 Hi everyone, welcome to this very exciting session on a very, very cold Tuesday night. So hopefully this is going to kind of challenge you, excite you, get you warm, whichever way we can think about it, presentation on a book talk actually by author Diana Dark. Now this series, the series of lectures, they are hosted by the SOAS Middle East Institute, and they are co-hosted by myself, I'm Dina Matter and I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS, and by Nargis Ferser, who is also here, and she is the chair of the Center for Iranian Studies. Diana has very kindly agreed to come and talk to us about her exciting book, Stealing from the Saracens, and it's quite a, I've read most of it and it is a very exciting read, very well researched topic, and kind of brings different perspective to this whole thing about the constant argument between the East and the West about where civilization starts, who started what and so on. But she comes to it from an art historian background, also from a background of having lived in the region, particularly in Syria for a very long time, I think 30 years on and off. She is a very well known author, she has written recent books, particularly on Syria, one is called The Merchant of Syria, A History of Survival, and the other one is My House in Damascus, for anyone who's interested in reading about ordinary people and about people living under very, very difficult circumstances for a very long period of time, I really recommend these two books, they're written very well, you can relate to them even if you haven't been to the region and you don't know much about it, but it's almost an intimate history, or people's history of Syria. Diana is going to give a presentation of 40 to 45 minutes, she has a powerpoint, and may I encourage all of you to put your questions in the question box, question and answer box at the bottom, where you can ask the questions and I'll try my best to collate the questions and then pose them to Diana. It looks like we have huge attendance Diana, so well done you, 180 participants so far and these are people on the Zoom, I don't know whether that includes the people on Facebook, but this is our highest number of attendees, so really looking forward to what you have to say, I'm not putting you on the spot here or making you nervous, I'm sure you will never be nervous, so please go ahead and welcome to so as and thanks for coming over. Well thank you very much, Dina and Nargis, for hosting this and I'm going to go straight into sharing my screen so that I can take you through a whole, just need to move, the boxes are blocking my ability to get to my slideshow, just need to get rid of them, that's it, okay? Great, okay so if everybody can see this now, so I'm going to take you on a sort of virtual journey through the various discoveries that I made in researching this book and I'll start with explaining the title because that's been rather controversial, Stealing from the Saracens, how Islamic architecture shape Europe, now stealing from the Saracens, it's a very very deliberate choice, I must clarify that because people have challenged me, oh what do you mean stealing, how can you be so controversial, but the reason is, and this is explained in the introduction of the book, that the commonest derivation for Saracens is from the Arabic Saraka to steal, so Sardikin Saracens are people who steal, so the idea is it's a double irony that we are taking things from people we called thieves, and the reason that the word Saracen is so important and had to be in the title is because Christopher Wren, when he designed St Paul's Cathedral, which you'll see there on the right, and the cover itself, the interior of the dome there, Christopher Wren said, when I built St Paul's I used Saracen vaulting, and this is the key thing, this is why we've gone for this referencing of St Paul's, and Christopher Wren coincided in his time in Oxford in the 17th century with a huge flourishing of Arabic scholarship, the Laudian professorship of Arabic was set up, which is still there to this day, so he coincided with a great deal of information coming in from the Arab world, so though he never travelled there himself, he saw many diagrams and read many reports of other people and questioned many people, so he had a vast knowledge, and he wrote this at the end of his very long life, he lived to be 90, and so it was a very considered opinion, so that's why I wanted to research this, and just to mention the bottom there, if anybody's interested in buying the book, the best place is to go straight to the Hurst website and put in that code of Saracen's 25, and that will give a 25% discount with free postage within the UK, £5 for postage within Europe and £7.50 for anywhere else in the world, so that's actually much better than anything Amazon is offering, so the thing that triggered me to write this book was the fire at Notre Dame, which is why I've actually dedicated the book to Notre Dame, and when that fire happened and the whole world was transfixed at the site of this extraordinary building going up in flames, and France went into mass mourning and said, our national identity is burning, and all of this from a secular country, and it made me sort of sit up and think, wait a minute, you're claiming all of this as your own invention, don't you realise that the backstory of Gothic comes from way further to the east, and because nobody appeared to know that, that's basically why I wrote the book, to explain the backstory of Gothic architecture. Now on the right hand side of the picture you'll see a decapitated saint called Dennis, and he is actually on the façade of Notre Dame, and he is one of three denises, this is where at many points actually in the story it becomes quite funny, that sort of medieval muddle and tangled tales of mistaken identities, because it turns out there are three denises, there's this one who is the patron saint of France, then there was a disciple of Saint Paul, who wrote a very famous and influential book called The Celestial Hierarchy, but centuries later, after the Gothic style had actually virtually finished, later scholarship discovered that this disciple of Saint Paul was actually an imposter and the real Dennis was a Syrian monk from the 5th century, so this brings us to Syria, because unsurprisingly early Christianity began in this part of the world, so for the first few centuries there was nothing that we would recognise as a church, the earliest actual building that's been identified as a church is the house church so called Doria Ropos, which is third century, Doria Ropos being a multicultural city on the Euphrates, but the place where the thing that we would start to recognise as early Christian architecture began is here in Syria for the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, we have what is collectively referred to in Syria as the dead cities, this is in northwest Syria, and here you have hundreds of early Byzantine settlements that show the transition from Roman pagan architecture into early Christian architecture, and on the left there, one of the most important churches is called Kald Lause, Heart of the Armoured, and it is the earliest example of a style that has come to be known now as Romanesque or what the English call Norman, and this is the Twin Towers flanking a monumental entrance, and the reason this was built was on the pilgrimage route to St Sillian's Basilica on the right of your picture there, now St Sillian was a very famous preacher from the top of his pillar, the stylus is Greek for pillar that's why he was called St Sillian Stylites, and when he died the Basilica was built on the spot where he preached from and that is the remains of his pillar, and at that time, and we're talking here late fifth century, the Basilica was completed in 490, and it was the prime pilgrimage destination of its time, people would come from all over Europe to visit it, it was the Santiago de Compostela of its day, and the detailing on the St Sillian's Basilica is quite phenomenal, if you look at the quality there of the stone masonry, you have this very famous motif that only exists in Syria, the swaying acanthus so-called, the way these leaves, they've managed to convey movement into it, and this is very very typical Sillian, this sort of the effusive nature, you see this right from the beginning in the pagan architecture in places like Palmyra and Balbek, and then it also comes into the early Christian architecture, and the reason for this is because Syria is covered in limestone, and so it is the prime building material, and so the craft of stone masonry is literally as old as the hills, these are some images of St Sillian in Europe, because as I mentioned he was incredibly influential in Europe, so there are two villages in France named St Sillian after him, and on the left there is the picture of St Sillian standing on his pillar in a stained glass window, and on the right is St Sillian on his pillar in a mosaic inside St Mark's in Venice, and the very influential place that was from the dead cities, Antioch was the main port just on the coast, and Antioch was the mosaic center that was incredibly influential for Ravenna, so in fact the earliest church that no longer exists in, that was originally built in the fourth century in Antioch, in an octagonal shape, is thought to be the direct model for San Vitale in Ravenna, and it's this octagonal shape, and so here we have, this mosaic I've chosen here happens to be from Santa Polinare in Classe, Classe being the port of Ravenna which was full of Syrians, and the Syrian backstory of Ravenna, again very unresearched, but I discover a huge backstory to Ravenna basically that shows all these Syrian influences, so Santa Polinare himself came the patron saint of Ravenna, he came from Antioch, and every single bishop up until the year 145 was from Syria, in fact there were complaints that there were so many Syrian bankers and Syrian merchants in the city, and so the people paying for these extraordinary early churches were mainly very wealthy Syrian merchants, and this is the octagonal shape that they were copying from the earliest churches in Syria. That octagonal shape went on to influence Aachen, we know that Charles Minier when he built his Palatine Chapel in Aachen was very influenced by Ravenna, he went there three times, he pillaged quite a bit of stuff from it, and actually looking at the Palatine Chapel it immediately has this sort of eastern feel, if you like, the ablack of the arches there, the contrast in colours, very Syrian design again, because in Syria you have the white limestone and the black basalt, so this kind of arch is very destructively Syrian. So this is what the early Muslims had to build on, when they came into Syria and the Umayyad caliphate was established with its capital at Damascus, they of course had the pre-Islamic inheritance, there's a big chapter in the book devoted to this because it is obviously so important, and you'll see how their first, the first Umayyad political statement as a building was the dome of the rock in Jerusalem, and you'll see how some people say oh well it's just a Byzantine copy isn't it, you know, but it's not at all, all right yes they've used the octagonal shape and the dome, but all the decorative mosaic work is on the outside and that is completely new, that never happened in Byzantine buildings, they were plain on the outside and all the mosaic was inside, but not only that there are two more innovations in the dome of the rock that are very very important for later Gothic, so on the arcade at the bottom you'll see the pointed arches, the first pointed arches appear and up under the dome you see the first tree-file arches, little triple-lobed arches appearing up there under the dome, and then the Umayyads also built the Umayyad mosque and it's worth mentioning because it's important to understand that when the early Muslims came into Syria they were actually, there are contemporary records showing that the indigenous population actually mistook them for another Christian sect to begin with, they didn't even realize that this was a completely different religion, and for a long time Muslims actually shared the churches all over Syria, and in Damascus was a case in point, I mean that had always been the sacred heart of the city, so way back in Aramaean times it had been a temple to a weather god and then the Greeks had made it into a temple of Zeus, the the Romans had made it into a temple of Jupiter, and the Christians had made it into a cathedral for John the Baptist, and so when the Muslims came they actually shared that building of the cathedral and they entered through the same entrance and the Muslims turned one way and the Christians turned the other way, and that arrangement only came to an end after nearly a century when they physically ran out of space, and at that point the the Muslims said to the Christians, look we in exchange for taking over this building completely will give you the land for four churches, and so that's that's what they did, and to this day those four churches are among the 17 churches that still exist in in in the old city of Damascus and on a Sunday morning you still hear church bells ringing out and and blending with the call to prayer, so you only have to look at this Damascus-Armaid mosque to see how blended the architecture is because the early Muslims embraced the the cultures there, they didn't in any way seek to obliterate them, so you can see that they've taken in there the sort of Hellenistic gable and and the Byzantine dome and the the minaret here, the square shape is is modeled on the the Christian bell towers of the churches, they were always square like that and so the early minarets were square, the Amerid minarets, and this one is even called the Jesus minaret in a very typical example of the sort of blending of Christian and Muslim tradition in in this region, it's called the Jesus minaret because local local legend has it that Christ will descend from from that minaret on on the day of judgment, now this is a detail of the mosaics inside the courtyard of the Amerid mosque and again you can see how blended it all is, so you've got the you've got typical Byzantine mosaic work and I'm sure Byzantine craftsmen were employed on this working for new Muslim masters but they've used the Muslim iconography, there were sort of visions of paradise with gardens and trees and rivers and fantasized buildings, but they've incorporated here that the triple arch which represents the Trinity in the early Christian churches that they will have seen, they've used the classical pillars and capitals there, so they they've absorbed and blended everything into something new, they've synthesized it if you like and then over here on on the left is a detail of the inside of the dome of the rock where you can see more closely these little tree foil arches, now another innovation in the in the Amerid mosque is geometric window grills and those come over into into Europe gradually and the example I've chosen here happens to be in from St. Mark's in Venice where they are very very extensively used and the Amerids also in their secular architecture used you'll see here this is the entrance to the Damascus National Museum and it's actually a reconstruction of an Amerid desert palace called Kastrelherl El-Garvi and it has very you'll see again that it's the twin towers if you like flanking a monumental entrance, it's the same concept that's been carried over now into early Islamic art and the detailing on some of these palaces is again this sort of exuberance of nature that we saw in St. Silliams is now come over into the Amerid stonework here, this this detail happens to be of Kassar Moushata which is in actually in the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art so you can get really close to it and see it see it very well and then the other innovation in a different early of Amerid palace is in Hisham's palace or Khilberul Mufjad which is in what's today the occupied West Bank near Jericho and some scholars have seen in this window the earliest example of a rose window because it was found high up in the audience chamber of the palace and fragments of stained glass were found in the excavations so they know it was used for decorative light to come through and so it takes then five centuries before you get to the absolute apogee of a stained glass rose window in Shatva Cathedral there on the right and then talking of stained glass this again was an extraordinary discovery that I wasn't expecting but the glass itself it turns out that between the years 1200 and 1400 most of our great cathedrals across France and indeed in this country in Canterbury and in York the glass has been analysed and has been found to have what they call Islamic composition and this is because the raw materials are so superior Syria was actually the the world leader in glass under the Abbasids and and Raka which of course we only know from Isis fame these days Raka was was the great glass workshop centre under Haruna Rashid when he built his palaces there and the reason the the glass there is so superb was because of the quality of the raw materials the pebbles from the Euphrates and the local salty plant which was used in the flux to and was called Ushnan and that blend made the most extraordinary quality of glass this wonderful thick organic glass with with bubbles and it's very very strong incredibly strong and so when the crusaders came and took took Jerusalem later they discovered the quality of this glass and shipped it back to europe in huge quantities to make these early stained glass windows so that is Umayyad Syria if you like but of course then the way a lot of these innovations come into the european mainland is into Umayyad Spain because here here we have an aerial view of the Cordoba Mesquita in Spain and of course the Umayyad prince who set who set all this up who made Cordoba his his capital was the only one to escape in 750 when the Abbasids came in and took over and he escaped managed to make his way across north Africa and against all the odds managed to set up an extraordinary uh rule that evolved into a caliphate and um and his successors then ruled in Spain for many years so and added extensions to this mosque so this this mosque is built in the eighth century and that was then extended in the ninth and the tenth century but we'll see in it so many of the things that we've seen in Syria so this is the minaret of it and now it's starting to go up in in registers um but again sort of resembling in some ways um you know it looks and in fact of course these days it is the christian bell tower of what has been turned into the cathedral but here we have an astonishing innovation um this is in the 10th century extension and this is the ribbed vault um in front of the meharad and this was examined for the first time by structural engineers in 2015 who got special permission to go in and do an extensive survey and they were flabbergasted by what they found they said they had never seen such an example of geometric perfection and it is never needed repair in its entire thousand-year existence and this is because by the 10th century um the knowledge of geometry had come over from the Abbasid court it was um and so so stone masons acquired this astonishing hand it had this astonishing knowledge which was not common in Europe at all this time and you could see the tree-file arches there along the bottom of the screen um and uh and again they used in in the holiest places now in the Cordoba mesquita on the back wall there is a whole um display of the masons marks these were found in the foundations um in in renovation works and when you look at them they are overwhelmingly muslin written in arabic a handful are christian um but they are overwhelmingly muslin showing that these are muslin masons who worked on the mesquita and here is a detail of the meharad itself and you can see the tree the row of tree file arches there across the top and the horseshoe arch which also began in in in in the Damascus amead mosque in a very slight form becomes more accentuated here in Cordoba and also the arches again this alternating pattern and here in Cordoba it's red and white because of the Rahman the uh the the amead who who the prince who escaped those are his dynastic colors red and white so the arches reflect that and they have double arcades and it makes this extraordinary sort of spatial web when you're inside there where you kind of lose all sense of direction you don't know where the beginning or the end is a very very different concept to how um christian architecture evolved in in gothic um but uh and here's an here's a gateway of the cordoba mesquita again covered in arches because the ameads loved arches and so in every opportunity the decoration is arches so you've got the tree file arch there and then inside you've got sank foil arches with five loaves and of course rather incongruously crucifixes put inside because it is now a cathedral and then here this is also in Cordoba but this is no longer the mosque this is the synagogue in Cordoba because the jews who lived there um were um you know valued members of society and they chose to adopt the islamic designs and so in their in their synagogue they used the same patterning the same styles and when they were uh expelled in the Reconquista and and expelled from Spain when they um uh wherever they went they chose more often than not to use to rebuild their synagogues in in islamic style probably the most famous one is in um is in Berlin and then Medina to Zahra so after Cordoba in the 10th century um the caliphs moved moved to just outside uh Cordoba so in the in the countryside just outside and built the most astonishing and opulent palace the like of which have never been seen in Europe and and there was a steady stream of of bishops and and diplomats coming to visit this who would have seen all these extraordinary styles and begun to be influenced by them so that's muslim spain that's a major way obviously that influences came into europe another way is through a mouthy trading trading port on the Italian coast and this this we know is the way that the pointed arch first arrived into Europe and we know this because in the church histories it is actually recorded um the the monasteries and abbeys were were very good at keeping detailed histories so we know what their building programs were and here on the left we have a mouthy cathedral and the merchants at a mouthy were trading with Cairo and noticed the Ibn Talun Mosque with its pointed arches and so they liked the style brought it back and used it in a mouthy and then a very influential abbot from Monte Casino came and visited a mouthy and saw the pointed arches and said I want those too in my in my monastery and so he imported the workman imported some raw materials and built them at Monte Casino and then the abbot of Clooney which is the Benedictine powerhouse you know the most influential abbey in in the in the whole of of France and he visited Monte Casino saw the pointed arches and decided I would like those in my monastery too and also imported the craftsman to do it because of course local local craftsmen were not familiar with the ways of doing this so and this is as I mentioned all recorded in in in the church histories and so once Clooney had it of course it was like setting the fashion and the top dog had pointed arches so after that all the bishops in their respective cities wanted pointed arches and the pointed arches enabled them to gradually build higher and higher and this is when it almost became competitive with the Gothic cathedrals now another route through which these styles entered of course was Sicily and here is a picture and Palermo the Palatine Chapel there where you've got Fatimid arches you've got the Byzantine mosaics and then you've got the Mokarnas in the ceiling on the right hand side we know that the craftsmen there were Muslim because again it's it's recorded that they came they came over from from Fatimid Cairo and so these styles now start to make their way into into France from all these gateways if you like from Muslim Spain from Sicily and and so because the pointed arches now become popular at Clooney Clooney is at this stage sponsoring the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela and it builds a series of shrines Cluniac shrines along the route and these shrines cathedrals start to show the influence of these Islamic buildings and so this is La Puy Cathedral and you will see that it's copying the ablac of the arches it's got kufic inscriptions in in various places and it has some some pointed arches as well and also at this time the Normans of course who who were on the Crusades and also in in Sicily bring the pointed arch from from Spain from Sicily they bring it back into Durham Cathedral so on on the left of your picture here this is the Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral and you'll see this interlocking blind arches almost identical to one of the gateways on the Cordoba Mesquita where also just notice the little row of merlons along the top there the little crenellations which are exactly like the ones along the Damascus Mosque as well and this is the time now in Europe where you start to get some very interesting imagery of God as supreme architect of the universe and he has a set of compasses so it's God as geometrician and it shows that this is the first time that this level of geometry and geometric understanding seems to have come into mainland Europe and it's very interesting that it coincides with the with the arrival of these ribbed vaults using their astonishing command of geometry. Just to quickly mention the military innovations as well so from the Crusades the Richard the Lionheart for example brought back many military innovations that he'd noticed and this is his the Chateau Gaillard on the Seine between Rouen and Paris and you'll notice there he's put this sort of scalloped Bailey round because he's learned from the muslim designs that the curved surfaces are better at deflecting the enemy weapons and heraldry it was another interesting thing I hadn't expected to find that when the Crusaders were in Syria they saw Saracen knights having jousting competitions on horseback with blunt javelins and they were wearing on their helmets they had symbols so the first fleur de lie is actually on Noura Dean's helmet and again we know this because scholars have done detailed work researching all of this so there's a German guy called Meyer who has written a book called Saracen Heraldry explaining the background to all of this and so what happens is that the idea was first seen in Syria and the Crusaders bring it back and use it differently and evolve it into the whole heraldic you know to do with inheritance and families and coats of arms and develop it into that in a way that it was never developed in the muslim world now this is an example of fake news if you like this is a a map of Jerusalem dated 1486 showing Jerusalem as the Christians of the time wanted to see it it was it was drawn by a pilgrim who was accompanying the Bishop of Mainz who was on pilgrimage and the Venetians at this time were busy running package tours almost to the Holy Land they were getting on very well with you know they were trading with with with the Mamluks often against the wishes of the Pope but they were shipping people out in large numbers via all the Venetian colonies to then arrive in in Jerusalem and this map shows in center stage the Dome of the Rock because the early Crusaders did not realize that this was a muslim shrine they actually believed that it was the temple of Solomon and it's labeled as such on the map and so the Templars you know copied this church and we've got the temple church in London the temple tube station they're around temple churches all over Europe there's one in Cambridge and there's one in several I think in in Portugal so it is an extraordinary example of something that was so influential and this was the first pictorial map of Jerusalem ever to be printed it was translated into many languages it was printed many many times and the mistake about the Dome of the Rock was not realized until centuries later this this map was carried on being printed so it was very influential in in the design of churches again completely based on on a misconception. Venice now St Mark's in Christopher Rehner even says that this is a building which is obviously designed in the Saracen style he says and again you can see the sort of crenellations along the top the the Islamic double dome which has been brought into Europe by the copied from from the Seljuks who who that's where it was first seen and then in Cairo it was seen and brought in by by merchants and then the Venetians themselves again loved arches you see the arches become more pointed they've got tree foil arches here this what's called the telephone dial motif from the Palazzo Dario that's copied from a Mamluk palace in Cairo and then the Doge's palace here on the right you've got this incredibly detailed you know very sort of tracery work very very like lace almost very very detailed and you've got the the the crenellations the merlons along the top they have also become highly decorative and then this of course spawns more copies the Doge's palace is a very very influential building and one of the strangest copies it's it produced was was this carpet factory in in Glasgow the Templeton carpet factory where again it's got you know its own crenellations up there and is copying all the styles a sort of cathedral of commerce and here this is now in Spain this is on the left we have the cathedral of Burgos another example that Christopher Wren says is clearly built in the Saracen style and when he disputes the the use of the word Gothic what he actually says is he says from the lightness of its work the excessive boldness of its elevations delicacy profusion and extravagant fancy of its ornaments it could only be attributed to the Moors or what is the same thing to the Arabians or Saracens and it then takes seven centuries to evolve into what we have on the right hand side of the picture here the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona which is if you like the complete you know the absolute apogee of of Gothic of course still not finished it's it's due to be completed in 2026 which is the centenary of Anthony Gaudi's death the architect's death and it's the most remarkable building if you like it's if you wanted to sort of categorize it you could call it something like Hispano Saracenic Gothic and it's it's the ultimate fusion of nature geometry and religion it's just so organic the way it combines all the different features into this astonishing creation and Gaudi himself openly admits that he was influenced by by Islamic architecture and this is a detail of the Nativity Fassade on the Sagrada Familia and again we see this incredible profusion of nature it's just bursting with with fertility and life in in that way that we've come to see you know in the Umayyad and then the Christian all these styles that have come come through from from Syria and then of course we have the Gothic revival that takes place in the 19th century which becomes very influential in many key buildings so Big Ben and again the way it goes up in four registers I can't help noticing but you know it does have certain similarities with with some minarets the facade it's this is a detail on the right hand side it's covered in in tree-file arches pointed arches and of course these styles make their way across the Atlantic as well so in this picture this is actually in Washington DC this is the national cathedral and what have we got here in America we've got the twin towers flanking the monumental arch we've got the rose window we've got the tree-file arches we've got pointed arches we've got all the cremations we've got all those elements that we've seen coming in from from Syria and they've been synthesized into something into something new and still in America Gothic becomes very influential in the academic world and in there are more universities colleges and schools in Gothic style in America than anywhere else in the world and Yale is an almost completely Gothic campus and so these pictures are both of Yale on on the left there is the Harkness Tower and on the right is there one of their main libraries which looks for all the world like a like the name of a Gothic cathedral and then of course finally the the US capital dome the seat the seat of government if you like the equivalent of our houses of parliament is like St Paul's Cathedral using the Islamic double dome technique of where the outer dome projects a different profile to the inner dome and so it's it's a slight irony if you like but this sort of apparently classical facade is actually concealing an Islamic use of geometry inside and so the whole point of this book really is to show that everything builds on everything else that we can't you know no one culture can claim for itself that oh you know this this is entirely my creation in the way that the French claimed about Notre Dame we have to realize that the the only way that I mean the reason it evolved is because of the the fact that people took the best of what they found and synthesized it into something new and that's exactly what Christopher Wren himself did he was an open minded man and so he was quite prepared to take the best vaulting techniques he could find and that happened to be what he called the Saracen vaulting so that's really the message of the book is that it's only through multiculturalism that we managed to take the best from everything and and move forward with with new discoveries all the time thank you very much thank you thank you Diana for a very interesting and detailed talk I was amazed by the quality of the images I mean they are really amusing so I don't know what type of camera you were using but but basically I wanted to kind of bring up the end of the talk for as a point of beginning of discussion which is and and and then returning to the beginning of the talk where you talked about the titans stealing from the Saracens in a sense it is it seems to me like if we are going to be open to to cultural kind of encounters then we need to acknowledge that you know the encounters are in a sense important for how we understand the world today so I see the book or the way that you know I've read parts of it like I show it as a you know putting forward an argument for the importance of encounters and the importance of understanding cultures in different ways but I'm still intrigued by the title so again stealing from the Saracens sounds like there had been no acknowledgement of the you know contribution or the influence of is like and architecture and design on the western world so if you could elaborate on that and then I open it up to questions I can see yes yes no no I mean this is this is the point is as I said it's a very deliberate choice and it's actually meant to be it's meant to be quite funny in a way the stealing from the Saracens things not meant to be taken seriously it is an irony and trouble is irony doesn't work very well in Arabic it's actually a word that you can't even translate you know so in a way it doesn't work you know people take it too literally when actually it's deliberately trying to sort of almost poke fun at the whole thing that here we are you know trying to say oh this is ours you know we only we Europeans you know managed to produce a wonderful building like Notre Dame when actually of course without any acknowledgement of where most of these ideas came from but of course it's also true to say that in Gothic cathedrals they were all these elements were synthesized into something new because the pointed arch was stronger this is this is one of the reasons that enabled Gothic cathedrals to get higher and higher and higher and in a sort of competition almost tilt till you get to the the crazy situation where Beauvay cathedral went so high that it collapsed you know and flying buttresses had to be invented to prop them up. So actually you know my comment is summed up by a brilliant comment from one of one of the attendees Deborah Dunham who says thank you for the masterful and digital synthesis connecting so many places I have visited without seeing the artistic multicultural connections but there's another question which says what are the sources and archives you have used to document the cost national contacts learning influences and exchanges you documented. Yes yes no no I mean the book the book by the way has been beautifully produced with over 150 illustrations by Hearst and it is fully footnoted so all the sources are given and basically what I discovered was that earlier scholars have done most of the work it's just that they have researched one particular aspect and so what somebody like me was able to do was to come along and join the dots really because people weren't making the connections but because I was you know I was lucky enough to already be familiar with the European buildings and with the Middle Eastern buildings and in some cases also the the Turkish buildings I mean in this presentation I didn't have time to go into the whole Ottoman things but there are many important things that come from there as well so it is it is you know it is it is well yes it is you know it's it is a very important thing certainly. Thank you so we have a question did the Saracens also take from the Europeans in terms of architecture or did you see a research did you kind of cross that as well. Well very little at the beginning certainly very little I mean that that was quite striking that most of the direction of travel was from east to west in these early stages I mean it's only much later that you know that that you see signs of well architecturally I mean really we're only talking in the modern age that that's because no most of these styles did not go in in in that direction what did of course happen was that a lot of the styles that I'm saying you know started in Syria of course didn't necessarily start in Syria either a lot of them came in from Iran from Persia and indeed from further east you know that these you know the in these very very early civilizations a lot of these styles that this whole area was quite it's important to understand how multicultural that part of the world was and multi ethnic you know the whole of the fertile crescent was was a huge melting pot of civilizations and and you know very very creative part of the world as obviously why so many of the inventions came from that part of the world as well because they were busy bouncing ideas off each other the whole time learning from each other and this is the way new new thoughts come into your head from from these sorts of encounters where suddenly you need to do something different because you come up against a different way of doing things and and so you know this is this this is what what's so important to help societies to move forward. Thank you I hope that everyone can hear me it seems like I'm muffled but there's a question do you think architects of more recent constructions were aware of all these influences and or do you think that they are not aware of it in a sense the question is about modern architecture which you might you know you might might not want to answer but then a question relevant to my my comment about the title someone's asking what are the actions of people to the way that you interpret the book versus you know how they interpret the title of the book versus the excellent research that you presented well um yes I mean what's been interesting I I have noticed in in the reaction to the book I mean there's a certain kind of person if you like who I suppose is a product of you know their education system but you know if you like a sort of you know an older person who perhaps you know is of the generation of Kenneth Clark's civilization you know on the BBC the very first documentary series I mean if anybody can remember I mean people who saw that will realize how incredibly Eurocentric people were at that stage and I was I was a product of that if you like I grew up believing that Europe was the center of the universe and that really the Greeks invented everything and that was that and it was only when I just you know changed to study Arabic that I realized my goodness you know even the Greeks it didn't invent that much you know a lot of their ideas came from further east and so I I you know was lucky enough to choose a subject that you know broadened my horizons so that I could see and of course you know over the years that I spent living and traveling in the Middle East I was able to see so many things that you know that we we think of in Europe as Greek when actually you know the the Greeks didn't you know say so much of it actually came from further east and which is again hardly surprising considering that the birthplace of civilization was there between the Tigris and the Euphrates thank you and on the modern architecture thing I mean I think you know I think there are some architects obviously who are aware of these things I mean Gaudi I mean Anthony Gaudi is just such an astonishing man I mean who was clearly I think deeply aware of this incredibly uh sort of organic quality of of um uh of Islamic architecture I mean he he loved the way I mean he calls it it actually has a term fractal geometry where you're you're you're kind of copying nature so you know you've got these things like snowflakes and mollusks shells you know you're kind of and everything is is is you never have a right angle and he says you know there is no right angle in nature in fact he even says you know I am a geometrician that is to say I synthesize I mean he under he completely gets it about what it is in Islamic architecture that makes it so sort of so so living you know and that there's no kind of intermediary if you like between between the person experiencing this and God and this this was another interesting thing actually to come out of the research you know that you've got the linear hierarchical structure of a Gothic cathedral with the long thin nave where you're never in any doubt where the important people are you know they're up by the altar at the eastern end and then and then they're kind of ranked you know in the choir and then the important people are right at the front and and then you know the masses are are at the back and you don't you don't have that in in a mosque design at all the fact that you can sit anywhere that there's no furniture you know this is a very different way of approaching a religious building and I think I think this is part of what Gaudi completely understood you know that you wanted a building that made you feel as if you know you were being embraced by God from the moment you stepped inside it that's wonderful um so I have a couple of questions somehow related to each other I did the Europeans tried to conceal the source and claim it their own and another one saying my question aside from Ren is the record of much recuperation from European architects or patrons of the Saracen sources of the buildings and whether this is whether this is begrudging in you know kind of acknowledgement or whether it is a celebratory so it's related to the questions you we've just answered so in a sense do you feel that there has been looking at the European sources and the European writings on these great buildings and in Europe did they acknowledge the influence of their Saracens well I think you know politics comes into this quite a lot I mean you know you can't get away from the fact that these big public buildings are political statements it takes a lot of money to be able to you know to build a cathedral and I certainly don't think that gothic architects well you know the profession of architect didn't exist in the middle ages so what happens is you have the the bishop or the abbot who who takes the credit so so you know you have sander knee saint denis in in in on the outskirts of parents which is always credited as the first gothic building and yet it remains a mystery quite how that came about and the abbot there abut suje takes total credit for it you know he puts himself in the stained glass windows he you know there are inscriptions where he makes sure his name is there there is no clue whatever about who built the buildings it's simply no mention of it because they were just kind of dismissed almost as craftsmen and yet you know knowing what we know now and it's very interesting actually with the burning down of Notre Dame this is going to give a huge opportunity for researchers to for the first time in a way to really get to the bottom of some of the construction techniques and I'm I'm hopeful that they might begin to be able to find some of the identities of some of these early masons because it's very clear I mean stone masons in this country acknowledge that there's suddenly this huge leap you know when when gothic begins and this coincides with when the crusaders come back from the holy land suddenly the level of of construction the comprehension of geometry there's there's a there's a sort of huge leap and how do you explain that I mean how does that suddenly happen it has to be that that a lot that some you know people with the knowledge they never got the credit for it but but they they were brought back I mean there is evidence that some muslim masons and craftsmen were brought back as prisoners for example there's there's a record I mean I mentioned this in the book there's one who who's brought back and builds castles in in Wales and ends up being the the architect to to one of the Henrys I can't remember which Henry it is but anyway so to the king basically and so you have occasional things like that where suddenly a muslim mason crops up and becomes high profile but most of the time it's very hidden which is why as I said you know finding those masons marks at the back of at the back of the quarter by mesquita is is important and there are places in in churches and cathedrals in this country where arabic has been found in the numbering system in some of the carpentry so arabic numerals have been found so in Durham for example there is some I mean research is ongoing on this and I'm personally convinced that more and more will will come out about about it as as as people as more and more work is done on this and you know the Notre Dame renovation is going to offer a massive opportunity for that um I come to a question from someone on Facebook but uh before that there's a question from think it's the you hope I know um thank you for the wonderful theater you made it all sound so simple you just answered my question about how these foods were lying in plain sight but I think there's a good question here could you elaborate a bit more on who you mean by Saracens you made it sound like it's mostly Syrian well well this is a disputed term of course I mean the word you wouldn't believe how much time I've spent researching the word Saracens I mean and the number of people I've consulted about it you know but the person who actually um came up with I think the the most definitive definition um was my old arabic professor um at Oxford and he um he dug out he used to be a classicist so he dug out a Roman historian called um Amianus who who um recorded the Saracens um and they appear on a map in the second century AD so this is pre pre Islamic the term Saracens was around pre pre Islamic as a tribal grouping in the north Sinai was was where they're positioned on this very early map um but at some point um oh yes and Amianus then describes them as as uh they were they were well known for for being for for looting and uh so this then this fits in with my my thing about thieves and looting and stealing and everything so um but then at some point and the word Saracens comes into common use then really from from from the middle ages onwards because the Crusaders start to use the word to mean basically all Arab Muslims it becomes their all-purpose word and they very often don't distinguish between um well as you as you heard there with with um with Christopher Wren he says the Moors the Arabians or the Saracens which is the same thing you know that for him it's all the same thing that that's how how broad it is that there was not really any comprehension about you know the differences really okay um well I just want to bring in a bit of what Dr Stephen games uh put in in the uh Facebook chat and I think you know it's just a matter of clarification you could clarify what what you really intended um because he says that he thinks you are being essentially unhistorical in advancing the idea that 700 years of Gothic and neo-gothic architecture is a borrowing uh or stealing from Islamic or Saracenic or Syrian architecture um so he says this is um not true unless one predetermines or Gothic architecture as essentially Moorish in which case one is promoting an era of slavery um and then what he goes on to say is that um the uh pointed arch that Diana sees everywhere in Moorish architecture is in fact often equals or only accidental pointed arch uh so in a sense uh in a sense maybe you could respond to this um to this comment uh by by by reinforcing the points around you know the exchange you know the encounters and exchange but I think across really clearly um but if you don't feel you know don't really want to respond to this statement then well well no I mean what I what I'm I will respond certainly um because what I'm doing in the book is showing how all the elements that are common to Gothic so we're talking the pointed arch the tree file arch um the ribbed vault um these these three key elements and then there are lots of sort of smaller elements like the rose window if you like them the twin towers the um uh of course the twin towers and the monumental entrances is is is pre-Islamic so so that that that gets taken on into uh you know that that obviously the the Muslims adopt that from there from the earlier tradition but but but the things that that the Muslims seem to have genuinely innovated are the ribbed vaulting did not exist at that point the I mean the ribbed vaulting in the corridor of Mesquite there was nothing like that on European soil so the techniques for doing that found their way into southern France and then start to be used in early Cluniac buildings um along the route to Compostella and then and then find their way further north um and get used in in in the Gothic cathedrals and and again it takes centuries and centuries and centuries obviously of refining it before you get to something like um you know King's College Chapel in Cambridge with the absolute apogee and it takes many centuries to reach that but the point is the starting point was the court of a mesquite this technology did not exist in the European mainland before the tree file arch there is no tree file arch in Roman or Byzantine architecture it came in via the umayyads into Muslim Spain and the pointed arch as I explained came in via a Malfi so all these elements um get get taken get cherry picked if you like and synthesized then into something new in Gothic and what I feel it does once you sort of understand uh that it gives it deepens your appreciation of Gothic architecture I mean I now look you know at my local parish church which is covered in tree file arches and pointed arches and it gives me a much deeper understanding and appreciation of it it's a it's a lovely thing to sort of you know instead of just glancing at it and not thinking about it it actually enriches one's own experience of these buildings thank you that really explains it um I want to come to an interesting question which uh from Rarad Ziadi which says when the empires were copying from each other were they affected by religion culture arts politics language and so on because I think it is much bigger than just taking architectural elements um so in a sense do you kind of when you look at the architectural you know borrowing uh in in in all these buildings do you also come do you also kind of look at the historical context at the you know religious context cultural context um and yes I do I do uh where it's because it's actually very relevant um as I said you know politics I mean you know Christopher Ren was very aware of the politics of architecture you know he he says you know this creates a national identity um and and you know it is it is a very important political statement and and each new civilization when they when it comes in wants to build something that's bigger and better than than what came before I mean it carries on you know today in the gulf places like Dubai you know want the biggest and tallest skyscraper you know because they want to show that they are the biggest and the best you know it's always been like that with with architecture um that um and it tends to require a combination of um a new very ambitious and powerful ruler combined with a great deal of money and and then having the right the right people around him and what what happened so often in these uh when it came to then designing a new building was that um that powerful ruler would would call in the best of everything he could find so you know it was very common um for you know the empire to be scoured for you know the best quality marble and for it to be pillaged off other buildings and brought back to create you know a new building that that was to represent you know I mean the Iosofia being being a classic case of that you know um where where so much that was brought there from all over you know the best was brought from everywhere and of course the best craftsmen were assembled as as well I mean we just um that they they individually almost never get any credit that that that comes much later um it's only in the later gothic that you start to get a name of of the master mason as he's referred to the the term architect as such comes in very very late I mean even in Christopher Ren's day in the 17th century the profession of architect did not exist I mean he was called the master surveyor to the king at that time you know I mean we we think of oh they must always have been architects but um it was a it was a very novel um idea and really really quite quite late coming in and and also just to mention that the term gothic I mean these terms themselves are sort of all slightly are all very recent actually I mean gothic as a as a term was only coined in the in the 16th century by an Italian art historian called Vasari and he he uses the term gothic and he also coins the term renaissance and for some reason these are the terms that are stuck so you know I mean it's interesting that people have people like ren and a few others as well mainly in France interestingly have challenged this definition of gothic and said how ridiculous you know that whether goths you know were sort of heavy and and you know and known for destroying things rather than building things that you know it doesn't it doesn't stand up so they you know the terms themselves are are quite are quite misleading in a way and um you know like Byzantine I mean the Byzantines didn't call themselves Byzantines and we call them that much much later that's right um so I have two questions one is uh would temple church and template churches not being modeled on uh would it be possible that they're not being modeled on the Holy Spirit Church in Jerusalem rather than the dome of the rock and there's someone who's asking about contribution of Persian architecture whether you talk about that in your book yes well with with the dome of the rock I mean it's very clear as I said from that map and from the the way the maps are labeled um uh that the the Holy Sepulchre was not was not influential in in that sense it was um it was actually a very um uh the building itself of the Holy Sepulchre went through many many changes and and was destroyed and then rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt you know it's whereas the dome of the rock has has basically stayed in that in that shape I mean in that um octagonal shape and uh I mean it's not it's not disputed at all by art historians that um that that it is borrowed from from the dome of the rock um so I mean just just to give you some sense of um you know some some of the other sort of early scholarship I mean the Doge's palace um in Venice for instance is is apparently modeled on the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and and the the scholar who has um who has concluded that after extensive research is a lady called Deborah Howard who was the professor of um architectural history at Cambridge and she she spent 10 years writing a book called Venice and the East where again you know it's very very detailed research and she goes deeply into all sorts of manuscripts and sources um so so uh on most occasions um what I'm doing here is drawing together all of this different scholarship which which has not been nobody's attempted to to pull all the threads together in the way that I'm doing but the actual scholarship has been done by earlier scholars than me by people who've devoted you know decades to researching one particular aspect oh that's fantastic um so I want you know loads of people saying brilliant lecture thank you they really enjoyed it uh there's one question here about the link between Saracen's architecture and Orthodox edifices um maybe he's referring the question comes from Felix and who's referring to the dorms specifically um so do you have any comments on that oh well the whole question of domes yes there's virtually a whole chapter devoted to domes and it is fascinating I mean the way they evolve um and what they mean and and I mean yes there's a there is a whole chapter quite a lengthy chapter devoted to domes and it talks about the Seljuks and the Ottomans as well as the earlier examples obviously in Constantinople and Iosophia um incidentally with Iosophia we have to we always hold up the dome as this great wonder it's worth remembering that it kept falling down it wasn't wasn't quite the wonder that some people imagine it fell down after 20 years it was repaired so many times and um they've had to add something like 26 buttresses to hold it up I mean Sinan himself the great Ottoman architecture was was was also involved in one of the many um you know restorations because it kept on falling down and it's it's it's got iron chains around the dome holding it up even even now you know it is and that is not a double dome you see this is the thing it's the earlier technology um and and so whereas the later um the all the Ottoman mosques in Istanbul are all using the double dome technique and not fallen down structurally they are much stronger you know because because they they have evolved you know they they they're using geometry to to a higher level um but yes there are um very interesting that the evolution of the dome is itself a fascinating topic and that actually slightly brings me to um part of a question you asked earlier but which I didn't get the chance to answer about the about Persia and the Iranian influences as well um obviously I'm not majoring on that in the book but I do cover it up to a point yes and certainly domes um you know some of the earliest examples of you know um uh some sort of canopy over the head of the ruler for example occurs in places like Persepolis in in Iran so so um you know there are very early examples and and Sasanian architecture also comes in um clearly influences Umayyad Umayyad architecture as well so so yes and you know these these we have to keep looking eastwards as well and there's a related question but about the boats uh from about what sorry about voting uh ornamental in cathedrals so the question is moqarnas are cited to serve an acoustic purpose in that they help transport sound back but do examples of ornamental voting in cathedrals serve the same purpose um I don't believe that they do although very interestingly the one um the one cathedral where uh sort of moqarnas if you like a sort of are used um in in a way is the Sagrada Familia and and of course Gaudi himself um was very very conscious of acoustics and light and the interplay between uh between all of that and so he's when he when he designed the building I mean you know it's been so long in the making you know that I mean he he worked on it for 43 years um until he tragically was was killed in a in a tram accident um and and you know so people have been working on it for so long because it is it is um the level of perfection and and dedication in every little detail is so is so massive um uh but he wasn't going to be rushed with it all and he had a he had when people rebuked him about um you know how long it was all taking he he said my client is not in a hurry nobody nobody could answer that really a brilliant question from Mary Holmes where she says within architectural education there is often a huge precedent of constructing a linear history from which modernism emerges as a prototype product of mainly western epistemologies to send you a thing about education on architectural histories that raises awareness of the multi multiplicity of cultural influences on architect architectural development aids in the production and the synthesis of new ideas and architectures absolutely I I mean I do wish I do wish there's a broader you know less Eurocentric way of thinking about things would gradually come into the education system I mean everybody would benefit from that and it would be so much more inclusive you know instead of this sort of exclusive Eurocentric way of looking at everything um you know it would it would it would just open people's eyes to how much broader all of these influences are and um yeah I mean I really I really do hope that you know a book like this leads people to slightly rethink the way that they approach a topic like architecture. Fantastic um and so we have perhaps a final question which is will you ever venture into writing a book on later Islamic influence of Ottoman Mughal and South Africa architecture directly and clear influence on western architecture. Now you have that you have clarified in this book early Islamic influence may have ever seen Seljuk and so on on Gothic and Medieval architecture so it is um you know you kind of yeah yeah no I understand I understand the question I mean the answer is I'm not focused on that specifically to be honest I'm still very very focused on all of these things that I keep I keep learning I mean I keep learning from from the audiences actually of of talks I mean I some of the questions and things that people have pointed out to me um that I didn't know about and and so there is so much more to discover my my book is just if you like the beginning of bringing all these threads together um there is really so much more I mean there's a particular thing I'm pursuing at the moment um which is all about the um what what often architecturally gets referred to as the Chevron but it's basically the zigzag the zigzag design and I don't know if you're familiar with Durham Cathedral it's got you know in the pillars of the nave it's got this very striking sort of almost primitive zigzag pattern on the um on one of the pillars and uh and when you look it up it sort of it refers to it as oh a very distinctive Normanesque or Romanesque you know because Romanesque is Norman in in in Britain it's what William the Conqueror brought over in 1066 you know and so Canterbury Cathedral you know or basically the Normans rebuilt all our churches and cathedrals in in in the Gothic style the Norman style which incidentally at that time was simply known as the French style before it was dubbed Gothic centuries later it was just known as the French the French style so um but I I'm I'm developing a theory that um this zigzag was actually brought back by the Normans from Syria and the Holy Land because the zigzag is a very common pattern I mean I've got it in the courtyard of my Damascus house or all around the top there are zigzags going around and I was told that it's a very early Mesopotamian um uh design and and in that fascinating series of documentaries the secret history of writing that the BBC ran back in October there was a very interesting episode that talked about the early Canaanite hieroglyph that then becomes you know the alphabet where the symbol for water is just a zigzag a zigzag which then and and and the um it was known as my myine you know I mean clearly a word that comes into Aramaic as the Maya you know all the variations of water in Arabic um and the fact it would make sense if that was water if you like if that was representing water um it would be um you know because it's also linked with a symbol of power and of course power and water to go together the Seljuks used this this symbol um the the doge's palace has got this chevron on the front again as a sort of copying the courted Debra Howard from the Seljuk sort of power symbol um and I you know I mean I can't prove it I'm trying to prove it through through trying to track it back but um you know I I personally think the the Normans have got that design and brought it in they didn't invent that that they have brought it in because they recognized it as a power symbol that was being used in in in the east you know and brought it brought it through so there are still so many things and I'm still obsessed with stained glass so I'm still going to be be stuck in this for a little while longer I think until I satisfy my curiosity on all these counts we look forward to that book uh but what's kind of when you talk about the chevron and we talk about the water and so on this links to uh one comment or one question in which will be defined when I'll be asking um Donnie Musleh asked if I would like to ask if you know during which time the very direct representation of nature in Islamic architecture were translated in more abstract geometric representation of nature um so if um I don't know whether that is something we looked at but but whether you know it might be something a question that might direct you for future research that we'll be looking forward to. Well it it it's an interesting question certainly and I mean in a way um it makes me think of the Alhambra you know which is obviously not I do cover the Alhambra in the book although obviously it's later so Gothic has already arrived but but it was very influential in in the Gothic revival um the as a building because of all the people who started to visit it on their grand tours and things but but if you if you like I mean you do get a sense in the Alhambra of the use of geometry and the patterns um which which are the sort of endlessly repeating patterns of nature um and certainly on European soil that's the first time that it's used on such a scale um the endlessly repeating patterns that you know so influence people like Max Esher um and uh so yeah I mean it it it it is a sort of progression in a way towards these geometric patterns which um uh which which are at the end of the day creating a sense of sort of infinity and and and therefore you know you can lose yourself in in in the sort of search for God in uh in uh you know in in these patterns which is I think why they are endlessly popular yes why they're you know whenever there are classes run on on the on things like um you know Islamic geometry and designs they're always oversubscribed thank you um I think we have managed to answer most of the questions because they were interrelated a lot of them were asking around uh questions around whether the Europeans acknowledged the influence whether modern architects acknowledged that influence um I I think you you do produce a a history of architecture that is uh non Eurocentric which is uh really exciting for us at SOAS and will be very important for students trying to understand the the exchange of ideas and that not everything needs to come from one way to the other way um so it it falls within that line of of thinking and we hope that you know you're going to produce some some more on this work and then you know if you look at the stained glass I'd be delighted to talk about stained glass because so um I think that there hasn't been anything out there as far as I know that covers this um but really I apologize for the sound I've had a lot of people asking about the sound and so on and I don't know you know I've heard everything very clearly and for those people who asked about the recording we will be this will this is recorded and we will be putting it up as soon as we can I cannot give you the time when it's going to be available for you to to look back and kind of uh you know look again at the brilliant presentation and the visuals those were those were amazing um but thank you Diana thank you so much for taking time to come and speak to us thank you for all the audience and the questions and we do hope that you'll manage to hear us and apologize again for the sound thank you all thank you very much thank you Dina thank you bye bye