History of Islamic Architecture

The mosque today has become a distinctive phenomenon, perceived as an identity vessel of contemporary Islamic architecture that conveys sacred metaphysical meanings. Since the advent of modernity in the Islamic world with its supremacy of rationality and renunciation of the metaphysical, the relationships of the sacred-secular and the divine based-demythologized knowledge have been deformed. The mosque was glossed over as the sole contemporary sacred Islamic edifice that bears metaphysical/ religious connotations with cultural continuity, however, in an altered sense. Its architecture, meanings, function and uses have gone through a process of metamorphosis, particularly the State mosque. Contemporary State mosques are in effect symbolic statements and communicative messages of their rulers' power and national sovereignty, with a subsidiary role for worship. They have given precedence to the secular political connotations over the sacred religious ones, where the inherent sacredness in such grand mosques is used as a symbolic tool representing the state power and authority; i.e. the sacred has turned into a secular power-metaphor. This led to a loss in the deeply-rooted collective cultural codes of the sacred. This paper investigates the metamorphosis that took place in the semiological connotation of the contemporary mosque, with a special focus on grand State mosques, and its effects on the architecture of the contemporary mosque.

The conquest of Egypt by the Fatimids in 358/969 created a context of radical religious and political transformation: a context in which the Shīʿī polity sought, and indeed implemented strategies, to propagate their sect amongst a setting of Sunnī adherents. Perhaps the most workable weapon they applied was the introduction of mashhads, funerary domed structures devoted to the burial of their Fatimid imams, who claimed the ultimate descent from ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and Fātima, the Prophet’s daughter. However, many of these were just cenotaphs (mashāhid ruʾyā). Although Islam holds strict traditions against funerary structures, the Fatimid mashhads did the trick; they were, and still are, highly venerated by the Sunnī populace of Egypt. They even continued to be employed by the zealous Ayyūbid sultans, albeit under a different name: ḍarīḥs. This time, they were dedicated to notable Sunnī imams, such as al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), and had a different function; the Ṭurbat al-Zaʿfarān, where the Fatimid caliphs and their families were buried,  was not set in the necropolis of their imams, while the Ayyūbid mausoleum of al- Shāfiʿī was intended at the outset to serve as a royal burial complex. The present study is an attempt to reach a better understanding of the incentives and/or impediments of both sects towards the erection and veneration of funerary domes. Further, the study holds an architectural comparison between the Fatimid mashhads and the Ayyūbid ḍarīḥs with the aim of exploring whether and how the Shīʿī and Sunnī doctrines influenced the architectural, rather than, ornamental features of such funerary types.