“Visiting the Grand Mosque of Abu Dhabi”

With all of the ugliness and cruelty coming out of the Middle East and the Islamic world these days — e.g., this — it would be easy to conclude that cruelty and ugliness represent Islam and the Middle East.

But they aren’t the whole story.  Here’s a Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News, published this morning, about something of great beauty that was constructed just a few years ago in the United Arab Emirates:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865625662/Visiting-the-Grand-Mosque-of-Abu-Dhabi.html

Please be sure to go through Bill Hamblin’s photographs, taken quite recently, which accompany the online version of the column.

I recently heard a very prominent Israeli archaeologist speak.  His remarks were excellent, stimulating, and insightful.  There was one point, though, where I wondered whether I might have to stand up, object, and cause a stir.

Speaking about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, he pointed out, quite correctly, that the Dome of the Rock was essentially built by Christians, even though it’s a famous Muslim building (indeed, the oldest extant example of “Islamic architecture”).  It’s in the octagonal form of a Byzantine Christian martyrium — a topic on which I’ve written at least one or two newspaper columns and on which I’ve taught.

So far, so good.  But he wasn’t finished yet.

The Arabs were, he said, “barbarians.”

That was a very crude and misleading way of putting things, but it still contained some truth:  The Arabs of the seventh century were, many of them, essentially nomads.  They had a great tradition of poetry — which weighs nothing and takes up no space in a saddle bag — but they had no tradition of great architecture or urban planning.

Then, however, he said “You know what they’re like today!”

That was an outrage.  Had he pursued the topic even twenty seconds further, I would have felt obligated to raise a vocal and strenuous objection.  Fortunately, though, it was just an aside, and he instantly moved back to his actual topic.  He’s a genial fellow, he was a guest, and I decided in the end to let it pass.

But I mention it here because his attitude on the matter is not only insulting but false and historically illiterate.  The Arab and Islamic world developed a spectacular architectural tradition in the years and centuries following the completion of the Dome of the Rock in AD 691.

The Grand Mosque of Abu Dhabi is a contemporary example of that tradition, without which the world would be a much poorer place.