Diana Darke - Stealing FromThe Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe

First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL

Diana Darke, 2020

All rights reserved.

The right of Diana Darke to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by
Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016,
United States of America.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781787383050

ISBN: 9781787385108 (e-book)

This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources.

www.hurstpublishers.com

This book is dedicated to Notre-Dame. The catastrophic fire of 15 April 2019 was also the spark that ignited this book, once I saw how little the cathedrals architectural backstory was understood. I want to acknowledge the genius of Notre-Dames medieval architects and masons, whose painstaking and devoted labours over the course of two centuries produced a prodigious organic structure which lived and breathed the history of France, its revolution, the coronation of Napoleon I, and the funerals of many presidents. It became an eternal resident of the city, a spiritual core, a comforting presenceits immortality, perhaps, taken for granted.

As todays engineers struggle to stabilise the structure, the magnitude of the task ahead is becoming clear. The French parliament has passed a law requiring the cathedral to be rebuilt exactly as it was, but therein lies the challenge. President Macrons vow to reconstruct in five years is way off the mark. Ten is more realistic, probably longer. An estimated 1,300 oaks were felled to build the cathedral, but France no longer has trees of the same size and maturity. Even beyond the issues inherent in replicating the ancient materials, there is another, infinitely more complex problem. How can we recreate, in our computer-driven age of precision planning, the buildings original energy and force? Guided by instincts honed through generations of experience and passed down from master to apprentice, the builders left no records. Nothing was written down beyond a few unscaled drawings.

The danger is that, in our rush to reconstruct Notre-Dame exactly as it was with the aid of our digital devices, we may end up losing the buildings very soul, unwittingly expunging the subtle imperfections that are integral to its essence and identity.

These are the mysteries which lie at the heart of medieval Gothic or Saracenic architecture, the origins of which this book seeks to unravel. As the dark shadow of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic forces us to confront new uncertainties, one likely outcomeeven in those who profess no faithis the rediscovery of religious architecture and its power to calm and heal. May the future Notre-Dame remain forever true to the spirit of those mysteries.

This book has risen from the ashes of the 15 April 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris.

On that fateful night the world was gripped by images of the cathedral engulfed in flames. No one imagined that a building on fire could spark such interest and mesmerise global audiences for days on end. The French nation went into mass mourning on a scale that took everyone by surprise.

Why? What did this building represent to the French and to the world? In due course, statements by international leaders, not least French president Emmanuel Macron himself, would suggest that the cathedral somehow encapsulated French nationhood. All of France was burning in sympathy. In a country where statistics show that before the fire only 5 per cent of the population was church-going and 47 per cent described themselves as non-practising Catholics, what could explain such an outpouring?

Part of it, without doubt, was a reaction. France has a long tradition of lacit, secularism, that began with its revolution in 1789, and its constitution today guarantees that all citizens regardless of their origin, race or religion are treated as equals before the law. But the twenty-first century brought unforeseen challenges. During Europes migration crisis in 2015, France found itself overwhelmed with Arab and African refugees, most of whom were Muslim. Later that year, the streets of Paris were convulsed by a series of terrorist attacks, inspired by the extremism of Islamic State. In response to these upheavals and the perceived threat of Islam, many sought to revive a Christian national identity.

Now the French were in danger of losing this magnificent treasure at the heart of their capital city, the very symbol of their Catholic faith. The non-church-going mayor of Paris said she was convinced the cathedral had been saved from collapse by the power of prayer. After the fire, church attendance soared and the number of pilgrims walking between Notre-Dame and Chartres, especially the young, reached new heights. France, that most secular of countries where even wearing a crucifix to work is not allowed, is having a religious renaissance, a spiritual awakening.

But what if that very building itself, that intricate Gothic style so deeply associated with Catholicism in Europe, was in fact inspired by Islamic architecture brought into Europe centuries earlier? How would people feel about that?

The answer soon became clear after I put out a tweet the morning after the fire:

Notre-Dames architectural design, like all Gothic cathedrals in Europe, comes directly from #Syrias Qalb Lozeh 5th century churchCrusaders brought the twin tower flanking the rose window concept back to Europe in the 12th century. Its in #Idlib province, still standing

The reaction within a matter of minutes was staggering. Realising the tweet had struck a nerve, I decided to explain more in a blog on my website that same morning. I called it: The heritage of Notre Dameless European than people think.

It created a storm of interest. By lunchtime I had been contacted by Middle East Eye and by Asharq al-Awsat asking if they could reblog the piece on their websites. Within the next few days the blog was published by AFP Beirut and ended up being translated into Arabic, French, German, Chinese, Japanese and Hindi for most international media outlets. For whatever reason, this kind of information no longer seems to be mainstream and has somehow dropped off peoples radar.

Are we ready, in the current climate of Islamophobia, to acknowledge that a style so closely identified with our European Christian identity owes its origins to Islamic architecture? I wonder. In October 2019 I visited the British Museums Inspired by the East exhibition, not expecting to find anything of relevance to this book since the focus was on portable objects, like Orientalist paintings, ceramics, glass, jewellery and clothing. But one exhibit caught my eyethe widely reprinted and influential fifteenth-century pictorial map of Jerusalem showing all the Christian pilgrimage sites carefully labelled in Latin. It was a Christian vision of Jerusalem, with any evidence of the contemporary Mamluk Muslim rule quite literally airbrushed out of the pictureor so the map-maker thought. I laughed out loud, for the central building of the map, dominating all else, was an enlarged representation of the Dome of the Rock, carefully mislabelled as King Solomons biblical temple. The unwitting Bernhard, canon of Mainz Cathedral, in documenting his pilgrimage of 1483, had perpetuated the mistake of the twelfth-century Crusaders, who did not realise the structure was a Muslim shrine built in 691 by the ruler of Islams first empire. As a result, well into the eighteenth century when the error was finally realised, many European churches were modelled on a Muslim shrine.