Hello, everyone. Welcome to the second of six, Professor Slade, professor of Fine Art Lectures for 2021.
This is an important tradition. At the University of Oxford was John Ruskin, who gave the first series of lectures on art in 1870,
shortly after he was inaugurated as the initial state professor of fine art.
Ever since, a distinguished scholar has been invited to follow in his footsteps.
My name is Geoffrey Bachem and I am the professor for history of art here at the University of Oxford.
It is my great pleasure to introduce this year's slate. Professor Dr. Geralyn de Dodds Gerry Dodds as Harlequin, a Dear Donlon Professor,
Faculty of Art History at Sarah Lawrence College in the United States.
Professor Dodds, scholarly work has centred on mediaeval, Spanish art and architecture,
and especially on issues of trans culture and identity formation.
Amongst her many publications are arts of intimacy, Christians, Jews and Muslims in the making of Castilian culture.
A renowned co-authored textbook.
In addition to her other books, catalogues and essays, Kerry has also curated a number of exhibitions and made films to accompany them.
In 2018, in recognition of her exceptional contributions to the dissemination of knowledge of Spanish history and culture, Prof.
Dodds was the recipient of the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit from the Government of Spain.
We are honoured that Professor Dodds accepted our invitation to deliver this year's slate.
Professor of fine art lectures and I now am honoured to hand over the microphone to her thank.
Thank you so very much.
My thanks once again to the Committee for Slade lectures for this enormous honour and for the support of the Department of Art History,
the Great Torch Team and Professor Babatunde. The Great Mosque of Cordoba unfolds low and expansive at the city's heart,
and from its centre grows the 16th century basilica that reminds us that it is today also a cathedral of Cordoba.
In 2006, the Diocese of Cordoba surreptitiously registered in its own name, a number of properties assumed to be in the public trust.
And amongst those appropriated was this building, which is both the cathedral and a national monument.
For a mediaevalist, it's kind of thrilling in an anachronistic sort of way to see a cathedral chapter flex its muscles in this day and age.
But in this case, 14 portends danger in a host of ways.
Religious consecration responded The local government is not the way to acquire property.
They were clearly not mediaevalist,
and they were especially not his spinners for whom the acquisition of property is all about religious consecration.
Through public outcry and various legal contests, the cathedral chapter of Cordoba has aggressively intervened in the construction of
a tightly controlled historical narrative centred around Christian physical and
ideological possession of the building instrumental losing the monumental 16th century
church inscribed at its centre to create a teleological structure of Reconquista,
in which the site and building are seen as primarily primordial Christian.
While the mosque building is and I quote the is not sorry, there it is, the Islamic intervention between a fictive church and the present cathedral.
And this is the flyer that you get and it and it talks about the history of the church and
the entire mosque structure is is called an Islamic intervention in this Christian history.
This level of discursive control is offered in opposition, of course, to popular secular narratives.
The commodified competencia we spoke about last week celebrating an idealised religious pluralism in its most reductive form,
exploited by a growing tourist economy in Watson and Waterton, called a consumption of otherness.
The frizzle of exoticism met in encountering an enormous mosque possessing the centre of a European city.
But was there a thrill of exoticism in the beginning?
Did the forms of the mosque constitute a symbol of sectarian defiance when it was first constructed?
I'd like to consider these thoughts today in two discussions. The first?
How did the mosque take its place in the new Maya capital?
The hitherto very Christian city of Cordoba?
And then 200 years later, how other was the material form of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the grand period of the 10th century caliphate?
Between 711 and 718, several expeditions of troops under the command of an enterprising Tariq ibn
Ziyad crossed the narrow streets that separated North Africa from Spain in time,
defeating the Visigoths monarchy already fragmented by civil war and internal strife.
Much of the Visigoths and Hispano Roman elite took advantage of the pacts offered by the
conquerors through which they could maintain their estates and the practise of their religion.
And it's probably to pragmatism on both sides, together with military conquest that the allied forces triumphed.
This occupation was composed not only of Arabs, Visigoths and Hispano Romans,
but also of restive Berbers and Syrians engulfed in mutual suspicion and militant rivalries,
making it difficult to establish a stable provincial rule.
Six years after the initial conquest, the capital of Ireland, Luce was transferred from Seville to Cordoba,
probably because Seville's Visigoths gothic aristocracy was still resistant and peevish,
intent on asserting their actual rights to their own property.
Well, local elites were displaced from of intramural palaces, leaving the new conquerors more of a free urbanist.
A canned. The lead in Teak City of Cordoba had been established close to the river in the southwestern section of the city,
and it was here that the new medina, the new city, was constructed, appropriating late antique locations for civil and religious authority.
The presence of a congregational mosque where the Muslim community joined for
prayer on Fridays was an essential first step in establishing a colonial presence.
The little square in blue indicates the first stage of the later mosque and the probable position of the original mosque,
which was likely, however smaller, its functions were religious, political and social.
As the place in which the community prayed together and experienced its unity,
and also from which the imam led the community and declaring its allegiance to its ruler, amongst other ceremonies of authority.
But in this early period, mosques were likely rudimentary on the Iberian Peninsula, and they did not require the erasure of other confessions.
Though, of course, conflictive images of churches and mosque loom large in Iberian historiography.
Militant Arabic texts that spoke of the destruction of churches to make way for
triumphant mosques have been exposed as legitimising tropes compose long after the fact,
as have more recent utopian narratives about systemic tolerance use.
Here is the capitulation treaty made in 1713 between Abdulaziz and the Visit
Gothic to admire governor of the region of the southeast part of the peninsula.
And here it's in pink. It promises that Christians quote will not be coerced in matters of religion.
Their churches will not be burned, nor will sacred objects be taken so long as Woodmere fulfils the conditions we have set for him.
These were privileges that could be accorded to me, usually Christians or Jews whose rights to worship and to conduct conduct their own
communal affairs were established by PACs offered to the communities who capitulated.
Such PACs helped to buttress the progress of conquest and colonisation.
But the conditions of Christians and Jews could vary widely because the church over resisting population was not thus protected,
and there were many complex legal questions in between, which might be why civil kept its indigenous elites.
But Cordoba less so. The history of the of the construction of the First Congregational Mosque of Cordoba lies between
these two discourses and is on remarkably still a hot issue because part of the narrative
to which the cathedral chapter of Cordoba clings today concerns a Basilica of St. Vincent
proposed by Ibn Eatery incorporating an earlier chronicle in his 14th century by A. McGarry.
He recounts that the earliest whistle conquerors of all in Dallas followed the practise of the inmates of Damascus
by sharing the space of a monastery of Saint Vincent in Cordoba with the Christians until in the 8th century,
the new Neumeier Emir Abdul Rahman, the first leader, purchased the entire site from the Christians to enlarge his mosque.
This is an unlikely history, as it's stated, we can find no monastery of Saint Vincent Vincent in Cordoba,
either in Texas or in archaeology and chronicles closer to time and place do not make a mention of this.
The account is so clearly meant to a lie the founding of the Great Mosque of
Cordoba with an almost identical account concerning the AMIDE mosque of Damascus.
Then it was likely a legitimising oppose, one that's been repurposed by today's cathedral,
a window that you see on the right constructed into the vestiges of the late antique flower mosaic that has been excavated by today's cathedral.
I mean, not by the cathedral of a late 19th floor mosaic is labelled the Basilica of San Vicente,
but it's located in a place that had no mosque over it until 1987.
That's the red arrow two centuries later than Abdul Rahman's building.
But the mosaic and the window materialised so graphically that trope of replacement,
the obsession with the notion of erasure of a Christian church that it has propelled even the scholarly discourse into two poles.
There was a church, there was no church when the situation was more interesting, if less satisfying from an ideological point of view for either side.
I'm happy to say. Predictably, it is Professor Susana Calvo Kapila who is now the mosque's most important chronicler,
who points to excavations that have revealed a material dedicated to St. Vincent,
not in Cordoba but in Valencia, one which fell into ruin during the eighth century and was replaced soon after by a mosque.
This same process occurred in Zaragoza and Seville,
opening up an alternative scenario of a gradual process of appropriation of urban topography such as that chronicled by Mattia Geodetic in Syria,
in which early mosques were often built contiguous to, but usually not on top on,
not on top of existing churches in the nexus of towns, mercantile and administrative centres.
Until until the acceleration of conversion to Islam could cause the abandonment of church buildings.
Calomel has pointed to texts that speak of a large functioning church within the country,
signs of the medina of Cordoba at the same time as the earliest mosque,
a narrative that suggests something like this same process and then an unusual conversion of documentary and archaeological data.
Gutierrez Yonnet has demonstrated that the same thing happened in the Episcopal city of Vieille,
one of the very sites named in the Treaty of Two, admitted that we quoted earlier.
I use church survived long after the famous pact that protected it until it was slowly
abandoned while the mosque was built in another part of the urban centre altogether.
This looks very much to me like what happened in Cordoba,
where the mosque was built over an extensive Episcopal complex without necessarily displacing all its churches.
Cordoba would wait, however, for the arrival of the Mayan exile, Abdul Rahman,
the first for the beginning of the construction of the mosque we see today, far from Cordoba.
A revolution had occurred in 07:50 as a Bassett's defeated the Ohlmeyer caliphate and moved their capital to accommodate an Islamic world.
Continuing expanding to the east, the Abbasid had hunted and killed most of the Almiron's.
But great nephew of the admired Caliph, Walid Abdul Rahman, had evaded caption.
Al McCarey conveys a fabulous fragment from even Haiyan of what was purported to
be Abdul Rahman on account of his desperate escape across the Euphrates River.
The murder of his brother by Abbasid agents. And a secret crossing to Africa, where his mother's people, the Nafisa Berbers, resided from there.
After long negotiations, he crossed to an Iberia that seemed to those who lived in Damascus or Baghdad.
A wild remote frontier over which the ambassador would ultimately relinquish practical hold.
A place that had deep divisions already between different Arab tribes, Syrians,
vestiges of a shattered Roman Envisat Gothic aristocracy and Berbers who resented their secondary status in a promised egalitarian Islamic Ummah.
All of these groups were by now long rooted in independent power nuclei in the peninsula and did not yield easily to central control.
Christians were the least of Abdul Rahman's problems.
It would take Abdul Rahman nearly 30 years to unify this new state and act symbolised by the construction of
the mosque that would visualise his new consolidated emirate or Princeton and redefine his authority as imam.
But how was Abdul Rahman to give this building in a restive alanda loose,
a coherence that was not rooted in its connexion to the central Abbasid caliphate from which he was now politically estranged?
This kind of hyperscale plan that he uses is quite conservative.
It used the language of late antique architecture in a prayer hall wider than long subverting
hierarchy so that the aisles appeared without the Coleman Coleman story effect of,
for instance, a Christian basilica,
emphasising instead the collective experience of the community over axial authority Abdul Rahman would visualise his new mosque.
I think as an offshoot of the Imperial Building programme of his great uncle Alwaleed,
the first the admired Caliph who codified so many of the forms of the mosque.
This forest of columns 11 tiles with a slightly wider central aisle running all of them running perpendicular to the Kibler.
The wall facing Mecca possibly reflected the prayer hall of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,
but might also, in its simplicity, evoke an Iberian tradition,
reaching back to the first to meet conquerors of the peninsula to an Iberian mired
heritage sanctified by its antiquity and one that preceded Abbasid authority.
Regarding Damascus, it has been cautioned that such direct reference,
as I'm referring to so far from the capital is unlikely and yet consider Abdul Rahman's experience his connexion to Damascus,
from which he was exiled and his need to unify and legitimise his new polity under his family name in perpetuating this early plan.
Abdul Rahman could visually construct a new foundational history for middle and to loose,
one that could imbue the peninsula with its own essential Islamic authority, separate from that claimed by the Abbasid caliphate.
But here in elevation is also something far more complicated.
It's startling and new effect a forest of columns with a permeable elevation of super post arches and animated, almost provocative polychrome.
Marseilles noticed that the double arches of the aqueduct of Mérida provide a solution for lifting
the ceiling of quarter on quarter bicycles style hole much as a row of Windows does in Damascus.
So that is expensive. State space does not become oppressive, but the effect here is totally new and fabulously complex.
A conventional late antique arcade below and a second elevator arcade above,
fragmenting one's vision of the whole into ambivalent, ambiguous, overlapping lateral spaces,
a kind of hall of mirrors in which it's difficult to situate oneself or to judge
distances with clarity so that experience capitulates to multiple perspectives.
Abdul Rahman could not reproduce the colossal scale or gilded mosaics of the mosque built by his great uncle, the Great Mosque of Damascus.
However, at Cordoba, as at Damascus, something of the same theory of imperial self-representation is at work.
Abdul Rahman Cordoba originally had a concave mirror up a nished located on the Kibler wall, indicating the director of prayer,
a form first introduced by Al Waleed in Medina and Damascus that would become a standard feature of mosque architecture.
It might also carry the memory of the presence of the first imam of light and other royal associations.
And as at Damascus, the Mirror up here took the form of a scallop shell.
Susanna Calvo has shown.
And was paid at quarter, but to the use of local foliar, both classical and lead antique, a classical language repurposed not as an effect,
not as a reference to Rome, but to serve as a connexion to this imperial mired pass for the AMIDE cultural system.
Culture, Administration and Architecture 2.0 maintains took root in the late antique core.
Auditor Papaconstantinou has shown you mind system adoption of pre-existing
late antique labour and contract systems and the labourers themselves as well.
Something clearly at work in Cordova. She sees this as part of a conscious process of who might reclaiming the standard practises of imperial lineage.
It is manifest here in the systematic but neither exclusive nor mindless use of the horseshoe arch in its local aesthetic
and constructional avatar in the midst of a building that's otherwise formerly inventive and meticulous in its references.
So the horseshoe arch is used in the lower arches in the superimposed arches of the Great Mosque Sportsbook.
But there are, of course, in the upper arches semi-circular arches.
That is to say that using a horseshoe arch inventively but also quite consciously, it's not a major building construction thing going on here.
But given the aqueduct brings something else with it, it brings the means by which the mosque's strident polychrome was achieved.
The alternation of stone and brick was widely used in civic projects in the late Roman Empire, though it Mérida,
it is unsure if the alternation existed in the arches where it would have been technically more expensive and practically unnecessary.
The Cordoba, however, stone was alternate with red bricks, which had to be individually shaped to fit with the wedge shape of the stone,
which was then we need to ask at Cordoba had merit as red and white masonry just come along for the ride.
Escort of US designers appropriated the doubled arches, as is often said, but OK.
Can you imagine a motif so carefully conceived so that it completely dominates our impression
of the interior of the mosque to the extent that it becomes its primary signifier?
Can you conceive of this as passively adopted? I do not think so,
because this way of making banded arches presented Abdul Rahman with local techniques and material that could recall
the opulent opus tiling of the Great Mosque of the Great umpired monuments that constituted his lost heritage.
The Dome of the Rock or the Great Mosque of Damascus.
Abdul Rahman knew the great humoured monuments, not as symbols or as literary boy, but his personal memories projected on to his political identity.
These are the monuments envisioned imperfectly or better, said locally.
The Great Mosque of Cordoba through the gifts and limitations of an indigenous building tradition.
For a prince who bore amongst his many titles, Descent of the Empire,
collapse for a prince who was trying to picture a way of being Iberian and mired in an embarrassing world.
This was a theatre for the proclamation of political authority.
The unfurling of standards before the departure for war, the building of the mosque of Abdul Rahman,
the first in 1787, marked materially the passage of Orlando loose from a chaotic,
fragmented and remote province of bickering start strongmen into a state,
a mosque in how that state with an identity separate from that of the embattled caliphate that vanquished his family.
It represented a polity that was to be a superior Iberian, as the Bassett's architecture was Mesopotamian.
It carried the standard of the new state at the periphery of the Muslim.
The polychrome then appeared in the earliest exterior gate of the mosque,
the Bab always are in and in subsequent ones in its broader composition of it in the same broad composition of those of umpired palaces in Syria.
But now, in a form that has become emblematic of the new Spanish, my prints them a horseshoe arched door with a wide extra dose,
alternating red and white blue suarez and in framed by a rectangular moulding called an office.
Consciousness of the explicit meanings of these forms is found in their durable afterlife.
For over two centuries, in each of the subsequent additions to the mosque,
we can read unswerving reverence to this same elevation under Abdul Rahman the second.
In the long exhale extended to the mosque by Alpha Cam, the second through to the final 11th century additions to the mosque by al-Mansour.
Where the arches were constructed entirely of stone.
So the effect of resentment over the effect of resentment was achieved by painting red and white patterns that,
like marble resentment, was not tied to the scores below.
Why would you paint stone? Because the effect of alternation and polychrome in case the message of homemade antiquity.
Together with local authority, a sense of continuity carefully preserved by each of his rulers for over 200 years.
So I'd like them to step back to the 10th century to the height of the Iberian umpired power,
Cordoba was now the most powerful city in Europe and its most influential cultural capital.
This was the moment in which if the little mosque havebeen handily, we talked about last week was the periphery.
The Great Mosque of Cordoba was at the centre.
And I realised after I made the title of this that I had taken the title subconsciously from one of Tom Nixons chapters in Toledo Cathedral.
But it sort of makes sense. Both of these are pivotal monuments that represent both peripheries and centres.
In 1929, Prince Abdel Rahman, the third declared the Spanish maids to be not just princes, but caliphs in their own rights.
Proclamations of local authority by Shiite fat in North Africa had provided both a challenge and licence to the alliance of Cordoba,
who were also eager to defy the ambassadors and leaders of the Sunni community.
Abdul Rahman the Third's monumental expression of this act would be his palace city
of Madina Hazara with its terraced apartments and Grand Basilica with Reception Hall,
which you see here, all marked by radically enclosed horseshoe arches with alternating blue swirls,
now a clear marker of Mayan identity and a connexion with his eponymous forebear.
It would fall to his son.
OK, come the second to construct a monumental addition to the mosque in 1965 as part of his deloire or political religious propaganda.
Indeed, Suzanne Akobo has seen this enlargement as a kind of political stage set an idea I would
like to support and expand upon while taking a moment to assail one of my own theories.
I'll have come the second edition to the mosque, where opulent statement of statements of dynastic renewal.
He lengthened the prayer hall 12 bays in the direction of the Kibler, converting a wide covered hole into a logic to a longitudinal directional one.
It now culminated in an elaborate new Neumark Sora, an enclosure reserved for the prince,
preceded by three domes and covered throughout with gold and coloured mosaic to ceramic material and craft hitherto unknown on the Iberian Peninsula.
Even Hillary would later recount that al-Hakim had written to the king of the room,
the Byzantines to send a capable worker in imitation of that which will knocked
out Malik did at the time of the construction of the Mosque of Damascus.
Al-Hayat Act of Peace patronage following his father's reclaiming of the Almiron's authority,
as Caliph might be seen as completing the meaning of the mosque of their ancestor Abdul Rahman,
the first by incorporating brilliant mosaics as a direct reference to Damascus and monumental
inscriptions that recalled the early my introduction of Arabic inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock.
These were material expressions of histories being codified in court.
Expressions of continuity that were visual challenges to fatten it and a [INAUDIBLE] claims of authority.
At Cordoba, the mosaics include meaningful vegetable forms, but are largely organised around the schemata architectural emblem of the Iberian Mayans.
A broad horseshoe arch embraced by El fees. Banded arches now covered in a complex flail play a figure in ground folded into a rigid i,
a graphical discourse of who made revival in authority that works for us the conscious meaning of the mosque as a political instrument.
In this chronological context, we need to place the roots of the story of the sharing of the Church of St. Vincent.
It is, after all, encountered in Ibn Nadari.
But he cites as his source an earlier and an earlier chronicle who wrote this explicit comparison between Damascus and Cordoba in the 10th century.
In the moment in which scholars began the conscious construction of the history of all land delusional and
revealed in particular through excerpts in the work of the Mukhtar base of Nation what Martina's gross speaks of.
And imagine now of the Almiron's in this period, and imagine now the Almiron's, which has as its goal,
a return to the admired caliphate not only of its old territories, but the threads of its own history.
But then how does the architectural form of this story fit into the weave of this, my imagine.
It has not only a deep microbe like a room, but three openings doors into a Treasury and a Sabbat, which is a direct passage into the palace.
And each of those surmounted by a red dome.
And a three child basilica space extends from it,
marked by two screens of fabulously manners Polly lobed to speak in these interlacing
arches that create the illusion of an interwoven architecture collapsed in space.
A second illuminated dome marks the foot of the space.
One of three domes originally, as Juan Carlos Ruiz discovered, there are many axial forms associated with moxa, rose and mirrored tiles.
But this three island space announced by luminous domes is unique in the Muslim world.
So why is this not about Christians? A three year old basilica,
a mirage in the form of a deep room like an APS and the decorative treatment of the entries to its Treasury and support all echoed the
Easton's in both elevation and plan of contemporary three lapsed Christian basilica like San Miguel de Escalada or the basilica at Bostrom.
And the screens of arches seemed like wild elaborations of the divisions created by an altar screen like that of Escalada.
At least I used to think so,
this is a this disposition reflects a division of space that belongs to a long-standing Christian liturgical development on the peninsula.
I used to think, after all, connected to an even more venerable Byzantine one.
But why would this mosque sort of look like a church that is a boundary not easily franchised in the confessional realm?
And then why not? I imagined that the aura was the immediate reflection of local Christian models masked or, you might say,
laundered of Christian ecclesiastical content through their use first in a secular context in the reception hall of midfielder Zara,
for instance, a three child basilica hall that culminated in three banded horseshoe arches.
The centre, one of which in framed the caliph as he was seated on a dice.
These arches. Or not doors. They're only in framing devices that demonstrate the extent to which the banded horseshoe arch
with a wide profile had little or literally become an emblem of new roommate Kayla full dignity.
So the three old mucks were about to come, the second reflected this cynical audience,
all of the palace underscoring the authority of the Caliph within the precincts of the mosque.
That reception hall, in turn echoing the axial throne halls of both lions and Bassett's.
The connexion between the mosque and the palace draws a fine thread from the site of
the Caliphs Religious Authority to his political home in the suburban Palace city,
one fortified by a formal processional route that ran from Cordoba to Medina Sutra.
There, a guest must walk between two rows of court retainers just as Barcelona reconstructs it here in the reception of 960 at Madina,
etc. The long aisles in Palace and Mosque provided an extended stage set for the performance of authority
in the articulation of hierarchies in which the side aisles indicate distance from the centre of power.
Modelling Saffron revealed the caliphs claimed to be the source of order and stability.
But though the silico plans had abounded in palatial concepts, concepts, concepts and contexts and mosques throughout the Mediterranean,
the particular way in which this was articulated brought one back to this 10th century churches.
There had been dramatic events amongst the DME in all on the loose.
A rash of voluntary monitors of resistant Christians in the 9th century and a revolt of more do indigenous converts to Islam,
along with rural Christians and Muslims under the Renegade or more have been?
Who was said to have converted to Christianity? And there were techs recognising the rhetorical power of Christian practise during these revolts.
Ali, did he see? Reminds us that the Treasury of this sura was a Koran in which or folios from the off of with moneyman often,
and that this is the copy which he wrote with his very hand and on it or drops of his blood.
Uthman was the martyred progenitor of the Almiron's, whose ultimate legacy legacy lay in their descent from him.
According to an three C, the Codex was carried in procession in this mock sura,
preceded by an authority who carries a candle before it's brought to a lectern where the imam gave the customary reading.
Processions with candles were extremely unusual in mosques and very frequent in churches.
Indeed, this procession is almost identical to the reading of the gospel in the Hispanic liturgy in which it was processed to the lectern,
accompanied by a monk with a candle.
Travis Sun points out that ocracy, who wrote from the 10th century, discusses the Mousab in a depth that heightens the credibility of this report.
Thus, I think putting aside recent claims that this is an Al-Mohannadi invention.
The appropriation was clearly not meant to directly reflect Christian practise,
but rather to garner something of the rhetorical power of that practise in a time when
the affective power of Christian worship had been on display for a century in Cordoba.
Perhaps it was possible that the use of these recognisable,
rhetorically powerful spaces and practises were appropriated and then redirected as performances of art, history and legitimacy.
In the case of the procession or in the case of the IRA, redirected through the use of anti-Christian graphic rhetoric in Soros,
denying the divine nature of Jesus located along the Kibler.
On the door with the support, for instance, is this creator of heaven and Earth?
How should he have a son when he has no console? And on a nearby portal portal, God forbid that he himself should be get a son.
However, it's always more complicated, isn't it? As Susanna Calvo in her careful study of the epigraph of the mosque now shows these tasks.
These texts occur in a far broader ideological context.
They are Koranic responses to three heterodox threats,
of which Christianity was just one in an epic graphic programme meant to support the
religious elite in serving the image of the caliphate as a defender of Sunni orthodoxy.
The main target was not Christians in general,
but the rebellion of more than half soon whose supposed apostasy and that of his sons had threatened Abdul Rahman,
the third role as defender of Orthodoxy.
The suppression of his revolt was amongst the most important victories of Abdul Rahman, the third on which with other victories,
he built his new dollar as Caliph and Ibn have soon had also attempted to align himself with enemies of the Almiron's,
and this gave Abdul Rahman the third, the third a chance to conquer his enemies by proxy.
Submitted Christians in the Spanish United States were saffron reminds us part of the larger political community.
Their mutual security was integrally associated with the Islamic legitimacy of amide rule.
And while jurists were concerned about religious transgressions, apostasy and contamination with Christians,
Christies has shown that there's little general anti-Christian polemic and olan de luce until the 11th century.
Christianity is present in this era, but not Christianity writ large,
the religion itself is a minor player in the game of political identities and anxieties.
And so if you're not, as I was focussed uniquely on religious difference in this mock up, the world becomes a little larger.
Because we sort of rushed back past Samarra, the Royal Abbasid city, of course,
was the ambassador against whom the Spanish inmates had fashioned their political identity.
But they also represented a challenge and a potent model.
The 10th century shift in focus from urban palaces to sprawling palatine complexes outside of urban centres would be shared in both realms.
And in fact, the inmates followed the ambassadors in creating a changing image of the Caliph into a more remote ceremonial figure.
A difficult access and a bustling city of Samarra had an impact in other ways as well.
The three openings in the mock Sora and Cordoba connects not only to Spanish and Byzantine churches,
but also to the same functions at the Great Mosque of Samarra,
and there's archaeological evidence that the ambassadors were using old tesserae in their microb.
We can begin to see summaries. Mosques are transmitted in written accounts as a catalyst for Al Qaeda camps pushed to such opulence.
Although he translates it, the models for the mosaics and the three mosques,
or openings into an expansive language about umpired continuity and legitimacy,
especially turning, essentially turning the Abbas its own opulence against them.
The forms that I saw as so Christians were those first adopted from Hispano Roman traditions in the
first years of the AMIDE emirate and developed over time to serve an Iberian umpired identity.
And now they rose to support the new caliphate. To mark the three openings as assuming not a basic.
The basilica is so medically consistent across time as a form, but it is protean and flexible in its specific iconographic applications.
By the time they appeared in al-Hakim, come the second smock Shura.
These forms had already evolved in a transcultural Mediterranean space.
For centuries, tracing a cognitive map for the performance of hierarchy at the intersection of secular authority and the
divine that was exploited eagerly and with full entitlement on both sides of the confessional divide.
Here they are, more semantically heated in the service of defying other Islamic realms and iconography that allows other similarities to to subside.
The deep room like Mitt, Rob expresses this convergence of meanings.
It's dome is in the form of a scallop shell connecting to the original mirrored nation of the mosque of Abdel Rahman,
the first and ultimately to the earliest, Miraz once again of a Waleed end of Damascus.
And yet, while it seems focussed squarely on it squarely on expressing umpire authority and renewal,
I am not sure the 10th century audience was oblivious to its vestigial meanings, peering out from the palimpsest of its formal history.
I'm remembering the procession before this mirror described by Ebony Immunitarie and also
a remark of Husam born to win a wide court official in the last years of the caliphate.
Even Husam led a tumultuous life after its fall before turning to study and writing in 10:27.
Born less than 20 years after the death of al-Hakim, the second he certainly knew Cordoba.
His discussion of legislation regarding mosque building is interesting for us here.
It's India's voluminous treaty on jurisprudence al Mukalla.
Evangelism begins his section on mosques, moral precaution against architecture by accepting the theoretical position of
other traditionalists that rejects the Mirabaud as a blameworthy innovation,
one that does not conform to the tradition of the prophet.
The reasons offered for this are the fear of imitating Christian churches and also of introducing luxury into the precincts of the mosque.
Of course, in practise regarding the use of microbes, the horse had already left the barn, even Hassan's eloquent interpreter,
Jose Miguel Puerto Belches, remarks that as regards architecture,
even housing was quote not always in line with the constructive realities of his time.
But we can read in these short comments that the Association of any Microbe,
let alone caught with the apps of a church, was a matter of open discussion.
I take this to mean that, however much the kibler of all have come,
the second has reinvented its antique Abbasid and Spanish roots is that its audience was not oblivious to this connexion.
It still bore a vestigial association with church building through all of those physical and temporal stratigraphy of interaction.
Despite his disapproval, what even has him shows us is that those associations must not have been very threatening.
That they paled next to the importance of facing down flatmates and ambassadors.
They paled next to the construction of my identity that the projected.
Memory, writes Eleanor Arrieta in a moving essay about today's mosque cathedral memory
accommodates only those facts that suited it thrives on big telescoping reminiscences.
It is vulnerable to transparencies and projections of all kinds.
As confessions, both Islam and Christianity demand boundaries and confessional spaces,
expressions of religious purity, but in their material manifestations,
these barriers were easily franchised because they were built off of a shared lexicon
of forms that excited latent meanings of divine hierarchy and UNmediated authority.
In the early mediaeval collective conscious.
And though we'd like to imagine that the separation between religions required blindness to this kind of latent intimacy,
such boundaries did indeed yield to an occasional flicker of consciousness.
But by. But why really, in the end would we be the only ones to see?
Thank you.