Encyclopedia of Islam

architecture

---

between a house, a citadel, or a school and the 

label  Islamic, and admit as Islamic only those 

buildings created to house religious activities. The 

mosqUe

, shrine, tomb, 

madrasa

, and Sufi enclave 

are usually included in this category. They are 

united by their uses, by a general (though not 

exclusive) avoidance of representations of liv-

ing beings, and usually by a liberal application 

of historical and religious inscriptions. Yet even 

here contradictions arise; the tomb and shrine, for 

example, may well be deemed un-Islamic within 

certain Islamic legal and theological positions. 

These contradictions, which extend to all catego-

ries of religious Islamic architecture, arise from 

the conflation of use and function.

It is the distinction between use and function 

that moves Islamic architecture (and art) out of the 

supposed natural systems in which scholars have 

situated them and places them instead within cul-

tural systems that are capable of producing a mul-

tiplicity of arts and architectures under the rubric 

of Islam. Use refers to the actual situations in 

which specific buildings or objects are employed, 

while function is attached to the reasons the 

building is built and the purposes it serves. Both 

provoke questions of how, where, when, who, and 

why, but function focuses mostly on the question 

of why. While mosques are built for 

prayer

 (their 

use), they may also be intended to commemorate 

the generosity or enhance the prestige of the per-

son who funded them or to signal the presence 

of a Muslim community in a new setting (their 

function). In this sense, Islamic architecture is no 

different from other architectures. It operates as 

shelter and as sign, and it is created within rela-

tionships that bind clients, designers, architects, 

builders, suppliers, and users.

See also 

bazaar

; 

cities

; 

hoUses

; 

mihrab

; 

mina

-

ret

; o

rientalism

; 

pUrdah

.

Nuha N. N. Khoury