Medieval Islamic Art and the Byzantine Transition

Introduction: Rethinking the Byzantine–Islamic Break

The Islamic conquest, which spread with unprecedented speed through the Middle East and Near East, through Iberia, and as a major cultural influence into Western Europe, is often seen as a sharp point of departure from the Eastern Roman power that had ruled these regions prior. Steeped heavily in Christian ideology and iconography, with its seat of power in Constantinople (in modern-day Turkey), the Byzantine Empire cast a dominant impression on pre-Muslim Arab civilizations. The apparent immediacy with which history records this empire being replaced by Islamic dominance may therefore not be fully accurate — or at least, it may lack the nuance needed to explain the clear and formative impact that centuries of Byzantine rule would bear on the suddenly emergent Islamic world.

Though a pronounced break is often imagined between Byzantine rule over the Middle East and the Islamic push back through Europe, the art and architecture that remain for us to consider suggest that this break was not as clean as history implies. Research connects these consecutive eras through the countless artifacts that point to continuity between Byzantine and Islamic rulers. Still, as Grabar (1964) warns, we are left only to speculate about what occurred during the transition — what cultural features were destroyed and what was adopted. On this point, Grabar "identifies a crucial moment in the political and cultural contacts between Byzantium and the Arabs, when the buffer world of pre-Islamic Arabs, who basked at a distance in the glow of high Byzantine culture, was about to become the Islamic Empire, the strongest power of the Near East and the Mediterranean since the days of ancient Rome." (p. 69)

The Rapid Emergence of Islam and Its Cultural Inheritance

The text by Grabar offers a primary insight for this discussion: the rule of the Byzantine Christians, which spread throughout the known world, had cast an influence over Arab civilizations that far surpassed any of the local or tribal powers that generally defined pre-Muslim Arab life. Many of the cultural features of the Byzantine Empire would therefore serve as a natural model for the emerging Islamic power. Ettinghausen et al. (2003) describe this as a phenomenon connected to the broader rapidity of Islam's rise. They compare the swift emergence and expansion of the Islamic world to the far more gradual and organic spread of the Christian ideologies that eventually proliferated through Byzantium, noting that in the 7th and 8th centuries, the prophetic visions of Mohammed produced a sudden and unifying ripple through an already self-contained Arab world. (Ettinghausen et al., p. 17)

Ettinghausen et al. explain that one reason for the widely apparent Byzantine influence on Islamic art and architecture was the relative spontaneity of the Islamic movement as a whole. They report that "Islamic art did not slowly evolve from the meeting of a new faith and of a new state with whatever older traditions prevailed in the areas in which the state ruled; it came forth as suddenly as the faith and the state, for, whatever influences may have been at work in the building and the decoration of early Islamic monuments, their characteristic is that they were built for Muslims, to serve purposes which did not exist in quite the same way before Islam." (Ettinghausen et al., p. 17)

Works Cited

Ettinghausen, R., Grabar, O., & Jenkins-Madina, M. (2003). Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250. Yale University Press.

Golombek, L. (1988). The Draped Universe of Islam. Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen: New York University.

Grabar, O. (1964). Islamic art and Byzantium. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 18, 67–88.

Ismail, O.S.A. (1968). The founding of a new capital: Samarra. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 31(1), 1–13.