Original subtitles

The narrative of human history

is punctuated by war and conquest, triumph

and catastrophe.

But in the end, what endures?

It is not the struggle that has lasting in our consciousness

and treasured in our museums.

It is the outpouring of creativity and intelligence

that is civilization's greatest gift.

The true legacy of Islamic culture

is revealed in the nuance and ingenuity

of its art and architecture.

That feeling

of the encounter with majesty, the encounter

with monumentality, it transcends culture.

It transcends history.

It is a kind of universal human experience of the arts.

We use art, we use architecture to crystallize our deepest

emotions and our deepest aspirations

for an understanding of our place in the world.

These monuments and artifacts

continue to inspire us.

They herald the finest qualities of Islamic culture

and show us the best of individual achievements.

Each contributes a crucial part in the ascent

of world civilization.

The seventh century was a turning point in history.

In Europe, the Germanic tribes that

had overrun the Roman Empire struggled for supremacy

as they shaped their feudal kingdoms.

To the east, the once great empires of Byzantium and Persia

were weakened by centuries of mutually destructive wars.

At that moment, the tribes of Arabia

began one of history's greatest revolutions

in power, religion, culture, and wealth, united

under the new faith of Islam.

From its birth in the Arabian Peninsula,

Islam spread across the basin of the Mediterranean Sea,

eventually we changed from Indonesia to Spain.

And from this diverse civilization,

and the extraordinary wealth of its rulers,

came an outpouring of artistry.

Objects and buildings, gardens and paintings

reflect how this new culture grew

in a varied and complex world.

It's not only about beautiful things.

It's not only about looking at specific techniques

or how a beautiful object looks in a museum.

It's more like a window on a culture.

Islamic art is a reflection of the people and the context

in which it was produced.

And that, of course,

makes art even that much more important because it

is a reflection of who we are, and what

we are, and will be memorialized in the years to come.

The themes that emerged

as Islamic art developed show us the similarities

in our common cultures, how our techniques and styles are

shared and transformed.

Well, there

are aspects of art and architecture

that are universal, that you don't need to learn

to appreciate to get it.

So I might have to learn Arabic to read the inscriptions,

but I don't have to read Arabic to appreciate

the purity of simple black script

on a white background on a plate.

It is elegance, and it's elegance

that speaks through the centuries.

In Muslim tradition, Islam

began in 610 in a cave in Mecca, where

an angel came upon the prophet Muhammad

and revealed to him the words of the Koran.

In the first revelation, God proclaimed himself the creator

and said, "Read, for your Lord is the most generous,

the one who taught the use of the pen,

taught man what he did not know."

More than poetry, more than a holy book,

it was the very word of God.

For Christians, God's gift was his son.

He sent down his son to save mankind.

For Muslims, god sent down a revelation.

So the parallel is between Christ and an oral revelation.

Because God's gift to mankind in Islam is the Koran,

writing becomes the central feature of Islamic culture.

And the use of the word everywhere,

from day-to-day objects to Koran manuscripts,

is the one feature that separates Islamic culture

from all others.

The earliest dated words of the Koran

are found in a stone building in Jerusalem,

one of the most sacred and politically charged cities

in the world.

Built in 692, it is called the Dome of the Rock.

The Dome of the Rock

would have been a familiar building in terms of form,

that is, that the shape, the arches, the techniques

of decoration would have all been

within the local Christian vocabulary.

It borrows the form

from a Byzantine martyrium.

And a martyrium is simply a building

that marks the place of a martyrdom

or perhaps the burial place of a saint.

But instead of a burial site,

the dome covers a massive rock believed by Muslims

to be the sacred place from which Mohammad ascended

to heaven on his mystical night journey

to pray with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.

The thing that

makes this a uniquely Islamic building is

the Arabic inscription that runs around it.

That is, in effect, the sign that says,

this is from a new culture.

This isn't just somebody putting up words.

This is somebody who cares.

This is carefully composed.

This is beautiful writing, calligraphy.

The interior inscription talks constantly

about how God is the one not three.

And this is clearly a rebuttal to Christianity

where the primary focus is that God sent down his son

and God is tripartite.

And for Muslims, this is anathema.

God is one, not three.

So clearly there is some kind of response

to the Christian presence in the city.

That inscription is made in gold cubes.

They're small glass cubes with gold foil on them.

They are by far the most expensive kind of cube.

And in Christian buildings often are used for halos

or used behind the figure of Christ.

In the Dome of the Rock, they are

used for this inscription that runs around the building.

The Koran became the focus of devotion,

but it also became the focus of art.

From the earliest times on,

Muslims try to make Koran manuscripts as

beautiful as possible.

Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing,

is considered more important than all the other arts.

Today, one of the most well-respected

Muslim calligraphers in the world

is a convert from California.

After teaching himself Arabic, and working for over 20 years

to perfect his art, Mohamed Zachariya

finally traveled to Turkey to learn from the masters in 1983.

Basically, they made a deal.

They said, if you want to start all the way from the beginning,

if you want to forget everything you learned about calligraphy

for a while and sort of go from blank from start, just

like you'd never picked up a pen before,

and go through the lessons, we'll

be behind you all the way with this thing and help you out.

But if you can't do that, have a nice time in Istanbul.

Zachariya accepted the challenge

and began to learn his craft again,

just as the first masters had before him.

Traditionally Muslims always

wrote with a reed pen.

So you went out and you had reeds or you imported reeds.

Trimming the pen is even more important.

Cutting the nib is even more important

than actually the reed itself.

And you have a tool on which you lay the reed when

you cut it and a special knife.

And people collected these tools and gathered them

in their little tool boxes.

Decorated with geometric designs

and calligraphy, these toolboxes alluded

to the practical use of the box, as well as

the mystical power of the pen.

I've always had a facility for carving.

But to cut a pen, you need a knife of a certain shape

and a certain curvature in the blade.

If it isn't that curvature, you're

never going to cut a good tip.

In the seventh century,

calligraphers wrote the Koran on treated animal skins

called parchment.

The parchment was

so important and so expensive that sometimes they

even reused it.

And they scraped away an earlier text and rewrote on top of it.

And what's happened over time is the earlier text has darkened,

and you can actually see it underneath.

Most of them-- they're readable,

or legible, or practical.

They're very, very interesting.

But they don't rise to the level of art.

But every now and then you see one of them, and you look at it

and say, how on earth could this guy have done that?

You know?

How did they do their [inaudible]?

How'd they cut their pen?

We don't even know what angle the pens were cut.

But it simply takes your breath away.

Islamic calligraphy was forever

altered by a new invention from the east, paper.

Paper was introduced into the Islamic world

in the eighth century due to interaction between China

and the Islamic caliphate.

So the technique of paper making and actual paper makers

were transported from China to Islamic lands.

And paper just takes off in an Islamic context.

Just as important as the pen,

the paper must be specially treated and prepared

for calligraphy.

The man who taught me paper making or paper

prep took me aside one day and said,

I'm going to show it all to you.

The paper is rubbed with a rag that has a bit of soap on it.

The soap is dry rubbed on the drag.

It's a wool felt, and it's rubbed all over the paper

to give it lubrication.

Otherwise, the burnisher would snag the-- the surface

and digress the heck out of it.

You want to have it smooth so the pen will

glide across the surface.

But you also don't want it slippery.

You want to have the paper have a grab to it, just enough so it

holds the pen.

Doesn't slip.

The ink sits undersurface, doesn't penetrate.

For the calligrapher, the process

of copying the words of the Koran

is, in itself, a meditation, a prayer,

as God speaks through the pen.

And when you write, it just writes itself.

Your own connection with it feels minimal

because your concentration is concentration without thinking

about it being concentration.

It's what the old Arabs used to call [arabic], which

is the ease that comes from practice that

makes the hard thing look easy.

Now, it is impossible

if you are writing with a reed pen to write more than two

or three letters with one pen stroke.

You have to recharge your pen.

You have to dip it back into the ink.

But the point with calligraphy is to not see those strokes,

to not see the difference between one and the next,

to imagine that it was written with an unending pen.

The old guys used

to hold their breath under the theory

that if you hold your breath when the pen is in motion,

the breath goes down into your hand, through the pen

and into the paper.

And that's what would give it that life, or breath, as they

would call it.

You are not looking

to see any human interaction.

You are looking to see the divine.

When you see a manuscript that has all these little marks

on it, that's a later manuscript because it's

meant to be used by someone who's actually reading the text

not just using it to recall what he already had memorized.

We also have chapter headings that are illuminated.

Illumination is a very important art form

in the production of Islamic manuscripts.

It serves to navigate the reader through the different sections

of the text.

Because calligraphy basically

is for reading, you know?

It's not really about paper, pens, ink, and stuff like that.

It's about meaning.

And in my case, you know, I'm an American.

Obviously, wherever I go, you know, I'm the pink on,

you know?

And, uh-- you see a photograph of all the calligraphers,

you know?

And I'm in there, you know.

It's-- that guy looks really funny, you know?

But it's-- what am I doing with it?

So I try to-- I try to bring it out what it means.

And for me, that's absolutely the number one thing.

I have access to this material, and I have to pass it on.

It is that divine presence embodied

in the word that appears throughout Islamic art

as writing becomes ornament.

I am always

moved when I hold a plate or a ceramic object or a metal pen

case, and think of myself, I'm holding the same thing

that someone 1,000 years ago or 600 years ago held.

I'm repeating the experience.

I'm in a different place, a different moment in history.

I'm a different human being.

Everything about my world is different except that object.

And that object comes forward intact.

That's very moving.

Many buildings in the Islamic world

are imbued with the voice of God as elaborate inscriptions speak

from their stone walls.

They really are beautiful to look at.

Even if one doesn't understand them,

one can always appreciate their beauty.

And those inscriptions are usually

in places that you cannot really read.

You're not expected to read.

But you expect to relate to them because you

know what's going to be there.

You just know what sorts of verses of the Koran

are used, for example, in certain buildings

or in the case of Alhambra it's the beautiful poetry.

The Alhambra was built in the 14th century

by the last Muslim rulers of Granada, Spain.

Part fortress, part palace, the Alhambra

provided a princely refuge from the ravages

of the fading empire.

In order to feel Alhambra,

to know what was meant, you have to go slowly and read

the poetry that is written just at eye

level inside the building.

I could spend hours standing by a window,

reading an inscription, looking at this.

That's what it was made for.

It is meant to be lived in.

In some cases, some of the writing actually

is as if the building is speaking about itself.

You have the dome or the wall or the fountain

talking to the viewer and telling you what it's about

and how it functions or how it's set within the building itself.

The water basin whispers.

Melted silver flows through the pearls which it resembles

in it's pure, don beauty.

Water and marble seem to be as one.

The calligraphy as it melds into ornament,

the boundary between the two is so subtle

that they become so extraordinarily

good at just weaving shapes in and out of one another.

Are these zoomorphic?

Are they-- do they come out of vegetable life?

You know, you can't really tell, and it

doesn't make any difference.

Because they arrive at a place that totally

masks and has left the place from which they came.

The cities of the Muslim world,

extending across three continents,

are as diverse as their people.

But the fundamental human need for shelter is common to all.

We put tremendous effort

in what we build.

And therefore, they reflect a great deal about us,

about our values-- economic values, social virtues,

cultural values.

You have mosques.

You have palaces.

You have very impressive military architecture,

and you have the whole spectrum of buildings

that cover what people use.

The first mosques were made from simple unadorned mud

brick.

Hearing the call to prayer, Muslims

gathered in open courtyards all facing the side

of the mosque closest to Mecca.

Later, direction is shown by niche

in the wall called the mihrab.

Other than the mihrab, in real terms,

there is no other standard element that

has to be in a mosque.

The mosque is one of the elements that are

ubiquitous to Muslim societies.

Yet, it is built, expressed in very different ways,

historically.

One of the oldest surviving

mosques is in Damascus, Syria.

Finished in 715, it was built a little over 100 years

after the birth of Islam.

The Great Mosque of Damascus reveals

how Islamic architecture quickly adapted to the changing

needs of a growing religion.

More and more specialization

develops within mosque spaces.

You have special places for the prints

and special places for ablution and special places

for the call to prayer.

It becomes more hierarchical.

A pulpit called a minbar

was added for the reading of the Friday sermon,

making the speaker visible to the entire congregation.

In order to create a large enough space

to house the city's entire Muslim population for Friday

prayer, the great mosque of Damascus

was built in the hypostyle form.

The hypostyle mosque simply

is the idea of a series of columns built along a grid.

So what you end up with s a forest

of columns, an infinite space.

So you look and just see column after column after column.

It's a very spiritual experience.

And you find it very often in the mosques

that were built during the first three, four

centuries of Islamic history.

Outside in the mosque courtyard,

glass mosaics sparkle in the sunlight,

evoking a protected and sacred natural space within the stone

walls of the mosque.

It incorporated

the largest service of mosaics ever created anywhere

in the world.

You have rivers and houses and trees

and some have read that as an expression of Damascus,

a city that is known for its Barada river

and also for its orchards.

Another was that this is a representation

of what paradise would be like.

So you have that reading of the mosque,

which is very interesting.

But the leaders of the dynasty that

created the wealth and power of Damascus

would perish later in the eighth century.

After a violent political rebellion,

a young Syrian prince named Abd al-Rahman

was forced to flee Damascus, narrowly

escaping a certain death at the hands of his family's rival.

Abd al-Rahman made his way to North Africa

and on to Cordoba, Spain, seeking refuge

in the struggling European outpost of the Islamic empire.

There, the prince founded a dynasty of his own.

His subjects called him al-Dakhil, or the immigrant.

But Abd al-Rahman made Cordoba his home.

As he set out to create a great mosque for his new capital,

he used the hypostyle mosque of Damascus

as his blueprint, longing for the Syrian homeland

to which he could never return.

Abd al-Rahman I

who built one of the masterpieces

of Islamic architecture and world architecture.

He had access to older Visigothic columns

that he found in Spain.

These were relatively short columns.

They didn't have a sense of monumentality

that we could find in an earlier building such as the Great

Mosque of Damascus.

So what he did is he put two rows of arches

on top of each other to raise the ceiling

and get a higher building.

And it actually created this wonderful spatial effect.

And whenever the building was expanded,

that system was maintained.

One of the extensions

was to add this fabulous mihrab, which

is right now on the qibla wall.

And it's done in the same technique of mosaic that had

been used earlier in Damascus.

Added 200 years after the mosque was

first constructed, the mosaics required a skill unknown

to the artisans of Cordoba.

They had to write to the Byzantine Empire

and say, send us a mosaicist and the glass cubes

so we can learn how to do this.

You make sheets

of glass in different colors, and then you

cut it up into little pieces, little cubes.

And then you set them in plaster to make designs.

Mixing Byzantine and Roman techniques

with Islamic style, the great mosque of Cordoba

created a striking juxtaposition of old and new.

You take a look at the arches

as opposed to the round arches that are

used in Damascus in Syria.

We have slightly horseshoe arches.

So there's a little bit of a local tradition.

Islamic architecture

has this ability to absorb the best, the kind of the solutions

that are already on the ground in these regional areas,

and to realize what is in fact a continuous tradition

of a mosque in all of those different areas using

different adaptive techniques.

By the 14th century, Muslim Spain

had developed its own distinct style of architecture,

shown nowhere more magnificently than in Grenada's Alhambra

Palace.

Palaces express another aspect of life,

more a life of luxury, a life of refinement.

There is spirituality even in those buildings.

In many ways, they also express the power of the ruler

partly in terms of how space is manipulated, how as a visitor,

you have to go through a certain series of spaces to enter it.

But you see, I think, how there is a sense of refinement

and sophistication in the use of visual form

and natural resources in those buildings.

Courtyards open to the sky, but still

inside the palace walls blend the interior with the exterior,

creating a varied and vast domain.

But also, there is the light and how it plays,

the color, even the smell.

And of course, architecture embodies that.

In 1453, the Islamic world and beyond

was forever changed when the Muslim Ottomans captured

Constantinople from the Christian Byzantines.

The conquest signaled a new era of expansion and empire

for the Ottomans who would reach eventually

into North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Arabian Gulf.

Their capital became known as Istanbul.

To display their increasing preeminence,

the Ottoman sultans created the Topkapi Palace,

an expansive court exemplifying royal life

for the powerful Islamic empire at its peak.

Its most famous resident, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent,

easily outshone his 16th century European counterparts

in wealth and influence.

The Ottoman Empire was very hierarchical

and so is the space in Topkapi, that you

are moving linearly in toward the most restricted space,

which is where the sultan was.

Palaces, of course,

were only for the elite.

They were for the delectation of the prince and his court

and whoever visited him there.

So it's part of that elite world of art.

A great cultural patron,

Suleiman also wrote poetry, espousing the traits

of a benevolent prince.

"Do not sleep.

Be awake on your throne.

Our strong hands hold the fate of the world."

The 16th century is a time of princes

all over the world making beautiful things in order

to compete with each other.

Sultan Suleiman was the first sultan

who realized that he was not just continuing old empires,

but he was creating a new empire.

Suleiman was named for the wise King Solomon,

and his signature graces many of his creative endeavors,

including the Topkapi Palace.

His vision for the new empire was far reaching and even

extended into Jerusalem to the venerated site

of the Dome of the Rock.

Originally it was covered with mosaics,

and the dome was not gold leafed.

I think it was just lead covered.

Under the Ottomans in the 16th century,

the mosaics had deteriorated, so basically ugly stars

were put in its place.

The renovations,

instead of thinking of them as changes,

what I love to say about it is it

shows how meaningful the building remains.

That is, people always thought it was

worth redoing and repairing.

Suleiman asserted his power

across the Ottoman Empire, but his legacy

endures most in Istanbul.

Completed in 1558, Suleiman's imperial mosque,

the Suleymaniye, represents the coming together

of a great patron and a great architect, Mimar Sinan.

The son of a Greek stonemason, Sinan

rose in the ranks of the Ottoman court,

becoming a military architect before designing the greatest

monuments of the Ottoman Empire.

Sinan was trained as an engineer.

And you can see his engineering ability

come to the fore in buildings like the Suleymaniye.

What you have is

a large, dominating, overwhelming dome that

just defines an enormous space beneath it.

And the Ottoman, especially imperial Ottoman architecture,

has always emphasized that.

The structure is very, very clear.

And the ornament is used in a very, very restrained way

to emphasize the structure but not overwhelm it.

Perhaps the greatest source of inspiration for Sinan

was the nearby dome of the Byzantine church

of Hagia Sophia, built in the sixth century

and converted to a mosque by the Ottomans.

We know from written documents

that Sultan Suleiman and his architect Sinan

tried to outdo what was there before.

So the dome is slightly larger than the dome in Hagia Sophia.

It's much better proportioned.

The spaces are opened up much more.

There are all kinds of better and more adventuresome

things in it.

But it is clearly within the same tradition.

Whether domed or hypostyle, plain or ornamented,

all mosques serve the same purpose.

They reflect how people perceived and understood

prayer.

And they expressed that from different places

and different ideas in different ways.

The differences

between their very simple mosques and the very complex,

highly engineered buildings have to do

with local cultural traditions, the availability of materials,

and of course the availability of money and technologies.

In the West African Muslim country of Mali,

the buildings of Djenne evoke the simplicity

of early Islamic architecture.

Settled between the Niger and Bani rivers,

Djenne survives despite the torrents

of monsoons and flooding.

Shelter has always been made from what is locally available.

And during the rainy season, Djenne

is rich in water and earth.

The Great Mosque of Djenne celebrates

these natural resources.

It unique, made entirely of mud brink.

I have traveled to many places and seen many mosques,

but none look like the mosque of Djenne.

In some ways, it

redefines our conception of what a mosque is.

And it emphasizes the fact that diversity is a very important

issue to keep in mind whenever thinking about the architecture

of the Islamic world.

Rebuilt many times on its original 13th century

site, the massive mud structure's shape

comes from a millennia old West African tradition

not Islamic design.

However different the outside may be,

the inside has all the elements that a Muslim coming

in from Iraq or Saudi Arabia would find familiar.

The hypostyle mosque's flat roof

is supported by 99 columns, one for each

of the 99 names of God.

And these pillars go up three stories.

They're not shaped like the pillars

of the Greek temple that gives you the image of soaring space.

They are quite squat.

But still, there's this sense that you're in a [inaudible],

that the light is streaming through, being broken up

by those network of pillars.

It's a very different light.

It's a very different use of light and space

than you find in your everyday life.

For Muslims entering the mosque to pray,

its towering space is informed by their faith,

the mystical branch of Islam called Sufism.

The West African brand of Sufism

is very, very tolerant.

And the tolerance comes from the fact

that everyone is allowed to have--

within certain boundaries-- but everyone

is allowed to have their own experience

and to celebrate their own experience with God.

It's something about we humans that we

need to make space where we can be alone with our own thoughts,

with the knowledge that we're only

a very small speck in this larger universe.

The Great Mosque of Djenne

doesn't have what people think of as mosque architecture,

the big dome, the tall minarets.

But it is local and that it's the same architectural style

as the mosque in the village next door.

And there is the sort of intimate picture,

which is how the space is used by people in and around Djenne.

It is a reflection of how people perceive their place of prayer.

In the hands of skilled craftsmen,

threads become stars, words, and arabesques,

repeated endlessly over colorful textiles.

Patterns, intricate and interwoven,

transform ceilings into the cosmos overhead.

In these complex designs, Muslims

can see the very possibility and promise of heaven.

When Prophet Muhammad comes down

from the mountain with God's message,

he tells these potential believers, here's

what happened looks like.

And he uses every flora, fauna aspect

that is not in the landscape of these desert dwellers,

starting with trees, water, shade, fruit, and, of course,

what would you do if you had no concept of the afterlife

and at that point you were just a pagan

worshipping idols of your ancestors?

It seems like a pretty provocative message

and also promise.

So this idea of heaven, you know, the afterlife and what's

in there, in terms of the vegetable, floral abundance

is emblazoned in the minds of most Muslims.

What's interesting is

the patterns and the leaves and the tendrils

and the vines that were used in previous artistic traditions

to frame more important things in Islamic art

become the subject itself.

And I think

there is the idea of infinity there, the idea of an ending.

And what is it that is an ending?

It is that abundance, the fertility

of the earth, the ability to not just survive

but to survive well.

The stunning effect of these patterns

reflects Muslims' deep interest in geometry.

Geometry is a very tricky, very difficult thing

because it's something which to us seems

on the whole rather boring.

And they've managed to transform to something quite different.

And of course, geometry

was very central to Islam because there are so

many religious and social practices that

are dependent upon geometry.

For example, they have to orient their mosque

by looking at the stars and making calculations

based on geometry to know the proper direction of prayer.

They need geometry to determine the times of prayer.

They need geometry to navigate as they

move through the Mediterranean or through the deserts

of Arabia.

So geometry is a survival technique.

Geometry is important to religion.

And it becomes aestheticized in the arts.

Ordinary, everyday objects

are made extraordinary, embellished

with geometric and vegetal designs.

Some of the objects that

are most delightful to look at today

were made for utilitarian purposes,

so plates, bowls, pitchers for pouring water,

that may take very fanciful forms,

may have a little bird on it or an inscription

around the outside.

Or it may have a surface that is completely

filled with vegetative ornament, you

know, this kind of leafy vine scroll ornament or geometrical

ornament.

These things were made for use.

It was an elite patron who used it.

It wasn't the ordinary person on the street

who could afford a beautiful metal ewer to pour water.

They would have used a clay jug.

But it was in the princely environment,

in the palace environment, something

that would have been used.

Enjoying the tremendous luxury

their wealth afforded then, Muslim rulers

were major players in the international world of princes

and adopted many of the same practices

of their contemporaries.

The king was glorified and glorified

not so much by the victories he won,

but by the treasures he had.

That was what counted.

Muslim princes wanted

to compare themself with Christian princes

or Buddhist princes and so on.

And they have wonderful sculptures

of roaring lions and flying eagles.

And so wanted the Muslim princes.

We have a very nice example of an incense

burner in the shape of a lion.

But if you look at the body of the lion,

it consists of plant ornaments instead of,

you know-- had it been a European incense burner,

you would see the hairs of the fur.

And you will see the claws, and you will see

a lot of naturalistic details.

The Muslim artist is kind of more creating

an idea of a lion not necessarily an image

which you would recognize-- an animal which you

would recognize from the zoo.

Depictions of animals or people

are surprising, as one of the greatest misconceptions

about Islamic culture is that figurative art does not exist.

If you look at this line

because throughout the ages, in many parts

of the Islamic world, figurative art and sculpture

is very common, whether it is painting,

whether it's sculpture, animals, human beings, and so on.

It's very common, in fact.

We even have pictures of Mohammad

unveiled in manuscripts made by Muslims for Muslims.

But they are not idols, and they are not meant to be worshipped.

Because early Muslims feared idolatry, in the mosque

the divine presence is portrayed only

through non-figural designs and the holy words of the Koran.

Figural imagery,

images of people and animals, is really confined to the secular

world, the sort of ordinary world

where religion does not dominate,

is not the primary interest.

I think by denying that there are images

and refusing to show images, you try

to project the image that there were no differing

views in Islam, where it's perfectly

clear from the historical record that we have images

and that different Muslims felt differently

at different times in different places.

And this is one of the great things about Islam.

It is such a large religion, and it has so many adherents.

Over the past 1400 years, the people

saw things in different ways.

One of the most striking artifacts

of figurative imagery in Islamic art

is a small ivory box from Spain meant to hold

precious objects like perfume.

Our quart of an ivory box

belongs to a very small and select group of objects which

were made for the caliph in Cordoba

and the circle very close to him--

his wives, his viziers, the princes.

So they are works made for the court.

The box was made and kept

here in the caliph's palace, Madinat az-Zahra.

Built in the 10th century but now in ruins,

the palace set a new standard of luxury and prestige,

proclaiming the caliph's supremacy to all who saw it.

The iconography or the images

on the objects reflect that.

They are kind of princely animals.

They are falcons.

They are griffins.

They are lions.

Cut from a single tusk,

the ivory is delicately carved, giving the illusion

that the figures are emerging from this small case.

What's really extraordinary about it is it

shows us a whole other aspect of the artistic culture

of the time.

We have to look at the mosque and this box and say,

these are the poles.

One of them represents the religious public aspect

of the artistic culture and then the box

represents something that was meant

for precious materials, that was meant

for very private consumption rather than public display.

In Spain's Alhambra Palace, the ornament of the box

is turned inside out, hidden inside plain stone walls.

It's like a pearl in some ways.

You have a shell around it.

But then you go to the inside, and what you

have is just a very delicate arrangement of decoration.

You enter into some of the domed rooms in the Alhambra,

such as the Hall of Abencerrajes,

and you see these wonderful [inaudible]

vaults, these [inaudible], honeycomb walls which

short of hover over the person.

You can get a sense of immateriality,

as if you're watching the stars or the constellations.

They used all kinds of ways

of covering the walls that used stucco

to make it look like textiles, so that in fact,

as has been recently argued, the Alhambra tries to imitate

a tent, a series of tents.

So there is an aspect of it which

is like a fairy tale, the fairy tale created

by an ornament, which I think the fact that the ornament is

so dependent on textile patterns, I think,

is rather important too.

All over the Islamic world, textiles

evoked a life of comfort through their sumptuous

materials and bright colors but also through their decoration.

And often rulers who went to desolate areas

in their military campaigns, they

had to recreate that magnificence

that they were accustomed to.

Textiles are portable for those purposes,

to recreate this concept, this idea,

of a heavenly, abundant, lush, luxurious environment.

You have to imagine

that textiles are the furniture of the Islamic lands.

Tables and chairs are used in the European and American

tradition to get you off the ground, which is cold and damp.

In the Islamic lands, it's fairly warm and it's dry.

So you just need something that separates you

from that dirt on the ground.

The rug is the perfect item.

You can roll it up and carry it.

You can sit on it.

You can sleep on it.

You can put another one on top of you, and you have a blanket.

The ancient skill of carpet weaving

was perfected in Persia, as specialized dyes and techniques

led to a thriving textile industry in Iran.

During the 16th century, Persian textile designs

spread into India with their descendants,

the Mughal dynasty.

In modern-day India, weavers make carpets by hand

as their Mughal ancestors did centuries before,

using a special hooked knife for cutting the thread.

Weaving is always done on a loom.

You set up vertical threads.

That's called warping the loom.

And then you weave in and out horizontally with the weft.

So it creates a grid like pattern.

Weaving is basically a geometric technique.

So it's very hard to weave a circle.

You can knot a circle just like you

can do it on a computer screen by making the knot so small.

And in fact, this is one of the reasons

that people invented what's the so-called Persian knot that's

open only on one side because you could pack more of them

together, and therefore, execute circles,

or curves, or arabesques, or scrolls more easily.

The Mughals were particular in showing florals,

especially to a botanic precision,

and also to show-- I'd like to think-- the transience of life

by showing flowers in their various stages of birth

and death.

In the Koran, God says to Muslims, "To know me,

know my creations."

And of course, you can't see God.

God is never represented in Islamic art.

But this sort of instruction to look at his creations

deeper and at their essence will get us that much closer to God

is another imperative, another objective for representing

flora and fauna in Islamic art.

That's what makes it all so very dramatic,

you know, that here is a textile that

is dated 300 years from today.

And yet, still sort of is moving, that you're almost

catching it in a moment of transition,

that it's not static, and it's not still

but sort of speaks of the life that God had put into it.

Today India's diverse heritage

is revealed in its art and architecture as well

as day-to-day life.

In workshops in Agra, India, Muslim artisans

still practice an ancient Roman technique

of stone inlay called pietra dura, first adopted

by the Mughals in the early 17th century.

So in India

we have, again, that display of a willingness

to borrow, and eclecticism, and a kind

of cultural intermingling that I think

must have been one of the artistic strengths

of Islamic art.

Using hand-powered machines

as they have for centuries, craftsmen

cut and shaped tiny semiprecious stones.

Then, with astonishing precision,

they fit them together, creating arabesques and other floral

and geometric patterns.

The Mughals' colorful pietra dura designs cover every wall

of Agra's tomb of I'timad-ud-Daulah, commissioned

by Emperor Jahangir for his father-in-law in 1622,

the building is made from marble inlaid with Carnelian lapis

lazuli, onyx, jasper, and topaz.

But it is the building's form that

reveals the most about the Mughals, a dynasty with Persian

as well as local Indian heritage.

It looks Persian in some respects,

and it fits the end of a four square garden

called the Chahar Bagh-- these are Persian art forms--

but that has these little corner umbrella-like cupulas that

are called that are, in fact,

borrowed from Hindu architecture.

Nearby, one of the most magnificent monuments ever

created in Islamic art appears against the sky

like a heavenly pearl, the Taj Mahal.

A colossal mausoleum, it was built

by Mughal Shah Jahan for his beloved wife,

Mumtaz Mahal in 1628.

Mumtaz Mahal, first of all,

is of Persian heritage and not Indian or mixed

Indian heritage.

So she hails from a Persian legacy.

She wasn't his first and only wife.

But he favored her, and he had the most children by her.

Whether it was because she was beautiful above all or not

is still up for question.

But love transcends all.

And I think that's a very powerful symbol of it

and continues to be.

He buried her very young,

and she died, and he was so in love

with her that he built her this beautiful mausoleum.

And he mourned her forever and ever.

The fact that she

was buried in the central position

under the summit of the tomb's dome is very telling.

And it says something about certainly his respect for her

and the importance that was accorded to her that she would

have a monument of that size and that she

would get that central spot.

Shah Jahan spent 10 years overseeing

its construction, using an all white marble as well as pietra

dura but refining the technique to achieve a rare subtlety

and grace.

The Taj Mahal is a very delicately

ornamented building.

In some ways, to me, it's the material

that dominates the decoration not the other way around.

So when the light falls at a certain way,

the decoration emerges in a certain way.

The delicacy of the marble absorbs the light.

And so at sunset, you'll experience it

in a very different way than you would at sunrise

or in summer you would experience it very differently

than you would at winter.

You're suddenly imbued

with that perception of heaven.

You feel you've entered an other worldly

realm with a monument completely encased in marble, reflecting

its ulterior identity in the pool in front of it,

showing both realms, heavenly and earthly.

And he basically models the entire complex

on what the vision of paradise and heaven is.

In West Africa, the simplicity

of Mali's small village mosques stands in stark contrast

to the heavily decorated buildings in the East.

Their minimal design of mud and timber

is echoed even in the more urban city of Djenne.

You look at the mosque of Djenne

where there is no applied ornamentation.

But you have something different.

There, the scaffolding is actually

built into the building.

And that is done for a very practical reason, which

is that these mud buildings, these dried mud buildings,

need constant maintenance.

These beams protrude enough

to make a pattern on the wall.

So when you look at it, you're not looking only

at the plain earth building.

When you're looking at it, you're

looking at a building that has lines on it.

And those lines are making different patterns, mostly

in diagonal lines or herringbone pattern.

But this pattern changes.

It's sort of alive.

It reflects the sun in its movement.

On the interior, you have almost no ornament at all.

The ornament there, if we can call it that,

is the play of light through the lightwells

and how light is reflected on these huge columns that

formed the corridors inside.

That's what the Djenne mosque is all

about to the communicants who go there.

They have an experience with God, an unornamented experience

with God.

Bereft of water and scorched by the unrelenting

sun, the urban landscapes of the traditional Islamic heartlands

were mostly dust colored, made from the surrounding earth.

In its scarcity, vivid color became

a treasure used to celebrate and elevate more

than buildings and objects.

Imagine if you're coming on your camel,

and you come across this plain, and you see a mosque from afar.

And Mohammad, sometimes Ali or Ya Allah

are written in glazed tile.

They are neon.

They glow.

And you've got another 20 miles to go,

and you're plunking along.

And so you start reciting sacred names, prayers, Koranic verses,

and it's a way of encouraging you.

It's a way of bringing you on.

It's a way of enveloping you into the community.

One of the ideas was to make life, as everywhere,

as pleasant as possible.

So you perfume things and you colored them.

You colored your food.

You colored the clothes you wore.

The weaving of different colors is possible

because you can dye silk, particularly also

wool and cotton in many different colors.

And many different dyes from saffron, from crocuses,

to various kinds of blues, and reds,

were all available and accessible

and easily transportable in the Islamic lands.

And color becomes so important that people often

made color and things that are difficult to color.

Take, for example, metalwork.

There was everyday use metalware.

Then there was metalware that was perceived of as,

at the time, not only from our perspective as art objects,

objects to be appreciated because of their beauty.

One of the highlights of metalware

that's made in the Islamic lands is the inlaying

of one metal into another.

So you have a bronze object, and you put silver and gold pieces

into it to make it colorful.

And just doing that shows you that people valued color

because why bother otherwise?

This small painted wooden table

from the 11th century was discovered only

recently hidden away for hundreds of years

in a cave in Afghanistan.

This little piece of secular furniture

is an extraordinary survivor.

We hardly have any secular furniture

from the Islamic world at all from the medieval period.

The color combinations of the table-- reds, blue,

kind of greenish colors, black, and then

the color of the wood itself, where the layer of paint

has been cut through-- gives it an extremely lively

nearly garish appearance to the object.

It is stunning.

Colorful paints, enamels,

and glazes are readily available today.

But historically, they were extracted

from the natural environment and given life

by the artist's hands.

One of the ways you make color

is by grinding up pigments.

Often metallic pigments, so you can grind up copper,

and you can get green.

For tiling, and blue and white ceramics, you need cobalt.

And the biggest sources of cobalt, traditionally,

were in Iran.

So we think today of Chinese blue and white ceramic.

That cobalt and the idea of blue and white ceramic

actually comes from Iran.

The Iranian city of Isfahan,

poised between the East-West trade

routes became a burgeoning center of ceramic arts

in the 16th and 17th century.

Isfahan's Sheikh Lotfollah mosque

with its striking blue tiles an ornamental dome

was built in 1618 by the great Persian ruler, Shah Abbas.

Used only as a private mosque for the Shah's royal court,

it wasn't until centuries later when

the building was open to the public

that its magnificence was revealed to the world.

The ornament is some of the most colorful and complex tile

work ever created.

They would take tiles and break them

and then rearrange them so that you

would have a more intricate, rich play of light and color.

And you see that in this mosque.

Where in some ways, the building is dematerialized completely.

You no longer see the building as a special form

or special space but more as basically

an overwhelming surface of color and light.

Just enough light comes in to bring the mosaic tiles to life.

While if there was more light coming in,

it probably would overwhelm them,

and you would lose that effect of the tiles.

But here, the right amount of light only is let in.

NARRATOR: Faced with the labor of cutting each mosaic tile

by hand, the mosque's architects adopted

a more efficient glazing technique that allowed

designs to be painted directly onto the tile.

They were thinking of how to transfer ideas.

They were experimenting.

They were what we-- they were the daring artists of the time.

Because they're introducing new ideas and new techniques.

In this new technique, potters

paint in an outline of the design

with a mixture of mineral pigment and grease

before filling it in with colored glazes.

Once fired, the grease would burn off,

leaving a thin line to separate the colors.

Inside their private palaces, like the Chehel Sotoun,

the shahs of Iran used color in a very different way,

with figurative paintings of epic tales

from their own history.

This fresco commemorates the Battle of Chaldiran,

when the Persians bravely faced the Ottoman army in 1514.

Outnumbered and fighting only with traditional weapons

against the firearms of the Ottoman soldiers,

the Persians suffered a devastating defeat,

losing more than 5,000 men.

In the secular environment,

in bathhouses, in palaces, in the private tradition

of manuscripts that are not Korans, not prayer books,

but rather story books or historic or epics,

or historical narratives, or scientific manuals,

for example, there are lots of images of people.

These were made in the court,

and they were not made-- this is important point-- they were not

made with the same obvious externalization that

happen in Western art.

This was not for a public.

The public probably didn't even know of the existence

of these paintings.

With high drama and emotion,

illustrated narratives tell the tales

of the princes' distant ancestors,

linking them symbolically to the wise rulers of the past.

The greatest most famous of these

is the Persian epic poem by Ferdowsi called the Shahnameh,

or Book of Kings.

Mythical figures like Rostam are recounted

as heroes, cloaked in animal skins,

slaying demons, and saving humanity

from the evils of the world.

The imagination runs wild.

And heroic exploits are depicted on the page-- not just

human beings but also super human animals,

and monsters, and angels.

Rostam's rival, the valiant knight, Esfandiyar,

must face his own supernatural enemies

before he can meet Rostam in battle.

After wisely wounding the ferocious beast

with his blade covered horse, Esfandiyar

delivers the last fatal blow by hand.

You have the monster with its striking wings

and color and the clouds that look like the monster.

And this is where the talent of the composition

comes in, where details repeat itself,

echo each other in the image.

Here, you have very slowly to start looking,

and then you start drowning within those images.

Finally, after much bloodshed,

Rostam is able to conquer the invincible

Esfandiyar, by discovering his only weakness, his eyes.

One double-pointed arrow silences his opponent forever.

The Shahnameh recalls great battles

of the pre-Islamic past.

It also recounts great love stories.

It has a certain sensitivity to the human condition,

much like we see in the work of Homer, for example.

The Shahnameh was so beloved

that other characters like the fifth century Persian prince

Bahram Gur took on new life in romantic epics.

In the poem "Seven Beauties" by Nizami,

Bahram Gur asks an architect to build

seven pavilions for the seven princesses

he admires from afar.

As he visits each one, the pavilions' colors

are used to illuminate the prince's own spiritual journey.

Poetry, like art, is a mirror reflecting the invisible world

of the human spirit.

The central part of this beautiful poem

is his entering seven pavilions and being entertained

by a princess in each pavilion.

And each privilege is identified, distinguished

by a certain color.

And these colors are related to a progression

of going from a point of just thinking about oneself

and not being enlightened to enlightenment.

These Persian art forms spread,

as Islam blossomed in India under the Mughals.

There was a lot of strong contacts

and interest between Iran and India in this period,

and we have a lot of interaction,

a lot of movement of poets and artists

going between these two empires.

And that's how ideas are transmitted.

That's how techniques are transmitted and goods.

By the 17th century, under the reign

of Emperor Jahangir, Mughal art and architecture

was flourishing.

The monuments built during his reign

reveal how Islamic heritage took new forms, influenced by trade.

Janhangir himself admired and collected European and even

Christian art.

And that probably

has a lot to do with the Portuguese,

the Jesuits, who had already come to India in Jahangir's

reign, bringing gifts.

Along with gifts, they're bringing illustrated Bibles.

And, of course, in the hopes to-- they're

proselytizing, hopefully converting these great emperors

of this great empire.

And, of course, the emperors are accepting these gifts.

They're very gracious.

They're very thankful.

So the reservoir, then, becomes quite rich from where

the artist is drawing.

Here, a Mughal painter experiments

with the Western concepts of perspective and shading,

while using local materials.

The colors are all

derived from pigments, natural pigments, and even

semi-precious stones.

The blue, especially, is from lapis lazuli,

which comes from Afghanistan.

But most of the reds, the yellows, the white

is all naturally derived and is indigenous to the place

in which the painting was created.

Indian yellow is a mixture

of the urine of cows that are fed on Mango,

and that's bound with water and also a gum arabic.

And mixed together, and it creates this incredibly vibrant

yellow.

It is in Jahangir's illustrated memoir

that the growth and sophistication of Mughal

painting is most clearly seen.

In this work, he's shown with a halo.

And that links him to Western art,

and specifically Christian art.

He is above everyone.

Even though everyone is dressed in their finery

and they are individualized, that beautiful blue basically

winds us back to our primary focus, which should

be the emperor and nobody else.

And colors in Islamic art are very moving.

They're very sumptuous, lush, almost supernatural colors

that transport you to another place that is not earthly.

Water gives life in barren lands.

It changes its surroundings.

It moves.

It reflects.

It is also a simple element that ties us to our past in a way

that nothing else can.

Water is one of those elements

that we take for granted.

But when I see water in a pool in a tomb or in a palace,

I'm often struck by the fact that it's actually

the same water that flowed when the palace was built.

Because water doesn't go away.

It evaporates, and then it falls back on the earth.

And it evaporates, and it falls back down again.

It's the same water.

It's the Roman water.

It's the Islamic water.

It's water from all stages of history.

It's continuous.

And so for that moment, I am in that place,

not just in my imagination but literally,

materially, I'm part of that same environment.

Though appearing effortless,

the water that ran for centuries into the reflecting pools

and garden beds of the Islamic world

traveled a difficult journey, one involving a complex system

of engineering and labor.

A number of parts of the Islamic world

do suffer from scarcity of water.

They have very little rainfall.

Some of them might have large sources of water,

but you have to move the water to other locations.

Perched on the edge of the Orontes River, the city

of Hama, Syria once had as many as 30 water wheels in service,

bringing water from the source to the people.

You have these wonderful, enormous water

wheels, which could be 20 meters in diameter

or 60 feet in diameter.

And they would carry the water from the bottom

from the river up to the top of the water wheel.

And then from there, it would be transferred

to aqueducts or to canals.

And then it would feed various other parts

of the city, whether for agriculture

or for residential use and so on.

There's a very important verse in the Koran that

often is repeated, which is that God has made

everything alive through water.

So it's actually a very even simple and basic principle,

which is water is life.

Through irrigation, an otherwise dry

landscape is made doubly productive in that it

is-- you can grow crops through the summer.

You can grow crops through a time of the year

when you wouldn't ordinarily have

any crops at all because of this ability to manage water.

In more arid climates like Iran,

the challenging desert topography spurred innovation.

One of the wonders

engineering feats of this part of the world

is the subterranean aqueduct called, in Persian, a qanat,

in Arabic a [arabic], Probably invented in Iran

already in the fourth century BCE,

but certainly developed in the Islamic period

and brought from Iran all the way to West Africa

and then in fact to the new world.

From above, qanats appear

as a series of large crater-like holes in the earth.

Workmen were lowered into these access points,

some as deep as 150 feet, to tap the water's source

in the heart of a mountain.

Then, by hand, they cut through the earth

to create a long tunnel.

You bring this water 25 miles underground

on a slightly sloping path, and then you

bring it out whenever you want to water your field.

The management of that water

requires a very careful understanding of slope.

Because the cardinal rule about water is it flows downhill.

If it flows too fast, you lose your water

because it spills over the edges.

If it flows too slowly, you have a stagnant pool,

and it doesn't go where you want it to go.

In Kairouan, Tunisia, water flowed from aqueducts

into massive reservoir basins.

Built in the ninth century, these highly sophisticated

collection pools provided water that

was both fresh and filtered.

They're quite sizable.

You have a small pool and then a large pool.

The idea is that the water, which

is brought in from another location,

goes into the small pool.

There, the sediments basically settle.

And then it moves into the larger pool

where it's stored for the use of the residents of the city.

Once inside the city walls,

water played an important religious role,

as all Muslims are required to wash before prayer.

Washing involves

a symbolic and practical cleansing of one's self

before approaching God.

And so it is a way of putting yourself

in the right mental framework for approaching the divine.

You have the section for ablutions

in the mosque, and often these are very beautiful elements

within the mosque.

Sometimes you find them in the middle of the courtyard.

Sometimes you find them outside the mosque.

You find them in different locations.

But they do have an architectural presence

in the mosque.

Water takes on this sacred association

in many cases.

But at the same time, it has a day-to-day connotation,

and you can't separate the two.

Water is actually

a very complicated substance because it does not

hold its own shape.

It has to be given form.

It's very heavy, and therefore very heavy to lift.

And any time you work with water,

any time you manage water or carry water,

you actually need a container for it.

You need a vessel for it.

Decorated ewers, or pitchers,

carried drinking water and could be

used for washing before meals.

SHEILA S. BLAIR: Someone would come out and pour the water,

and you would rub your hands over it.

And the wastewater would go into the basin.

But water was so precious you wouldn't just

let it run away on the floor.

You.

Would take that basin of dirty water

and pour it on your garden.

Water is about so many things.

It's not only about cleanliness.

It's not only about produce.

It's not only about beauty.

It's all of that.

In palaces like the Chehel Sotoun in Iran,

called the Palace of 40 Columns, water

magnified the ruler's majesty, making it as valuable as gold.

Water has the ability

to enhance the architecture around it--

the architecture that contains it

or the architecture that it surrounds.

So if you think of the Chehel Sotoun, the Palace the 40

Columns in Isfahan, it doesn't have 40 columns.

Its columns are in fact doubled by being

reflected on the body of water that sits in front of it.

It's a very nice poetic interpretation

of the building.

But it also shows, again, that water always

plays an element in how the popular imagination sees

a building.

In the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain,

water spouted upward from an alabaster basin

and poured from the mouths of 12 marble lions.

A poem carved on the basin echoed its physical form.

"The fountain is the sultan who showers all his subjects

and land with grace, just as water wets the gardens."

The fountain

is nothing more than the mechanism of extracting water

from the earth, turned into a celebration.

Every time water enters into a palace environment,

it enters through some kind of theatrical effect.

It enters through the mouth of a lion

or the mouth of a bronze deer so that the animal

seems to come alive.

And this is the only way of creating animation

in this world.

And it must have had an enormous effect on viewers.

It must have been-- it must have excited the imagination

to see something like that.

Now covered in pebbles,

the Alhambra's Court of Lions was once a four-part garden

fed by the channels of water, representing

a microcosm of the irrigated landscape outside.

The ultimate expression of water

is, of course, in the garden.

Because none of the gardens in the Islamic world

would exist if they didn't have a man-made,

an artificially introduced, source of water.

The Generalife, Granada's 14th century summer

estate, was a pleasure palace, decorated with lush gardens

and whimsical fountains.

They evoke, on the one hand, the garden that

is the garden that grows food.

But they also evoke the gardens of paradise and the very word

"paradise" comes from the Persian "paradeisos" which

means a walled park or garden.

Islamic gardens are typically

walled enclosed spaces, and the reason for that

is that by enclosing the space, you

are creating a box in which fragrant flowers,

fragrant fruit trees, are contained and made

more available to the nose.

You can smell them.

They are close at hand.

They are meant to be something that you have

almost physical contact with.

You also should think of water

in the context of sound, because water

provides a pleasing sound.

So most gardens, like the Alhambra or the Generalife,

have running water because it's this babbling noise behind you

that screens out other noise but also brings quiet and calm.

During Mali's long dry season,

water is an even greater luxury.

In the mud villages outside the city of Djenne,

people persist and thrive without rain,

grinding the millet grown before the floodwaters slowly recede.

In the hands of an artist, water becomes a medium

for creativity, used to shape and build

the world around them.

For over 4,000 years, people have used the sun, the earth,

and water to create mud brick or adobe buildings.

The word "adobe" itself comes from the Arabic word for mud,

"at-tub."

The city of Djenne is actually an island

in a vast flood plain.

Here, water is both a blessing and a curse.

And here, the buildings tell a story

of survival and community.

This part of West Africa

has a very long dry season and a short wet season,

rainy season, only about two and a half, sometimes

three and a half months.

But the rains are monsoonal rains,

so they come in torrentially.

Mud architecture needs constant repair

because these rains wear way the plaster walls.

The Great Mosque of Djenne

is the largest adobe structure in the world.

You see the mosque,

and there are very few sharp corners.

Everything is softed.

Everything is rounded.

That's in part a good protection.

But it's a tribute, if you will, to the force of the rains

and the force of nature in that-- in that sense.

This mosque is very important

not only for me but for all the Malians

because it shows how creative and how

ingenious our masons are.

The masons of Djenne mix

earth and water with a vegetable fat

called shea butter to shape the cylindrical mud

bricks which form the skeleton of the mosque building.

There is a very long

archeological tradition that goes

beyond a millennium of dealing with these traditional mud

bricks.

And the traditional mud bricks are

the signature of the barey ton or the masons of Djenne.

They are cylindrical bricks.

They're about 20 centimeters high.

And they're laid vertically in rows,

but they're extremely hard.

In order to protect them from erosion

during the heavy rains, mud plaster

is continuously applied to the traditional bricks

by masons who scale the timber scaffolding.

The timbers not only serve as decoration.

They also serve as a tool to create, to build a mosque,

to plaster it, and to make repairs on the mosque.

They let this mud and the grain

and the butter ferment for weeks.

It's really foul smelling, but it's-- once it's put

on, it's as hard as regular Portland cement.

The Mosque of Djenne

is eternal in a different sense, and it

is in the act of rebuilding and renewing and replenishing it

that it's importance is found.

The legacy of Islamic art

is intertwined with the very fabric of world civilization.

In a deep and meaningful way, it is part of who we are today.

It's not that Islam has suddenly

appeared in our lives now.

We've been involved with Islam for centuries.

I think that Islamic art puts

a face on a lot of the uncertainties Western society

has about Islamic culture.

And also it sheds light on some shared histories

between Western culture and Islamic culture

and shows a continuity rather than a break.

To ancho ourselves in the past

as a way of giving ourselves, I think,

an anchor in a world that is in such enormous and threatening

flux.

Art, I think, is something that is the most human thing.

It's what makes us human.

Sometimes material objects

can be the bridge between one world and another.

That translucent glass is beautiful

regardless of your religious background.

Mosaic sparkles and dazzles the eye, regardless

of what time in history you are in.

Monumental, tall domes that stretch overhead

like the heavens themselves are awesome whoever

you are, whether you walk in there to pray or walk in there

with a camera as a tourist.