decoration, on panellings and mihrabs. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the palette of ceramists steadily improved, drawings became more complex, and finally, at the beginning of the 16th century in Ardebil, Sheik Sefi’s tomb was decorated with a wide range of possible applications of architectural ceramics: cornices with stalactites, fascia boards, friezes with inscriptions and enamelled brick domes. Buildings that were constructed or restored in Isfahan during Shah Abbas’s reign are also wonders of ceramic ornamentation, but the indiscriminate use of wall tiles is one of the main reasons for the dilapidation of these buildings. Abandoned without any maintenance and with the changing Persian climate, these coverings gradually fell off, and monuments less than four centuries old lost their adornment in a few years. Colours became more and more varied in the 17th century. Pink, light yellow, red and green added to the range of colours that were initially used: turquoise blue, brown, reddish brown, dark green, cobalt blue, white, violet and black. The decorations originally looked like carpets, then like the human figure, scenes with people, animals, and then real flowers were gradually introduced into this disarray, which quickly led to the decline of this beautiful art. Coloured stained-glass windows set in structures of cut plaster, friezes made of sculpted or moulded plaster or stuccos, precious wood inlays, precious metals, gildings, and later glass from Venice, paintings and impressive stars stitched with gold or silver – all these elaborate crafts added to the collections which we only know vaguely, either through the descriptions of travellers who did their best in describing what they had seen, or through books in which the presentation of these buildings and their decoration was often very vivid.
In Persia, whose pre-16th century edifices are known today as exclusively religious or public buildings, there are still the palaces of the Safavid kings and their successors, as well as those of the main Persian lords that date back to the 17th century. Based on these examples, we can still clearly appreciate the splendour and taste of Persian courts as they were and see these ancient luxurious wonders that we know only through history books constructed today, as it were.
We have seen the reasons that make us point to Mesopotamia as the cradle of Islamic architecture in Persia. As for monuments in Turkestan, they cannot be studied separately because they demonstrate a strong Persian influence: some buildings in Samarkand and Bukhara were erected by Persian architects from Shiraz or Isfahan. It would be very difficult to draw any kind of analogy between them, and to attribute all of them to a so-called Seljuq style, since Ottoman art is different from that of Persia, from a strictly architectural point of view.
These foreign dynasties sometimes fairly contributed to modifying local styles by encouraging more frequent interactions between the peoples they united under their rule; by introducing the taste of enamelled coatings, as did the Seljuqs of Anatolia; by seeking to find, in the monuments that they were erecting in Edirne, some of the aspects of this luxurious decoration that they had admired in Persia; or by creating substantial colonies of Chinese ceramists, whose influence is clearly established by some details of faience coating used as ornamentation and tonality for coloured enamels. This is what Hulagu and Tamerlane did for Persia and Samarkand respectively.
The Mosque of Samarra is known for its imposing minaret. It was designed on a square foundation, where the tower itself is erected with its spiral staircase, which tapers to a sort of cone. It includes six revolutions, and the tower is 50 metres tall. The pillars are rather similar to those of El-Achik, though smaller in diametre. Samarra has three huge palaces: El-Gauchak, El-Oumari and El-Waziri constructed by Montassim, el-Haruniye constructed by Harun el-Walid, an artificial hill and a hippodrome. Upon Moulaouakil’s death, his successor abandoned Samarra, and its inhabitants were forced to leave their homes, taking along their furniture, beams and the doors of their houses.
The Tikari madrasa, Samarkand.
Kalyan Minar, 1127, Kalyan Mosque, 16th century, Miri Arab Madrasa, 17th century.
Bukhara.
The Poi Kalon complex, 12th-20th centuries.
Bukhara, Uzbekistan.
Baghdad
Although Baghdad became the ultimate capital of the caliphate, nothing is left of Haroun-al-Rashid’s monuments or those of his successors, who reigned there without interruption for almost four centuries. This may be explained by the fact that the buildings there were made of baked and unbaked bricks, and very rarely of stone, which was reserved for columns and the pavement of courtyards. Mosul alabaster was used for the buildings. Since buildings made of sun-dried bricks are short-lived, we can understand why most monuments from this period have since crumbled. In addition to time, however, almost all monuments there were destroyed following the conquest of Baghdad led by Hulagu in 1250. The vanquishers swept radically across the territory, leaving nothing in their wake: wealth was pillaged and manuscripts were burnt or thrown into the Tigris. “These were resources that knowledge seekers had assembled in this city before this terrible tragedy,” says Kotb ad-Din El Hanafi. “The Mongols threw all the college books into the Tigris to the extent that they piled up to form a kind of bridge for both pedestrians and horsemen, and the river’s waters turned completely black from them.”
The Friday Mosque of Isfahan
The plan of this mosque is unique. It has a vast square courtyard, with a square pavilion in the middle. The four sides of the courtyard are decorated with huge, arched gates, linked to each other via porticos with two-tiered arcades. The tallest and most attractive of them, leading to the sanctuary itself, is flanked by two big minarets. The minarets, which may actually be likened to huge chimney stacks, are slightly conical, ending in a balcony supported by stalactite-like corbels, from where the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer.
The plan of this mosque is very different from the classical plan of early mosques in the area. Its square courtyard and the huge gates, which are fairly reminiscent of the gigantic arch in Khosrau’s palace in Ctesiphon, are the distinguishing elements of the mosque. The rest are beam fillings, such that, in the end, there seem to be four mosques with parallel and multiple naves. It was simply hollowed out in the middle, and still stands because all the area from the base of each side of the sanctuary seems identical and apparently forms a separate mosque on either side, each with its own mihrab. In between these two wings, the real sanctuary is sheltered by a huge dome.
The vaults are either supported by square pillars or by four attached columns. The dome is supported by the columns and surmounted by an internal dome made of bricks laid out according to the sinuous ribs, which are separated by blue faience mosaic panels on a yellow background and overlaid with an external dome decorated with faience.
The arch of the main porch is extraordinary, not only because of the faience and enamelled brick decoration and the two minarets lined with enamelled bricks, but also and most importantly because of the way it was constructed. The rectangular plan on which it is constructed does not actually constitute a cradle; it is a half-dome preceding a dome, both of them star-shaped, which have been able to restore this rectangular plan through a succession of stalactites in the form of tiered corbels on a triangular plan. This succession of tiered stalactites is distinctive, and the vaults seem to float in the air.
The stalactites are made of pink enamelled bricks. The interior and exterior of the entire building are lined with enamelled tiles, painted in bright and stunning arabesques, while the base is decorated with beautiful wavy and banded porphyry tables, which Abbas the Great wanted to be used in the royal mosque. The ornamentation is exquisite everywhere – the entire lengths of walls, on friezes and cornices – and contains verses of the Holy Koran and utterances of imams. The main dome has a diametre of more than 30 metres. In front of this dome, which is like the choir space of the mosque, there is a spacious courtyard surrounded by cloisters with arcade fronts and supported by huge pilasters
