Abstract:
This article attempts to investigate the proposed answers for the three questions about Islamic art and particularly Islamic architecture: first, does Islamic art have an independent identity? Despite the buildings with different applications in Islamic architecture, is there a common space? Can a single yardstick be introduced for investigating different spaces of Islamic art and architecture? In investigating the answers, this article backs up the independent identity of Islamic art and architecture and introduces the calligraphic-vegetative-geometric decorations as a “visual language” of Islamic art and architecture and presents it as the unifying factor of spaces in Islamic art and architecture and tries to provide a new proposition for the issue of meaning in Islamic art and architecture which is formed based on the viewpoint of „Ayn al-Quḍāt Hamidānī about the meaning. Imām.
Machine summary:
In the first four centuries after hegira, the Arabic plan passed its evolutionary process in language and expression, and through transferring to different lands in the Islamic geography and under the influence of geographical-local traditions of architecture brought about different plans for mosques, of which the most important plans are the ones for the mosques of Iran, Ottoman and west Islamic lands including Spain.
However, Muslim architects perhaps considered semantic reasons as well as the use of its aesthetical application in designing the mosques of that area, and they wanted to express artistically the political domination of Muslims over Christians, on the one hand, and also to express visually the necessity of compliance and subordination of Christianity in regard to Islam, especially turning 90 degrees the plan of T form of Basilican churches of Christians and laying it in the direction of Qiblah can precisely imply this point.
Contrary to this viewpoint, David Watkin, the professor of architecture history in the art department of Cambridge University, holds that the specific form of the mosques of Iran, Turkey, and India has been the result of the use of the legacy of domical and vaulted churches with the concentrated plan which was the feature of Byzantine churches from the Justinian era onward (Watkin, 2011: 124); of course, there is no doubt that Ottoman architecture, because geographically it was located in Byzantine as the material and spiritual capital of the East Roman Empire during its evolution, was under the influence of Byzantine churches, and it used the domically architectural language of concentrated churches belonging to the Justinian era onward to express its intentions.