The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c30.3

v3.c30.3

How much precisely this Indo-Islamic¹ art owed to India and how much to Islam, has been a moot point. The majority of writers, approaching the question from a western standpoint, have treated Indo-Islamic art merely as a local variety of Islamic art; others, taking the opposite side and in sympathy with Indian rather than with Muhammadan ideals, have seen in it nothing more than a modified form of Hindu art. Much may be said in favour of either point of view. On the one hand, examples might be adduced of Muhammadan architecture so closely resembling the Hindu as to be all but indistinguishable from it; or, on the other, of monuments so entirely devoid of any indigenous influence that they might almost equally well have been erected in Samarqand or Damascus. Such examples, however, would be misleading and the arguments based on them fallacious. Broadly speaking, Indo-Islamic architecture derives its character from both sources, though not always in an equal degree. In India, indeed, the history of Muslim architecture is closely akin to what it was in other countries. Wherever the Muhammadans established themselves—whether in Asia or in Africa or in Europe—they invariably adapted to their own needs the indigenous architecture which they found prevailing there. In the lands first conquered by them—in Palestine, for example, or in Syria or in Egypt—this was inevitable, for the reason, as we shall presently see, that the Arabs themselves possessed little or no genius for the art of building, and, if their places of worship were to be as attractive as those of rival creeds, it was indispensable that they should impress into their service the builders and artists of the newly conquered territories. Later on this deficiency was made good by wholesale conversions among their subject races, and in no long space of time the followers of the Prophet found themselves heirs by blood as well as by the right of conquest to the arts and learning not only of the vast Sasanian Empire but of the greater part of the Graeco-Roman Orient as well as of Northern Africa and Spain. Under the sway of the Muslims the cultural development of all these countries received a powerful stimulus and, thanks to the freer intercourse and increasingly closer ties established between them, Islam was able to evolve for itself a new culture, which rapidly became common to the whole Muslim Empire, and at the same time to elaborate novel forms of architecture especially adapted to its religious and social needs. But though Islamic architecture thus acquired a fundamental character of its own and found expression in standardised forms and concepts in general use throughout the length and breadth of the empire, it still remained true that almost every country within that empire—from Spain in the West to Persia in the East—developed a local Muslim style of its own based primarily on indigenous ideals and stamped with a strong national individuality. Nowhere, for example, but in Spain could the romantic gateway of Toledo, or the fairy-like courts of the Alhambra have taken shape, and nowhere but in India could the Quwwat-ul-Islām mosque of Old Delhi or the chaste and stately fabric of the Tāj Mahall have been designed.