Paradise or Empire? On a Paradox of Umayyad Art (original) (raw)

Power, Patronage and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites

Islamic art on a grand scale, and it has continued to exert its fascination upon generation after generation of visitors ever since. To the modern student, it is also a field riddled with elusive meanings and apparent paradoxes. For decades, divergent interpretations have been put forward about its two most emblematic monuments: the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem, and the Great Mosque of Damascus. Indeed, the more one reflects about them, the more the same conclusions seem to repeat themselves , with a single referent— the representation of a plant, a precious stone, a building— seemingly evoking both paradise and empire. This puzzling situation is, of course, partly due to the lack of human figures and identifying captions in their iconography, leaving the viewer to construe , after a gap of over a millennium, what may have been obvious to original audiences. What is more, any imperially sponsored sacral building or object is inherently bound to be a manifestation of both spirituality and power. Yet the reality observed in practice goes beyond the level of truisms, reaching a degree of articulation that suggests the possibility of a deliberate choice, a conscious tendency to elude one-dimensional readings and to conflate the spiritual and earthly planes. This possibility and its cultural context form the subject of the present chapter, with a focus * The research for this chapter was undertaken with the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which is gratefully acknowledged.