Islam and Architecture woohoo

Oh wow I'm hungry. It's 11:44pm and I'm fantasizing about food, food which I don't have in my refrigerator. So, Oh well.
It's also 11:44 pm on saturday night, at the end of another weekend in which I had set out to write a paper on Islam. (Saturday night here is Sunday night in the US. The week starts on Sunday. Weird to say.) Needless to say, the paper is not done.
Not really close.

Every time I look at it I am overwhelmed by how little actual information is there. My first instinct is to muse about the problems I am encountering rather than record facts. And so what happens is I read read read. Well, sort of. Think wow this contradicts this, or this is kind of like what this guy said, then write something about what I wrote above - with barely any mention to specifics, and then I realize I need to fill in the specifics, and I never quite get there because when I go to read more I find more problems that just don't work together and so instead of writing about facts I write about problems.

Or, I spend an hour on facebook. That too does not help the paper writing.
But really, I am getting to the hard part now, the part where I have to make something out of this trash so I can hand it in, and I keep hedging away from it. But it is time to try.
Time to try to put all the scattered facts I have read at some point and are now swimming around in my brain (I hope) on to paper, and then to make it coherent, and to give the paper a point. And damn I hate writing.

Bulllll crap. I don't want to write a history paper. I want someone else to write a history paper and then I can write questions about it.

The real problem is, once I get this paper done I have three more bigger papers to first decide on a topic for, research, and then write. This was supposed to be my easiest one... damn.

In other news, ugh, I don't want to talk about other news.

I'll tell you what I'm writing about. I'm writing about, or looking into the architecture Muslims built in the lands they conquered in the seventh century and eighth centuries. Blah time is problematic, because the muslim conquests started in the seventh century and continued until the 9th?, but I can't remember exactly where they conquered when, except that most of the places I am talking about were conquered by the seventh or beginning of the eighth century. I am too lazy to go and look at exactly what was conquered later and where. All I know is Syria, and North Africa, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran were all conquered really quickly by the Muslims - 640, and in the succeeding decades, and I stopped paying attention after that. To be honest I'm not sure when the Muslim conquests officially stopped. Maybe I should go wikipedia this now.

Anyway, I wanted to try to understand how the Muslims related to the peoples they conquered, and I thought that looking at the architecture might help. Really, I had seen in Spain that when the Christians reconquered spain from the Muslims they built cathedrals into a lot of mosques as a sign of their domination (I had thought at least) and I wondered if the Muslims did the same thing when they conquered the huge amount of land they conquered.

But ummmmmm.... they didn't really. Or well, my assumption about Spain was an uninformed one, and it's not so easy to say this piece of architecture means this. So, even things that seem to have been meant to show domination/ conquering are disputed by historians. Plus, well, there really aren't that many examples of towering and overwhelming pieces of architecture from the time immediately after the muslim conquests. The really impressive pieces of Islamic architecture seem to have been built much later (but I can't really get into those things in my paper because I chose to write about an earlier time).
And on top of all this I wanted to combine what I read about the architecture with the traditional history books about the Muslim conquest to try to gain an understanding of the Muslims' views of the people they conquered, and how they interacted with them.

Ummm... pretty impossible. I can't even figure out half of the equation, let alone put the two halfs together. Except, now comes the time when I try to make it seem like I know....
Like the ARabs at first kept apart from the people they conquered, not even trying to convert them and building separate towns for themselves. This helps explain why they did not seem for the most part to attempt huge feats of architecture. (Because they were keeping themselves separate from the people they conquered and were not, it seems, concerned with exhibiting to these people their dominance and power.)
Uh huh, but this is not correct, because there are a few examples of when the Muslims/ Arabs, did build grand mosques or monuments that seem to do just what i said they didn't do -- demonstrate their power for the people they conquered.
However, what I first said is still true to a certain extent. The Muslims when they conquered did not want to assimilate, and, they did not it appears persecute the people they conquered for not being Muslim.
And the first mosques they built were really primitive, not impressive, they seem to have just been built out of necessity. (They needed places to pray).

But now I am not being specific enough. The regions the Muslims conquered were very different from each other. In Syria they encountered the Christian and Jewish inhabitants (former inhabitants) of the Byzantine Empire. And they found lots of Christian (and Roman I think) architecture there along with the people. In Iraq they found people who had been under the rule of the Sassanians (Persians). The Sassanians were Zoroastrians and not as forceful about religion as the Byzantines. There doesn't seem to have been as much architecture in Iraq when the Muslims came. And in Iran there was a certain city that impressed the Muslims, but all in all they don't seem to have been as awed by the architecture here as in Syria. (Though this doesn't make sense because Persian architecture becomes really big later on, and I assume it was from pre- Islamic times.)

But anyway, because there was such an impressive corpus of architecture in Syria when the Muslims arrived they seem to have been affected enough to want to build architecture of their own. And so they built the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of Damascus. Which, it appears to me, are the only still standing, "impressive" pieces of architecture we have from the beginning of the eighth century from Islam. Both were built on or near Christian/ Jewish holy places. They seem to be symbols of the Muslims' or the ARabs' new dominion over the region.
And this is another problem -- whether the architecture symbolized a religious dominion or a secular political dominion, or both.
Damn, I don't know and everything I write gets confused.

Then there was also this city of Baghdad which was built later but this one author includes it with the Mosque and the Dome I was just talking about. It was a perfectly planned circular city, which I think I remember this guy saying was a symbol of the power of the Muslim princes who ruled there. In the ninth century Baghdad was thought of (at least in the Muslim empire) as the center of the world.

What else? well, also important but which I haven't mentioned here, or in my paper is that, DUH the muslim conquests occurred immediately after the birth of Islam and so to speak of Islam exerting its architectural muscle is kind of not fair. How could they make architecture when they did not have architecture of their own yet? This is kind of problematic sounding in a lot of ways, it sounds denigrating but I don't mean it to be. I don't think muslims had had a chance to develop their own form or architecture (or even an identity) to then put on display to other peoples. And many people say that before Islam there was no "architecture" in Arabia, because many people were nomadic living in tents, and the cities themselves were built simply out of mud and brick. This again smacks of the West writing pejoratively about the East, but what can I say? We don't have any grand excavations of architecture in Arabia from before the seventh century when Islam was born.

So what is all this? I don't know. I don't think I have learned anything.
And, sadly my paper in an attempt to sound paperly makes a lot less sense than what I have written here. BAHHHHH

At the end of all this if you asked me about Islamic architecture I will probably be able to tell you very little, because as I have said I get stuck on the problems and do not do enough of just learning.