Undergraduate Course: The Classical Heritage in Islam: Early Islamic Art in its Late Antique Context (HIAR10116)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Available to all students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Credits | 20 |
| Home subject area | History of Art |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
None |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | After the conquest of a vast territory spreading from North Africa to India, early Muslims started to organize their empire. During the early centuries (7th-11th c.) along with the administrative system, the new rulers also transformed the landscape and the culture of the conquered societies. The transformation of the extant cities and the foundation of new urban centres, the establishment of an Islamic network of pilgrimage sites, the erection of mosques and theological schools, of palaces and new civil engineering works, the creation of a new Islamic aesthetic for the decorative programs of the public buildings, the spread of Arabic language and the rise of the art of the book, the appearance of a new coinage and of monumental public inscriptions: all these processes dramatically changed the world conquered by Islam in the 7th century. The vocabulary for the creation of this &«new world&ª, however, was wisely selected and creatively adapted from the civilizations early Muslims encountered during their conquests. Furthermore, the vastness of early Islamic rule allowed blending together different material, stylistic and technical traditions ranging from West Africa to Arabian Peninsula, to Mesopotamia, to India. |
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| Displayed in Visiting Students Prospectus? | Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Delivery period: 2011/12 Semester 1, Available to all students (SV1)
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WebCT enabled: Yes |
Quota: 20 |
| Location |
Activity |
Description |
Weeks |
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
| Central | Seminar | | 1-11 | | | | 14:00 - 15:50 | |
| First Class |
Week 1, Thursday, 14:00 - 15:50, Zone: Central. Seminar Room 2, Minto House |
| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Hours:Minutes |
|
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| Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May) | The Classical Heritage in Islam: Early Islamic Art in its Late Antique Context (HIAR10116) | 2:00 | | |
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| Delivery period: 2011/12 Semester 1, Part-year visiting students only (VV1)
|
WebCT enabled: Yes |
Quota: None |
| Location |
Activity |
Description |
Weeks |
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
| Central | Seminar | | 1-11 | | | | 14:00 - 15:50 | |
| First Class |
Week 1, Thursday, 14:00 - 15:50, Zone: Central. Seminar Room 2, Minto House |
| No Exam Information |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
| Students will investigate the multiple links connecting early Islamic art and architecture with pre-Islamic culture. The course will provide significant examples to understand the relationship of Islamic culture with other civilizations. The interpretative keys used during the course will help students to critically analyze the continuities and discontinuities in one society when a new artistic system comes to light. |
Assessment Information
| 1 x 2 hour examination (50%) and 1 extended essay [2000 words] (50%) |
Special Arrangements
| None |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Not entered |
| Syllabus |
1) Early Islam in Arabia
The establishment of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula took place in the 7th century. Islam did not affirm itself in a desert land, but in a geographical area integrated into international networks since centuries. The waves of emigrations of Arabs toward North and the efforts of Syrian missionaries to Christianize the still pagan population of the Peninsula extensively connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea before the appearance of Islam. At the same time the Yemenite area had contacts with Christian Abissinia and was included in maritime trade networks. At the religious level, the pre-Islamic Arab society of the Peninsula was characterized by the presence of Jewish, Pagan, and Christian communities. All came to be affected by the new message brought by Muhammad, the prophet of Islam.
&· Robert Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 139-197.
&· Geoffrey King, &«Some Christian Wall-Mosaics in Pre-Islamic Arabia,&ª Proceeedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 10 (1980): 37-43.
2) The Mosque: a Late Antique Building?
Once the prophet Muhammad moved from Mecca to Medina in the year 622, he organized the life of his small community. According to the Arabic tradition, his own house was also used as a place of prayer and gathering by the Muslim community. In the year 715 the Great Mosque of Damascus was completed and ready to be used as the main place of prayer of the capital of a world empire. During the first century of Islam the mosque became the gathering place for all Muslim communities throughout the caliphate and the symbol of Islam for the conquered societies. The development of the mosque as an architectural form, however, was not linear and univocal. Early Muslims exported a model for their places of prayer outside Arabia, but at the same time also adapted it to the architectural forms they encountered in the conquered territories. During the first centuries they were particularly receptive of the basilica typology widespread in the former regions ruled by the Christian Byzantines and of the dome chamber typology which characterized the sacred architecture in Mesopotamia and Iran in pre-Islamic time.
&· Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture. Form, Function and Meaning, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 31-73.
&· K.A.C. Creswell, A short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1989), chapter 1.
3) Islamic Pilgrimage Places
During late antiquity several sites were held sacred because they were considered the places where sacredness manifested itself on the earth. Many of them became pilgrimage destinations. One of the first Muhammad&©s decisions was to convert the pre-Islamic pilgrimage sanctuary of the Kaaba into the centre of the Islamic world. People started to worship toward the Kaaba and to organize yearly a pilgrimage to it. In early Islamic time also other sites grew in importance so that the Islamic pilgrimage practice extended beyond the Kaaba: the tombs of the companion of the prophets, the sites of the earliest mosques, several Christian sites, and the Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem are among these places.
&· Oleg Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 59-119.
&· Amikam Elad, Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic worship: holy places, ceremonies, pilgrimage, (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 51-77.
4) Means of Communication Within the Mosque: Minbar, Mihrab and Minaret
The consolidation of Islam as a world empire made the mosque one of the means through which the new rulers communicated with the societies. This process brought to a certain standardization of the elements which characterized a building as a mosque. The development of a concave mihrab and its decoration, the role of the pulpit (minbar) as the place from where the religious and secular authority was declaimed, the emergence of the minaret as a symbolic landmark in Islamic cities are features shared throughout the medieval Islamic world. These common elements found their roots in the world of late antiquity and at the same time were declined according to local varieties, depending on specific time and place.
&· Estelle Whelan, &«The Origins of the Mihrab Mujawwaf: a Reinterpretation,&ª International Journal of Middle East Studies 18 (1986): 205-223.
&· Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture. Form, Function and Meaning, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129-155.
5) &«Varietas&ª as the Rationale of the Early Islamic Decorative System
The building program ordered by Abd al-Malik and his son al-Walid between the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century included a series of sacred places built both in Arabia and in Syria-Palestine. The decorative system of these places was characterized by the use of artistic late antique features such as marble slabs, marble columns and capitals, glass and gold mosaics. Colour and light appear as the most appreciated qualities of the material in the building-process choices. In several cases marble artefacts were reused as spolia from pre-Islamic buildings, while in other cases the standing late antique monuments appeared to have inspired early Muslims in the selection of their artistic vocabulary.
&· Beat Brenk, &«Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology,&ª Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 103-109.
&· Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present. Buildings with Antiquities in the Medieval Mediterranean, (Boston: Brill, 2009), 255-325.
6) The Palace: Art and Architecture
Early Muslims built several royal palaces both in the desert and in urban contexts. Some of the former presented urban features so that can be considered sort of palatine cities, created to control the conquered territory and to offer a secluded place for the new elite. Several elements of these palaces directly derived from the late antique period, such as the layout of the plan, the defensive system, and the association of the palace with agriculture estates. Very often these places were lavishly decorated. Stucco sculptures, paintings, mosaics of the early Islamic period show a strong continuity with the pre-Islamic period not only in the technique but also in the iconography they display.
&· Oleg Grabar, &«Umayyad Palaces Reconsidered,&ª Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 93-108.
&· Marcus Milwright, An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology, (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), chapter II.
7) Local Techniques and Global Islam
The spread of Islam connected vast and far areas such as Iran and North Africa, now under the same ruler. This helps the process of creating medieval Islamic aesthetics, because artefacts and artisans circulated easily throughout the caliphate. In this new world order also local techniques and styles &«travelled&ª extensively: the so-called Samarra style moved to Egypt and transmigrated from one material (stucco) to others (carved woodwork, carved glass), Chinese ceramics were imported in Baghdad and later copied in the local production in order to respond an increasing popular demand. Political reasons, religious necessities and the organization of the work through mobile artisan workshops helped in creating and putting into circulation new tastes and fashions.
&· Richard Ettinghausen, &«$ùThe $ùBeveled Style&© in the Post-Samarra Period,&ª in Islamic art and archaeology: collected papers, ed. Myriam Rosen-Ayalon (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1984), 182$ú201.
&· Oliver Watson, &«Islamic Pots in Chinese Style,&ª The Burlington Magazine 129 (1987): 304-306.
8) Means of Communication in the Public Sphere: Inscriptions and Coinage
Inscriptions on coins, seals, and weights and monumental public inscriptions were extensively used by early Islamic rulers in order to consolidate the caliphate and to affirm the new faith. In the same time this material shows both the gradual change of the society from the Greek/Latin/Persian to the Arabic language, and the development of Arabic-Islamic calligraphy. The latter in few decades became one of the elements shared by the entirety of the Islamic world.
&· Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, (London: Saqi, 2010), 21-54.
&· Elias Khamis, &«Two wall mosaic inscriptions from the Umayyad market place in Bet Shean/Baysan,&ª Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64 (2001): 159-176.
9) Early Islamic Qu&©ran (to be held at the Library of the University of Edinburgh)
Around the beginning of the 8th century a new style, the Kufic, emerged as the first international standardized Islamic writing style. This is reflected in the production of early Islamic Qur&©an copies which show the transition from a more individual handwriting to a pre-planned and more geometrical approach to the manuscript page. The small collection of early Islamic Qur&©an fragments in the Library of the University of Edinburgh allows a close analysis of these patterns in early Islamic calligraphy.
&· Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, (London: Saqi, 2010), 55-93.
&· Colin F. Baker, Qur&©an manuscripts. Calligraphy, Illumination, Design, (London: The British Library, 2007), 15-40.
10) Urban Patterns in the Early Islamic Time: New Founded and Inherited Cities
After the 7th century Islamic conquest, early Muslims settled both in conquered cities and in new founded towns. Within these two contexts two were the on-going processes: one is the rise of the urban features of the medieval medina (diminution of the public spaces, absence of cardo and decumanus, development of cell-like clusters of residential areas), the other is the continuity of the hyppodamic classical plan (orthogonal and regular layout, wide main roads, functional division of the sectors of the town). Both these models appear to have neither connected to the Greek-Byzantine nor to the Islamic culture, but to respond instead to precise socio-economical conditions of their settlers.
&· Marcus Milwright, An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology, (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), chapter V.
&· Alan Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria. An archaeological assessment, (London: Duckworth, 2007), 71-112.
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| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
attached to Syllabus above |
| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Mattia Guidetti
Tel:
Email: mguidett@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Sue Cavanagh
Tel: (0131 6)51 1460
Email: Sue.Cavanagh@ed.ac.uk |
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