Sinan and the Competitive Discourse of Earlymodern Islamic Architecture
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GULRU NECIPOGLU CHALLENGING THE PAST: SINAN AND THE COMPETITIVE DISCOURSE OF EARLYMODERN ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE Oleg Grabar compared architecture in the formative pe As Spiro Kostof noted, "The very first monument of the riod of Islam, with its novel synthesis of Byzantine and new faith, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, was a pat Sasanian elements, to "a sort ofgraft on other living enti ently competitive enterprise" that constituted a conspic ties." "The Muslim world," he wrote, "did not inherit uous violation of the Prophet's strictures against costly exhausted traditions, but dynamic ones, in which fresh buildings. The Dome of the Rock and other Umayyad interpretations and new experiments coexisted with old imperial projects not only challenged the modest archi ways and ancient styles."I In this study dedicated to him I tecture of the early caliphs stationed in Medina, but at would like to show that a similar process continued to the same time invited a contest with the Byzantine archi inform the dynamics oflater Islamic architecture whose tectural heritage of Syria, the center of Umayyad power. history in the early-modern era was far from being a rep A well-known passage by the tenrh-century author etition of preestablished patterns constituting a mono Muqaddasi identifies the competition with Byzantine lithic tradition with fixed horizons. The "formation" of architecture, a living tradition associated with the great Islamic architecture(s) was a process that never stopped. est rival of the Umayyads, as the central motive behind Its parameters were continually redefined according to the ambitious building programs ofcAbd ai-Malik (685 the shifting power centers and emergent identities of 705) and al Walid 1(705-15):3 successive dynasties who formulated distinctive architec tural idioms accompanied by recognizable decorative The Caliph al-Walid beheld Syria to be a country that had modes. Novel architectural syntheses that both long been occupied by the Christians, and he noted there the beautiful churches still belonging to them, so enchant remained rooted in a shared Islamic past and self-con ingly fair, and so renowned for their splendor as are the sciously departed from it created a perpetual tension be Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the churches of Lydda tween tradition and innovation, often articulated and Edessa. So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque through pointed references to the past that endowed in Damascus that should be unique and a wonder to the monuments with an intertextual dimension. world . And in the like manner, is it not evident that his fa ther Abd aI-Malik, seeing the greatness of the martyrium of Though the semiotic charging ofbuildings with refer the Holy Sepulcher and its magnificence was moved lest it ence to specific architectural pasts had its roots in the should dazzle the minds of the Muslims and hence erected formative period of Islam, it came to playa particularly above the rock the dome which is now seen there? important role in the intertextual architectural dis course of the early-modern era, extending roughly from The Umayyads and the early Abbasids, who were the only the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. This pe caliphal dynasties to have unified nearly the whole world riod representing the "adolescence of modernization" of Islam, effectively competed with the past in construct was characterized by its growing independence from tra ing their imperial architectural image. After their cultu ditional culture, but at the same time its reluctance to ral hegemony had ended, the smaller states that sever ties from the past." My essay will identify a shared emerged often sought to legitimize their dynastic claims early-modern preoccupation with challenging the past by making allusions to the prestigious monuments of without rejecting its heritage, first by focusing on the these two early caliphates. For example, architectonic programs of Sinan's imperial mosques and then by sit and decorative elements from the eighth-century Umay uating their competitive discourse within a broader spec yad Great Mosque of Damascus were selectively quoted trum of examples chosen from the Uzbek, Safavid, and in the tenth-century Great Mosque of Cordoba built by Mughal realms. the exiled Spanish Umayyads who wished to establish an The competitiveness of Islamic architecture can be iconographic link with their imperial ancestral past to traced back to the imperial ambitions of the Umayyads . support their own claims to the caliphate." A similar 170 GOLRU NECIPOGLU claim was mad e th rough th e Fati mid calip h al-Mansur's As for the Madrasa of Sultan Hasan, this edifice has no equivalent in the whole world. It was reported that Sultan tenth-eentury ro u nd city of Man suriyya, with its obvious Hasan, when he ordered its construction, summoned all reference to th e eigh th-eentury round city of Baghdad , the architects ( muhan disin) from all the countries and th e ultimate symb ol of caliphal authority built by th e asked them: Which is the highest building in the world? Abbasid caliph al-Mansu r, He was told: Iwan Kisra Anushirwan. So he ordered that The monumental south dome (1086-87) of th e Great the iwan should be measured and revised (yu harrar) and that his madrasa should be 10 cubits higher than it, and it Mosque in Isfah an , which appears to have been inspire d was constructed .. .. Iwan Kisra has but one iwan, this by that of the fire-dam aged Umayyad Great Mosque in madrasa has four!" Damascus (rebuilt by a Seljuq vizier in 1082), can be read as yet another allusion to th e royal au thority of th e Timurid architec tu re showe d a sim ilar preoccupati on Umayyads. Coupled with the palatial eleme nt of th e with height, monumental scale, and spectacular effects. iwan , Malikshah's dome projected the prestige ofhis sul The unprecedented scale of Timur's Great Mosqu e in tanate which provided su ppo rt to th e weakened caliph Sam arqand (1398-1405) represented its patron's ambi ate of th e Abb asids who no longer enjoye d roya l power. tion to build one of th e most co lossa l mosques of th e The numerous domed maqsuras it engendered in Iran Muslim world in a capital he regarded as its micro cosm. and in th e sma ller mosques of the splin tere d Seljuq suc Acco rding to th e historian Sharaf ai-Din CAl i Yazdi, with cessor sta tes of Syria, Mesopotam ia, and Anatolia its soa ring height "ru bbing aga ins t th e heavens," Tim re flec ted a resurgence of roya l symbolism at a time when ur's mosque proclaimed the verse freque n tly cited by independent princely successor states, who perp etuated fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historian s: "Verily our th e Sunni revival of th e Great Seljuqs, were establishing monuments will tell about us, so look to our monuments th emselves in a Middle East no longer unified by co lossal after we are gone!" ? Wh en th e fourteen th-ce ntury histo imperi al caliphates." rian Ibn Khaldun wrote th at "the mo nu me nts of a given The reveren ce towards th e past see n in th ese exa m dynasty are proportionate to its origina l power," he ples from th e middle period of Islam differs fundame n noted that th ose of th e Umayyads, Abbas ids, and Fat i tally fro m th e refere nces fou nd in early-modern monu mids surpassed th e ones built by the "less impo rtan t ments. They more freque n tly allude to th e past in order dynasties" of his own time, amo ng which he singled out to challenge it and to affirm the superiority of their own th e "Turks of Egypt" (Mamluks) an d Timur (with whom tim e. This compe titive attitude first emerges in the post he had several meetings) as th e two most powerful rul Mongol era in the fourteenth- and early-fiftee n th-ee n ers." tury architectural p rojects of the Ilkh an ids, Timurid s, The co mpe titive streak that emerged in th e architec and Mamluks, whose domineerin g monumen tali ty ture of th ese two late medieval dynasties was to culm i stands out from th e modest struc tures of th eir immedi nate in th e ea rly-modern era with th e am bitious imperial ate predecessors, which had aba ndone d th e ambitio us projects of th e Ottomans, Safavids, an d Mug ha ls. T hese scale of th e early imperi al caliphates. It is embodied in empires shared th e same self-conscious attitude toward suc h monuments as th e co lossa l dom ed mausoleum of th e vast accu mulated heritage of Islamic archi tec ture th e Ilkhanid sultan Uljaytu at Sultaniyya (d. 1316) whose th at could endlessly be elabora ted to define new identi sheer size, com me n ted on by most contempora ry histori ties. No longer faced with th e pro blem of inven tin g ex an s, reflec ted an attempt to challenge ea rlier royal mau novo building types or forms th at had preoccupied ear soleums suc h as th at of th e Seljuq rul er Sulta n Sanjar in lier ge nerations, ar chitects co uld now co ncentra te on Merv. With its giga n tic iwan th e roughl y co ntemporary creating innovative reinterpretati ons of inherited mod Masjid-i J am ic at Tabriz, built by th e Ilkhanid vizier cAli els, with subtle quotati ons and intertextua l allusions Shah (d.