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Palaces

t Medina was "a meeting place for prayer" or masjid (from which the word mosque derives) and eventually "served as the model for building the first mosque" (Du Ry 17). But simplicity was the initial keynote of all Islamic architecture. One of Muhammad's sayings was that "the most unprofitable thing that eateth up the wealth of a Believer is building" and, while religious architecture did not follow this idea for long, becoming very elaborately decorated and solidly built, secular architecture was not seen as a reasonable, or even particularly moral, way of spending great amounts of money (qtd. in Grabar 746).

It soon became the rule, however, that "precautions [were] taken to ensure that mosques, madrasas, caravansarais and other public buildings should be solidly built" but this rule was "by no means regularly observed in the construction of palaces" (Hillenbrand Islamic 377). Such buildings served no religious purpose and they had no function in the general welfare of the community. Inexpensive materials were used to build palaces rapidly and the principal concern was for the beauty and impressive qualities of the exterior rather than for a lasting structure. Palaces might have been constructed more solidly if they had been seen as "the royal seat of a dynasty for the indefinite future" but this idea was never common in Islamic lands (377). The usual policy was for each new ruler to quickly build a new palace on a site he chose and, very often, this involved the destruction of his predecessors' palaces. By such means the new ruler could "assert his own importance or re-use whatever valuable materials" could be harvested from the earlier structures (Hillenbrand Islamic 378). Even in cases where palaces "were in continuous use [they] were repeatedly redecorated" and the unusual survival of the Alhambra in Spain shows how this reapplication of expensive decorative materials obscures, for any practical historical purposes, the...

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Palaces. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:41, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1709014.html