The Art And Architecture of Islamic Cairo

He ordered them to place the stone in the centre of a cloak for each
tribe to carry it by the corners to its place. The Prophet then picked up
the stone and placed it in its corner position. Later, when the Ka’ba
was burned down during the siege of Mecca in 683, it was rebuilt by
Yemeni and Persian craftsmen, but the curtain used to drape the structure
(the kiswa) was the imported work of Coptic weavers. The kiswa,
which is renewed annually, was traditionally woven in Egypt,
although since the 1960s it has been manufactured in Mecca.
Omar’s puritanism positively discouraged building activity and
he kept a careful eye on what was happening in Fustat. One tradition
states that he ordered Amr to take action over the construction of the
second storey of a house owned by Kharidja ibn Hudhafa.
Complaints had been made that the second storey threatened the
privacy of the neighbours, but it is more likely that Omar’s objection
was concerned with architectural ostentation rather than a breach of
privacy. 9 With the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty things
changed dramatically during the caliphates of Abd al-Malik and al-
Walid. They recognized that architecture had a powerful symbolic
role in proclaiming Islam’s supremacy, and their early buildings are
visual manifestations of that victory in no uncertain terms. They
were responsible for the two great masterpieces of early Islamic architecture,
the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (692) and the Great
Mosque at Damascus (715). Both these buildings were constructed
by non-Arabs, and Copts were employed on a number of early
Umayyad buildings including the Mosque of the Prophet at Medina,
the palaces of Mshatta (Jordan) and Khirbet al-Mafjar (Palestine) and
possibly the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
Caliph al-Walid employed Copts to build the prayer hall of the
Mosque of the Prophet at Medina (707–9) in which the oldest
recorded mihrab appeared in the form of a semi-circular niche. The
mihrab is the prayer niche from where the imam leads the prayer,
and it holds an honorific function commemorating the place where
the Prophet led the prayers. Whether the Copts had any influence
on the design and installation of this mihrab is uncertain, but it raises
the more general question of Coptic influence on the evolution of
the mihrab in Islamic architecture. This may account for the design
of the mihrab in the Dome of the Rock, which possibly predates
that of Medina. It is located in the cave below the sacred rock, and
its design, consisting of a flat slab decorated with a lobed arch
supported by two twisted columns, resembles a Coptic funerary
stele. Another early mihrab installed in Amr’s mosque at Fustat (710)
almost certainly involved the use of Coptic craftsmen. Ornamental
Umayyad and Tulunid Architecture 19