Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Great Mosque of Cordova
The Great Mosque of Cordova, preserved fortunately because Christian conquerors used it as a Cathedral instead of destroying it, is one of the finest exa’rnples left of an early hypostyle mosque. It \vas begun in 786 and enlarged in 848, 961, and 987 as the city of Cordova grew and developed. Its plan, a plethora of columns supporting arcades and covered with a flat roof, is simple and flexible. It illustrates the characteristics desire of early Muslims for a space large enough to contain the multitude of the Faithful yet suitable for teaching, private meetings, or whatever other needs the community may have felt. The focus of the mosque was its mihrab.
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Jayyusi, P.309.

698 Political and Cultural History of Islam

A mihrab is normally a semicircular niche that serves to indicate the direction of Makkah and to symbolize the place where the Prophet (PBUH) stood as leader of prayers. The mihrab of Cordova is unique, however, in that it is a small windowless room. The effect if quite striking from a far. At a distance it becomes less a niche than an opening, dark and even mysterious, a source of divine presence or at least a door to it. It is the first mihrab in Islamic architecture to which it is possible to attribute a mystical significance.30
The mihrab was also meant to be an exquisite work of art. The Caliph al-Hakam who had it built in 961 is reported to have ”ordered” the Byzantine emperor to send him a mosaicist who could decorate the mihrab in the same way that al-Walid I had decorated the Mosque of Damascus. The Byzantine emperor reportedly compiled, sending not only a mosaicist but also three hundred and twenty bags of mosaic cubes (tesserae). The mosaicist, it is said, trained local workers so well that they surpassed him in ability, while from all over Andalusia people came to help decorate the monuments. Whether this account is true or not, the point is &*i-«! Hakam wanted to create a unique monument in imitation of the Great Mosque in Damascus, the first major mosque «’” the Muslim world.
He transformed three bays in front of the mihrab into a separate enclave within the mosque-a maqsurah or enclosure reserved for the prince, an elaborate arcade of ploly lobed arches was put around these bays, and each bay was covered with a fancy cupola. The principal one, which is illustrated here, has two particularly noteworthy features. One is its system of construction. It presented the traditional passage from square to dome through an octagonal zone of transition. But a set of eight intersecting arches were then added above the octagon. These arches may have been intended originally to function as structural ribs to distribute the thrusts from the dome to a large number of points on the square. The use of such ribs (which, centuries later, became so typical of Gothic architcvuire) was rare at this time, and the Muslim experiment is one of the earliest found anywhere, certainly the earliest to be found in the western Mediterranean.
But, even if the purpose of the design initially was structural, the ribs of Cordova did not serve this one function only: eventually their masonry formed a single mass with the rest of the dome. Their
Hoag, P.38.
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more specific purpose was to break down the normal spherical space of the dome into many planes set at different angles from each other. This multiplication of planes gave a comparatively s>mall dome a monumental character and created an illusion of great height. But, beyond these architectonic achievements, the dome illustrates a very profoundly Islamic concern to modify the appearance of obvious or traditional shapes. In the dome, as in the polylobed arches below, the illusion was achieved by breaking forms down into smaller and smaller units, in a manner similar to the way in which contemporary poets at times reduce words to syllables or even letters.
The second noteworthy feature of this dome is its surface decoration of mosaic. This is one of the last major examples of wall mosaics in the Muslim world. Unlike the Damascus mosaics they purport to imitate, the Cordova mosaics are limited in subject matter to writing, abstract vegetation, and simple lines. It can be argued, however, that these designs have an iconographic meaning, as do the architectural landscapes of Damascus. The vegetal motifs and the rich texture of the decoration may indeed be an intimation of a parfadisiac setting in the sense that they are both stimulating to the eye and totally removed from any known reality. It is. therefore, the divine world that is suggested by the dome in front of Cordova’s mihrab, as envisioned by the Universal Islamic consciousness.