The Meccan Mosque Became A Model To The World Of Al-Islam, And The
Nations That Embraced The New Faith
Copied the consecrated building, as
religiously as Christendom produced imitations of the Holy
Sepulchre.[FN#7] The Mosque of Omar
At Jerusalem, of Amru at Babylon on
the Nile, and of Taylun at Cairo were erected, with some trifling
improvements, such as arched cloisters and inscribed cornices, upon the
plan of the Ka'abah. From Egypt and Palestine the ichnography spread
far and wide. It was modified, as might be expected, by national taste;
what in Arabia was simple and elegant became highly ornate in
Spain,[FN#8] florid in Turkey, sturdy in Syria, and effeminate in
India. Still divergence of detail had not, even after the lapse of
twelve centuries, materially altered the fundamental form.
[p.96]Perhaps no Eastern city affords more numerous or more accessible
specimens of Mosque architecture than Cairo. Between 300 and 400 places
of worship;[FN#9] some stately piles, others ruinous hovels, many new,
more decaying and earthquake-shaken, with minarets that rival in
obliquity the Pisan monster, are open to the traveller's inspection.
And Europeans by following the advice of their hotel-keeper have
penetrated, and can penetrate, into any one they please.[FN#10] If
architecture be really what I believe it to be, the highest expression
of a people's artistic feeling,-highest because it includes all
others,-to compare the several styles of the different epochs, to
observe how each monarch building his own Mosque, and calling it by his
own name, identified the manner of the monument with himself, and to
trace the gradual decadence of art through one thousand two hundred
years, down to the present day, must be a work of no ordinary interest
to Orientalists. The limits of my plan, however, compel me to place
only the heads of the argument before the reader. May I be allowed to
express a hope that it will induce some learned traveller to
investigate a subject in every way worthy his attention?
The desecrated Jami' Taylun (ninth century) is simple and massive, yet
elegant, and in some of its details peculiar.[FN#11] One of the four
colonnades[FN#12] still remains unoccupied
[p.97]by paupers to show the original magnificence of the building; the
other porches are walled up, and inhabited. In the centre of a
quadrangle about 100 paces square is a domed building springing from a
square which occupies the proper place of the Ka'abah. This
"Jami'[FN#13]" Cathedral is interesting as a point of comparison. If it
be an exact copy of the Meccan temple as it stood in A.D. 879, it shows
that the latter has greatly altered in this our modern day.
Next in date to the Taylun Mosque is that of the Sultan al-Hakim, third
Caliph of the Fatimites, and founder of the Druze mysteries. The
minarets are remarkable in shape, as well as size: they are unprovided
with the usual outer gallery, they are based upon a cube of masonry,
and they are pierced above with apertures apparently meaningless.
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