouin hosts already stood on the frontiers of the highly civilized empires of Byzantium and Persia. During the previous four centuries these empires had passed through great vicissitudes, and of the tradition of ancient Hellas but feeble remnants survived. In Byzantium Christianity, an importation from the East, prevailed; court, civil service and army, however, were intermixed with descendants of the bar barian tribes which had come during the migration of the Nations, and in the Semitic provinces the Monophysite spirit rose up against the "idolatry" of the Greeks. In Persia, on the other hand, there ruled the Sassanids, whose power rested upon their hosts of cavalry from the interior of Persia, and who culti vated, side by side with the Zoroastrian religion of their fathers, ancient oriental traditions only faintly touched by Hellenistic influences. When, on the death of the fourth elected caliph `Osman in 661, the early communism of Islam came to an end, the whole of Tripoli, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Georgia and Persia were already under the sway of Islam, which was soon extended to the rest of North Africa and Spain, Turkestan and the lower Indus valley. Until the middle of the loth century all these lands were ruled by the Arabs; but even under the first dynasty of the Umayyads (661-750) the Christian Syrians and Copts began to gain a considerable in fluence in intellectual life, followed by the Persians under the `Abbasid dynasty (750-945), and the Ostrogoths under the Umay yad caliphs of Spain (independent after 755) ; for the Arabs themselves owned few traditions of culture equal to the needs of a universal empire. With the decay of their empire, the 'Ab basid caliphs were forced to maintain their power with the help of mercenaries from the nomadic Turkish tribes of the north, but from the middle of the 9th century onwards these Turkish mer cenaries began to create "lieutenancies" enjoying an even greater degree of independence, with the result that after 945 the caliphs found themselves reduced to a position resembling that of the popes. In the middle of the 1 ith century western Asia was over run by new hordes of Turkish nomads, who founded the Seljuk empire, which, however, soon disintegrated into a number of small states. In the first quarter of the 13th century the Mongols and their kindred peoples of horsemen from Central Asia pushed as far as Syria, Asia Minor and Hungary. Other Turkish tribes followed, notably the hosts of the great conqueror Tim& (Tamer lane, c. 1400) in Turkistan. In 130o the Ottomans founded the Ottoman Empire, and in 1502 the Kizilbash, of the Persian Shia sect, founded the Persian empire under rulers of the Safawid house ; these two empires remained unaltered till a few decades ago. In 1526, in India, which had previously lain under the domi

nation of a series of Afghan and Turkish dynasties, descendants of Tamerlane founded the Mogul empire, which was ultimately destroyed by England in 1803. In Africa, on the other hand, the leadership soon fell to the nomadic Berber tribes, which formed, in addition to a number of small states, the orthodox kingdom of the Almorawids (1087-1147) and that of the Almohads (1147-123o) in the far West, and, after the loss of Spain in 1492, the kingdoms of the Marinids, Saidites and Sherifs of Sijilmasa. Egypt was ruled from 969 to 1171 by the Shiite anticaliphs of the Fatimid dynasty—Berbers likewise—and before and after that period by mercenaries (mostly of Turkish race), including the Ayyubids (1169-1250), who were Kurds, and the Mamelukes (1250-1517), who were overthrown by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I.

Origins and Nature of Mohammedan Art.

In a world en closed between desert and steppe and ruled by nomadic races, Mohammedan art inevitably followed an entirely different path from that of the West. Western classical art developed among settled tillers of the soil and in towns, and consequently it is intellectual; it loves the clear structural consistency of architec ture, and carries it on into architectural ornament ; it prefers the more or less naturalistic sculpture and relief, the portrayed figure, and reproduces them in industrial art. The art of the nomads, on the other hand, proceeds from the tent and the loom, and for that reason the tectonics of Mohammedan architecture are also limited to the primary forms, though it frequently resolves them into delightful shapes, and adorns all the wall-surfaces with purely geometrical decoration resembling rugs over the framework of a Kirghiz tent. Their decorative art is based on pure ornament, script, arabesque and intertwined bands. As in early Irish, Scan dinavian and also Romanesque art, representations of human beings and animals are combined with fillet and arabesque orna ment, and in plastic art they appear only in low relief. Only in painting do they acquire an independent life under antique Sas sanian and eastern Asiatic influences, but even so they are partly in the nature of calligraphy, against the background of an equally conventional, tapestry-like landscape. Except in the most recent period, naturalism never existed. Added to this, the Arabian world had a dislike of figural art—already perceptible in eastern Chris tianity—which absolutely prohibited figural representations in the early period of Islam and under the Berber dynasties of Africa and the Mamelukes of Egypt and Syria, though under the tOmayyads and tAbbasids and most of the Shiite and Turkish dynasties it was only excluded from public buildings.