MOST OF US see our first mosque at Woking. As the train slackens a small bulbous building appears among the fir trees to the left, and perhaps someone in the railway carriage says, ‘That’s Oriental.’ Our attitude is vague; and years afterwards, despite visits to the East, the vagueness remains. Whereas a Christian church or Greek temple wakens definite sentiments, a mosque seems indeterminate. We can recall its component parts and memorize it architecturally or can make a pretty picture of it against the blue sky, but its central spirit escapes. And before we grapple with such a book as the late Commendatore Rivoira’s on Moslem Architecture it may be worth while to do what he would scarcely think of doing: to question our memories, and through them the mosque itself, and to listen to what it has to say.
‘I was built,’ comes the answer, ‘in the first place at Medina, where I was a courtyard, and if you would understand me to-day you must still think of me as a courtyard, decorated by the accidents of history. Attached to the Prophet’s house, I was the area to which he proceeded when he would worship God, and where his companions joined him, summoned for this purpose by a cry from the top of my wall. I contained no ornament or shrine, nor was one part of me more holy than another. Near me was a well for ablution; in me was a fallen tree whereon the Prophet stood to preach; and against my north wall lay a stone to indicate the direction of Jerusalem, city of the prophets Abraham and Jesus. My inmates prayed northwards at first, but afterwards turned south, their aspiration being Mecca. Before long I was built at Mecca also, but (strange though this may sound) you should not think of Mecca if you would understand me, because there, contrary to my spirit, I enclosed a sacred object and became a shrine. Dismiss the Caaba with its illusion of a terrestrial goal. Recall the courtyard of Medina, construct upon its wall a tower for the crier, raise a pulpit upon its fallen tree, contrive from its well a lavatory or tank, and encloister the sides of the courtyard, in particular the side that indicates the direction for prayer. Then you will see me as I am to-day at Cairo, Mosque of Ibn Touloun.’
In the above reply the Mosque sets itself against a profound tendency of human nature — the tendency to think one place holier than another — and this is why it is rather a vague and unsympathetic object to a westerner, and why its own architects have tended to modify its arrangements. It does not fulfil what is to most of us the function of a religious building: the outward expression of an inward ecstasy. It embodies no crisis, leads up through no gradation of nave and choir, and employs no hierarchy of priests. Equality before God — so doubtfully proclaimed by Christianity — lies at the very root of Islam; and the mosque is essentially a courtyard for the Faithful to worship in, either in solitude or under due supervision. In the later centuries, under the influence of idolatrous surroundings, the original scheme was overlaid, and it is instructive to glance at the changes. The mosque that the Emperor Akbar built in 1560 for his new city near Agra is a good example. It has moved very far from the Medina model, and its air is almost that of a temple or church. The prayer niche, usurping the functions of an altar, has become the core of a vast and gorgeous building to which the eye and heart naturally turn, while the uncovered part of the courtyard sinks into the unimportance of a cathedral close and is dotted with tombs. When we leave the courtyard and pass through the ‘west door’ of the façade and through the smaller and darker apertures in the red sandstone beyond, we seem to near a sanctuary; and when the prayer niche at last appears and our eyes discern the ravishing but delicate colours that adorn its chamber, we have emotions appropriate to Canterbury or Chartres, and should not be surprised if priests arrived from the subordinate chapels on either hand, to mediate between the world and God. The emotion in such a mosque is religious, but scarcely Islamic; we do not experience it in the buildings of earlier date.
Since the edifice under consideration is a courtyard and not a shrine, and since the God whom it indicates was never incarnate and left no cradles, coats, handkerchiefs or nails on earth to stimulate and complicate devotion, it follows that the sentiments felt for his mosque by a Moslem will differ from those which a Christian feels for his church. The Christian has a vague idea that God is inside the church, presumably near the east end. The Moslem, when his faith is pure, cherishes no such illusion, and, though he behaves in the sacred enclosure as tradition and propriety enjoin, attaches no sanctity to it beyond what is conferred by the presence of the devout. Such mystery as accrues is the work of men. A Tunisian who visited Cairo in the thirteenth century found the famous mosque of Amr there littered with dirt; ‘nevertheless,’ he adds, ‘I experienced in it a soft and soothing influence without there being anything to look upon which was sufficient to account for it. Then I learned that this is a secret influence left there from the fact that the companions of the Prophet (may God accept them!) stood in its court while it was building.’ He was conscious of an atmosphere which, though supernatural, was not divine; men had produced it. And whereas men may perfume some mosques, they may defile others; for example, the mosque which Aurangzebe built at Lahore upon the ground of his murdered brother Dara, and which is reckoned unfavourable for prayers. Legends such as these, though they lapse from the spirit of Medina do not oppose it. Islam, like Christianity, is troubled by the illogical and the idolatrous, but it has made a sterner fight against them. The Caaba, the worship of saints, the Mecca-position, do not succeed in obscuring the central truth: that there is no God but God, and that even Mohammed is but the Prophet of God; which truth, despite occasional compromises, is faithfully expressed in Moslem Architecture, and should be remembered by those who would understand it.
[1920]