Home | Islamic Sciences | Theology | Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam

Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam

Font size:

In his famous Ihya Ulum al-Din (Reviving the Sciences of Religion), al-Ghazali (d. 1111), the celebrated Muslim theologian and mystic, cites an intriguing analogy. He says: “As an architect draws (yusawwir) the details of a house in whiteness and then brings it out into existence according to the drawn exemplar (nuskha), so likewise the creator (f atir) of heaven and earth wrote the master copy of the world from beginning to end in the Preserved Tablet (al-lawh al-mahf uz) and then brought it out into existence according to the written exemplar.”

In many ways, this book is a commentary on, and an exposition of, this statement, an attempt to explore the philosophical and theological contexts that give sense to such an analogy in premodern Islam. In broad terms, the book is concerned with the question of art and religion, creativity and spirituality, with how religious thought and ideas can provide a context for understanding the meanings of human design and acts of making. In specific terms, it is concerned with the cosmological and cosmogonic ideas found in the writings of certain influential Muslim mystics and with their relevance to architecture and spatial organization. The intent, as the title suggests, is to construct a new interpretive context that enables an architectural reading of mystical ideas. By this I mean using a tendency in spatial ordering traceable in buildings, settlements, and landscapes as a tool to frame mystical literature and to organize cosmological ideas into a coherent whole. Within this frame, a complex conjunction of metaphysics, cosmology, and mysticism is constructed and brought to bear on tectonic expressions.

Central to this interpretive approach is the notion of spatial sensibility, understood as a particular awareness of space and a predisposition toward spatial organization shaped by a complex, multilayered worldview. As an untheorized and unaestheticized predilection or bias, spatial sensibility mediates between layered cosmological, geographical, and bodily conceptions and deliberate spatial ordering. Throughout the Islamic world a tendency to order spaces according to a cruciform layout is traceable in a sufficient number of examples to suggest ubiquity and consistency across temporal, geographical, and cultural distances. True, the fleshing out of this cryptic order reveals very rich stylistic variations across time and geography, but the order itself remains noticeably consistent.

What lies beneath this consistent sense of spatial ordering is the core question this study is attempting to address. Deep beneath local sociopolitical and cultural conditions, I argue, lies a predisposition anchored in a wider religiocosmological conception that manifests itself in a spatial sensibility traceable
through modes of spatial ordering.

Source: Section from 'Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam' - Available for download once logged in