And
Again, It May Be Asserted That, However Incongruous These Disorderly
Forms May Appear To The Conventional Eye, We Find It Easy To Surmount
Our First Antipathy.
Perhaps we end in admiring them the more, as we
love those faces in which irregularity of feature is compensated for by
diversity and piquancy of expression.
There is nothing, I believe, new in the Arab Mosque; it is an
unconscious revival of the forms used from the earliest ages to denote
by symbolism the worship of the generative and the creative gods. The
reader will excuse me if I only glance at a subject of which the
investigation would require a volume, and which, discussed at greater
length, would be out of place in such a narrative as this.
The first Mosque in Al-Islam was erected by Mohammed at Kuba, near
Al-Madinah: shortly afterwards, when he entered Meccah as a conqueror,
he destroyed the three hundred and sixty idols of the Arab Pantheon,
and thus purified that venerable building from its abominations. He had
probably observed in Syrian Bostra the two forms appropriated by the
Christians to their places of worship, the cross and the
parallelogramic Basilica; he therefore preferred for the prayers of the
"Saving Faith" a square,-some authors say, with, others
[p.92]without, a cloister. At length in the reign of Al-Walid (A.H. 90)
the cupola, the niche, and the minaret made their appearance; and what
is called the Saracenic style became for ever the order of the Moslem
world.
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