In Conversation with Author Diana Darke
By Misbahuddin Mirza
Mar/Apr 2024
Diana Darke is a highly successful author who has published seventeen books to date. She is also a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in the BBC, BBC Arabic, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, and The Financial Times. In addition, she has contributed countless articles and interviews to various publications and websites. She specializes in Türkiye and the Middle East, with particular focus on Syria. She has lived and worked in the region for over thirty years.
Her marvelously illustrated “Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe” (Hurst, 2020), reveals Europe’s Arab and Islamic architectural heritage. She traces ideas and styles from vibrant Middle Eastern centers like Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, via Muslim Spain, Venice, and Sicily, into Europe. She describes how medieval Crusaders, pilgrims and merchants encountered Arab Muslim culture on their way to the Holy Land; explores artistic interactions between Ottoman and Western cultures; and reveals the Eastern roots of what Sir Christopher Wren dubbed “Saracen-style” Gothic architecture.
Islamic Horizons interviewed Darke about her groundbreaking book.
Darke grew up in a very European environment with an English father and a German mother. At first, she followed in her brother’s footsteps by studying German at university. However, when she arrived at Oxford, she realized that she didn’t want to spend three years studying something she was already quite familiar with and so decided to switch to Arabic. That meant she had to work extremely hard and catch up the first year that she had missed; however, she loved the language and the subject from the start.
The reason she choose Arabic in her undergraduate studies, instead of Chinese, Japanese, or Sanskrit, was because even as a child she’d always been fascinated with the birthplace of civilization: the cultures that evolved in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and along the Nile Valley. The choice to complete a master’s in Islamic art and architecture came after she bought a semi-derelict Ottoman courtyard house in the Old City of Damascus and restored it with the help of a team of Syrian and Palestinian craftsmen. She wanted to understand the house at a deeper level.
Gothic and Saracen Style
This fascinating book’s first chapter is about the famous British architect Sir Christopher Wren (d.1723) — a central figure to this book’s subject. Wren, in his waning years aged about 90, wrote in his correspondence with several people that he believed the style known as Gothic “should rightly be called the Saracen style.” He also explained that while building his 36-year-long project masterpiece, namely, St. Paul’s Cathedral, he had used “Saracen vaulting” because it was “the best.” He drew diagrams explaining why this was true.
This man of science, open to knowledge from wherever it came and intensely interested in new developments, never traveled beyond France. However, he used to ask those who did travel eastward and beyond to bring him information about construction techniques. He greatly admired Istanbul’s mosques and used their architects’ Islamic double-dome system to gain imposing extra height for the skyline. He and Sinan, the great Ottoman court architect, were close contemporaries, and one chapter in the book compares the two men.
Gothic architecture is defined by the use, starting in the 12th century, of ribbed vaulting, pointed arches and trefoil arches, rose windows, and twin towers flanking a monumental entrance. These innovations were used, above all, to build Europe’s great medieval cathedrals, like Notre-Dame de Paris. The pointed arch in particular was revolutionary, as it was structurally stronger than the round arch, thereby enabling walls to be built thinner and taller, with the insertion of larger windows, that, in turn, allowed in more light. All these elements entered Europe via Islamic architecture, through various gateways like Spain, Sicily, Venice, and Amalfi.
The middle English romances about Richard I, as well as Jean De Joinville’s “Biography of Louis IX,” both refer to Muslims as “Saracens.” Both of these monarchs had personally gone on Crusades. Darke used “Saracen” in the book’s title because that was the language that Wren used. In the Middle Ages, it was the usual word to describe “Arab Muslims.” This word’s derivation in Arabic comes from the root “to steal,” so “Saracens” means “people who steal.” The title is meant as a double irony, to convey how absurd it is that we called these people thieves and yet took things from them.
Islamic Architecture in the West
The main towers of New York’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge proudly sport the Islamic pointed arch. Darke writes about the Islamic elements in various prominent U.S. structures, such as New York City’s St. John the Divine cathedral, and the U.S. Capitol building’s dome. She explains that Yale University is a heavily Gothic campus and that Gothic is popular in many American academic institutions, probably because it’s thought of as cultured and refined. The interior of its Sterling Memorial Library looks like a Gothic nave.
In her book, Darke walks us through Islamic architecture’s contributions to some significant European structures in England, France, Spain, and the city of Venice. In London, Westminster Abbey bears all the features of Gothic, while the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben are neo-Gothic, from when Gothic underwent a revival in the 19th century — the book also has a chapter on the Revivals.
In France, Notre-Dame de Paris is the iconic structure, but the Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre also uses Islamic double-domes. Venice is alive with arches of every description, and Islamic architecture loves arches – “The arch never sleeps,” runs the Arab proverb. The Venetians traded extensively with Islamic cities in the eastern Mediterranean, especially Alexandria and Cairo, openly copying many Islamic architectural features on their own palaces.
In Spain, the key building that hugely influenced European architecture was the Cordoba Mezquita, dating from the 8-10th centuries with its various extensions. It was here, in the domes of the 10th century, that the first ribbed vaulting appeared on European soil. The dome in front of the mihrab, which has never needed any structural repairs during its thousand-year existence, was recently pronounced a “masterpiece of geometry” by a team of Spanish structural engineers. Wren chose it as the superior Islamic method of vaulting for St Paul’s huge dome. The recent findings of the design of ribbed beams supporting the vaulted ceilings of Spain’s famous Grand Mosque, the Mezquita de Córdoba mentioned above, underscore the wisdom in Wren’s earlier selection of the vaulting design.
Granada’s Palace of the Alhambra and its remarkable use of decorative geometric patterns was also highly influential on artists like Max Escher and Owen Jones, who based his famous design book “The Grammar of Ornament” (London: Day and Son, 1856) on it. Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia Basilica, created by the vision of architect Antoni Gaudi, is the perfect fusion of religion, nature and geometry. Gaudi was openly influenced by Islamic architecture, admiring both its organic quality and close affinity with nature. It’s due for completion in 2026, a century after his death.
Darke is currently working on a sister volume to the subject book, which, she assures us, will be even more fascinating.
Wren was born in 1632, and it was his magnanimity to publicly acknowledge that Gothic architecture should rightfully be called Saracen architecture. Today, Britain’s most prestigious Rugby team is the Saracens, which has a red crescent and star as its logo. When this team was established in 1876, its members chose this name because they were impressed by Saladin’s military prowess during the reconquest of Jerusalem. I was hoping that this meant that by the early 19th century the negative connotations of the word Saracen had started to convert into positive implications. But Darke’s recent interaction with the priest of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the reaction to her tweet after the fire at Notre Dame shows that additional work is needed to educate the public. This remarkable book is a tremendous step to fill this information void.
Misbahuddin Mirza, M.S., P.E., is a licensed professional engineer, registered in the States of New York and New Jersey. He served as the Regional Quality Control Engineer for the New York State Department of Transportation’s New York City Region. He is the author of the iBook “Illustrated Muslim Travel Guide to Jerusalem.” He has written for major US and Indian publications.
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