The second chapter discusses the historiographical problems of Ḥadīth and other early Arabo-Islamic sources. The first of which is an introduction that deals with: (i) the reasons for underestimating the role of Ḥadīth in shaping mosque architecture (ii) the main questions of the study (iii) and the approaches and methodologies applied to handle such questions. The thesis is divided into eight chapters. This study weighs up the influence of Ḥadīth, "traditions of the Prophet Muhammad of Islam", on the architecture of the major mosques which were built from the establishment of the Islamic state in 1/622 to the end of the Umayyad period in 132/750. This public lecture tells the story of this remarkable monument and its fabled precursors, the view from which takes in some three thousand years of Syrian civilisation. A sequence of still earlier temples reaches back to the Iron Age, when Ahaz, King of Judah, came to make burnt offerings and pour libations at the far-famed altar of the Aramaean god Hadad-Ramman. The wall footings of the Umayyad Mosque belong to the inner compound of the two thousand year old temple to Jupiter Damascenus, whilst Graeco-Roman architectural fragments from an even larger outer enclosure are found littered about the city. John the Baptist, and indeed a shrine within the mosque still contains the relic of the severed head, famously cleft from his body for the sake of Salome’s dance. It had previously been occupied by the Byzantine church of St. Yet the site of the mosque was already of considerable antiquity. When Damascus was emerging as the capital of a far-flung Arab empire, which at its height took in that vast swath of territory from Seville to Samarkand, the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd I undertook to build a great new mosque in the heart of the city.
0 kommentar(er)
