From Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced. The cross-pollination extended from design and materials to people – the shimmering gold mosaics that cover the interiors of both buildings are attributed to the Byzantine master craftsmen whose forerunners decorated the churches of Constantinople and Ravenna.
This sun-drenched historical patchwork could seem a long way from the gloom of early medieval Europe. But in Islamesque, cultural historian Diana Darke sets out to show Islamic art’s influence on Europe’s Romanesque monasteries, churches and castles, via a very similar story of surprising borrowings and occasional thefts. It is a companion to Darke’s previous book, Stealing from the Saracens, which argued that European masterpieces from Notre-Dame to St Paul’s took inspiration from the Muslim world, and whose eye-catching examples included Big Ben’s resemblance to the 11th-century minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo.
Islamesque begins with equally sweeping claims of a “controversial, revolutionary” thesis: that Islamic influence has been less “forgotten” than deliberately suppressed by chauvinists and culture warriors. But the true focus of the book lies at the other end of the scale, in the micro-details of archivolts and muqarnas, squinches and joggled voussoirs. To research it, Darke covered a staggering amount of ground, visiting “hundreds of Romanesque buildings scattered across England, Wales, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Sicily, not to mention scores of sites across North Africa, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey” – many of them shown in 150 beautiful colour illustrations.
Darke’s starting point is an exploration of a zigzag motif she traces from the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “water” through Coptic (Egyptian Christian), Islamic and western architectural traditions to the courtyard of the Ottoman merchant’s house she bought and restored in Damascus. The book then itself zigzags – sometimes disorientingly – through space and time. There is a fascinating chapter on the Fatimid architecture of Cairo: the buildings created by the Isma’ili Shia dynasty that founded the city and made it the centre of a caliphate that in the 11th century stretched from Sicily to the Hejaz in the Arabian peninsula. Darke is clearly an enthusiast and it is a pleasure to follow her from the exquisite shell-like facade of Cairo’s tiny al-Aqmar (“Moonlit”) Mosque, rich in esoteric symbolism, to the defensive bulk of the Bab al-Futuh and Bab al-Nasr city gates. (The book is loaded with intriguing digressions including, here, one on the highly decorated Coptic desert monasteries that inspired Celtic Christian art. By the sixth century, so many Irish monks were travelling to visit Egypt’s monks and hermits, Darke writes, that a guidebook was written for them, today preserved in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale.)
So how did the advanced geometry, engineering and artistry needed to create buildings like these make its way to comparatively backward Europe? Darke identifies several portals, first among them Sicily. By the end of the 11th century the island had been seized from its Muslim rulers by the Normans, who razed its palaces and mosques and constructed hybrid Arab-Norman-Byzantine replacements. In Spain, meanwhile, as the extent of Christian and Muslim territories waxed and waned, buildings such as Córdoba’s Mezquita changed hands and the boundaries between languages and cultures blurred. Through these routes – along with the Crusades and trade with the Italian entrepots of Venice, Genoa and Amalfi – Christian Europe drew on the superior knowledge and skills of the Islamic world and its craftworkers to create its own monuments.
The results spread even to the damp islands at the other end of the continent: Darke cites Wells Cathedral, where 13th-century stonemasons labelled sculptures with Arabic numerals centuries before their use became widespread, and Peterborough Cathedral, where carpenters created an intricately jointed and decorated wooden ceiling using techniques then unknown in Europe. Islamesque doesn’t need to be “revolutionary”; it offers an enjoyable and eye-opening reminder that Europe’s heritage has far more diverse roots than we assume.
