Muslim traces in Christian art
Chronologically, Christian art was born before Muslim art, but the history of the world has meant that these two arts have, in turn, evolved in time and space, each drawing inspiration from the other, the first Muslim monuments of Syria and Palestine being based on the Christian concepts of the Byzantine church, the Romanesque churches of Occitania being inspired both by these same Byzantine monuments and by Muslim decorative systems.
On the other hand, the Christian world is rather made up of sedentary peoples while the Muslim world, even if it has extended to peoples who are also sedentary, is of nomadic origin, and will constantly be “irrigated” by invasions, Mongol, Seljuk, Turkish, but always undertaken by nomads.
In all the lands where Islam, coming from the Arabian desert, spread, it assimilated the pre-existing local type of architecture, whether Byzantine, Persian, Hindu or Buddhist, developing the forms that suited its vision of the world, whether in the clay constructions that line the Niger River, in the Mughal monuments of Fatehpur Sikhri in India or in the aerial mosques of Sinan in present-day Turkey.
Mosques and churches are built from scattered materials, stones and wood found in nature and materials made from other natural elements such as bricks or glassware. And these will be the tools that will become the instruments of the divine by transforming these raw pieces into its reflections. The sculptor’s scissors will be similar to the reed pens that, in the medersas, will carve the paper to inscribe the verses of the Koran. From the “chaos” of materials, the harmony of the peaks emerges.
We enter a church through a door which, by the existence of a more or less worked arch, decorated with voussures, makes it similar to a niche, a niche that we find in the choir of the church, and which represents the “Holy of Holies”, the place of the divine “apparition”. Niche that we also find in Muslim places of prayer, in the form of the mihrabwhose vault represents the sky, but which, unlike the Christian rite, will not “contain” God, the believers directing their prayer towards a center outside it, beyond the niche, the Kaaba.
And we can imagine the hundreds of thousands of mirhab, which, throughout the world, form thousands of concentric circles around a simple black and sacred cube. While the surroundings of this niche portal will be the object of all artistic attention, both in the church and in the mosque, as they were already for the niches containing, in Hindu temples, the images, the signs of the Divinity.
The curved line, the guiding principle of all nomadic art, of all nomadism, came from the East with the Muslim conquerors of the 8th century.e s., lavishly adorns the form of polylobes and arabesques mihrab from the Mosque of Cordoba to the 10th centurye s., before conquering, two hundred years later, numerous Romanesque churches in the South of France, thus reconnecting them with the primordial movement, as close as possible to the Origin.
Churches and mosques are decorated with zoomorphic motifs from the most distant prehistoric societies, and taken up by Mesopotamian cultures as well as by the northern cultures of Europe. And, in southern France, we will find the lions and eagles escaped from the Gospel of Book of Kells like the Workshops of Cordoba, united in dragons and griffins often confronted, solar animals, symbols of the solstices, of the ascending and descending phases of the cycle of the year, each dogma, Christian or Muslim, giving it its own meaning, from the infernal creatures tamed by the Man-God to those, fabulous, endlessly fighting the supernatural forces, symbols of ambiguous power.
Christian art, heir, among others, to the Greek, Latin and Nordic worlds, meets Muslim art, heir to the Babylonian, Indian and Persian worlds, and one will exchange with the other its techniques, its motifs, its forms to construct works intended for the material concretization and the divine infinity.
The square of the foundations, firmly placed on the ground, meets in the air the dome destined to reach the sky. And golden stars will cover that of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna in the Ve s., while thousands of mosaic pieces would swirl on the ceiling of the Jamia Mosque in Thatta, Pakistan, more than a thousand years later.
And the heads of Buddha will be set in the North of the same country in a halo, a perfect curve enclosing the noblest part of the human being, as it will surround, almost a complete circle, the heads of the saints of Christian iconography before enveloping, completely this time, the names of Allah and of Mohammed on both sides of the mirhab of all mosques.
When we look up at the ceiling of the Karbala mosque in Iraq, entirely covered with beveled mirrors, the floors are reflected, diffracted and unrecognizable, but also the crowds walking on them, and our imagination can isolate any colored brilliance and connect it to any religion, to any belief – since the mirror is a reflection, both similar and different from the Truth – and designate it as the memory of the universe.
