A Tale of Two Legacies: Byzantine and Egyptian Influences in the Manufacture and Supply of Glass Tesserae under the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 AD)

The connection between Umayyad and Byzantine mosaic manufacture is a debated issue: on the one hand, Arab sources report that Umayyad caliphs received craftspeople and materials to adorn religious buildings from the Byzantine emperor; on the other hand, the reliability of these texts has long been disputed among scholars, and other possible influences have been hypothesised. Was early Islamic mosaic manufacture related to Byzantine tradition and to what extent? Were materials and artisans gathered from Byzantium and/or territories under the Byzantine control? Based on a multi-analytical approach, glass tesserae from Khirbat al-Mafjar, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and the Dome of the Rock have been analysed. Results speak of a tale of two legacies, demonstrating that, parallel to a continuity with the manufacture of glass tesserae in the late antique Levant—pointing, more specifically, to a re-use of materials from abandoned buildings—legacies other than Byzantine occurred. It emerged that Egypt definitively played a role in mosaic making during the Umayyad caliphate, acting as a supplier of skilled artisans and materials.

Scents of Space: Early Islamic Pilgrimage, Perfume, and Paradise

Within some of the earliest textual and material evidence for the history of Islam, pilgrimage appears as an important ritual of devotion, identity, and community. Yet modern scholarship has given little attention to early Muslims’ sensory experiences of pilgrimage sites and what they physically encountered while there. This article examines the importance of smell within Islamic pilgrimage practices of the first/seventh and second/eighth centuries. Drawing upon literary and material evidence, I reconstruct several olfactory components of pilgrimage in this period, including intensive usage of perfume and incense at pilgrimage destinations such as the Kaʿba and the Dome of the Rock, as well as pilgrims’ collection and ingestion of scented materials from these locations. I then argue that the prominence of pleasing aromas at these sacred spaces is connecting to early Islamic ideas about the proximity of paradise to these pilgrimage sites.

The Abbasid Mosaic Tradition and the Great Mosque of Damascus

Glass wall mosaic is a major feature of early Islamic architecture, surviving above all in the Umayyad monuments of the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus. These grand mosaics inspired periodic revivals from the eleventh century onwards. The centuries between the Umayyad commissions and the first of the documented revivals, however, have been seen as a period of decline for the craft; the Abbasid dynasty that defeated the Umayyads in 750 has not traditionally been associated with the medium. This article reexamines the question, looking at textual and material evidence for Abbasid mosaic production. It argues that, in fact, there was a continuous mosaic tradition well into the ninth century, under the patronage of both caliphs and lower-ranking officials. The first part of the article considers written evidence for mosaics in Mecca and Medina. The second part looks in detail at a surviving example that, it will be argued, dates to the Abbasid period, on the Bayt al-Mal (Treasury) of the Great Mosque of Damascus. The concluding section discusses factors behind the general decline in mosaic production in the tenth century and the possibility of pockets of continuity.

Historiography in the Service of the Muftī: Ibn Taymiyya on the Origins and Fallacies of Ziyārāt

This essay demonstrates Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement of historiography in iftāʼ. It draws upon fatwās on pilgrimage to Ascalon, travel to shrines of al-Ḥusayn in Ascalon and Cairo, and visits to Jerusalem and Hebron. Ibn Taymiyya weaves sophisticated historical narratives into his legal reasoning against visiting tombs of prophets and Ahl al-Bayt. He exposes lacunas, contradictions and unreasonable assertions in truisms about bodies of prophets and saints and their cults. He argues against ziyāra to such sites, blaming Shīʿīs for spreading the innovation at a particularly vulnerable time for Islam. His attack on notions of the religious merits of Jerusalem and of murābaṭa hinges upon his reconstruction of the history the Dome of the Rock and of the Islamic frontier. History leads him to stress the temporality of territorial definitions and their dependence on context. His argumentation resonates in works of later writers, demonstrating the continuing relevance of his fatwās.