Islamic architecture: characteristics and examples, from the Dome of the Rock to the Taj Mahal

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Islamic architecture is the building tradition of the lands under Muslim rule from the 7th century onward, from Spain to India, unified less by one look than by a set of shared elements: the mosque with its courtyard, prayer hall and minaret; the dome; the pointed, horseshoe and multifoil arch; the honeycomb vaulting called muqarnas; ornament in geometry, plant forms and calligraphy instead of figures; gardens and water; and a preference for decorating surfaces over shaping masses. It grew from Byzantine and Persian building in the first Arab empire, then split into regional styles, Moorish in Spain and North Africa, Persian, Ottoman, Mughal in India, each with its own masterpieces. Below: the characteristics one by one, the parts of a mosque, the five regional styles with their buildings, and the debt Europe owes them, with links to the Ancient temples of the world collection where its neighbours and models stand.

The nine characteristics

1. The courtyard mosque. A walled enclosure with an open court, an arcade around it, a fountain for ablution and a roofed prayer hall on the side facing Mecca; the plan of the Prophet's house in Medina, repeated at the Great Mosque of Damascus (715) and everywhere after.
2. The dome. Inherited from Byzantium and Persia and made the sign of the faith: the golden Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (691), the first great Islamic building; the domes of Isfahan, Istanbul and Agra.
3. The minaret. A tower for the call to prayer: square in Spain and Morocco (the Giralda of Seville, the Koutoubia of Marrakesh), cylindrical and pencil-thin in Turkey, brick and tiled in Persia, a spiral at Samarra.
4. The arch, in many forms. The horseshoe arch of Spain and North Africa, the pointed arch that reached Europe through Sicily and became Gothic, the multifoil and interlaced arches of Córdoba, the four-centred arch of Persia and India.
5. Muqarnas. Vaulting of small niches stacked like honeycomb or stalactites, turning a dome or an arch into a cascade; the ceilings of the Alhambra are the finest.
6. Geometry. Interlacing stars and polygons in tile, stucco and wood, endlessly repeating; the mathematical patterns of Isfahan, Fez and Cairo.
7. Arabesque and calligraphy. Scrolling plant forms and verses of the Quran in Kufic or cursive script, carved, painted or set in tile, as the main ornament in place of the human figure, which is avoided in religious buildings.
8. Colour and tile. Glazed tile in blue, turquoise and gold covering domes and walls in Persia and Turkey; carved stucco and painted wood in Spain and Egypt; inlaid marble in India.
9. Gardens and water. The four-part garden, the chahar bagh, with channels meeting at a pool, an image of paradise; fountains in every courtyard; the reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal.

The parts of a mosque

The sahn is the courtyard, with the fountain for washing before prayer. The prayer hall is a wide, shallow room so that many rows can stand close to the qibla wall, the one facing Mecca, marked by the mihrab, an empty niche, the most decorated point of the building. Beside it stands the minbar, a stair-pulpit for the Friday sermon. The minaret rises from a corner or the entrance; a maqsura screened the ruler; and the iwan, a great vaulted hall open on one side, faces the courtyard in Persian and Central Asian mosques, usually four of them on the four sides. There are no seats, no altar, no images; the floor is carpet and the walls are pattern and script.

The five regional styles

• Early Arab, 7th–10th centuries. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an octagon with a Byzantine dome and mosaics; the Great Mosque of Damascus, built in a Roman temple enclosure; the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia; the spiral minaret of Samarra in Iraq. Byzantine craftsmen, Roman columns, the first Arabic inscriptions.
• Moorish: Spain and North Africa, 8th–15th centuries. The Great Mosque of Córdoba (785–987), a forest of 850 columns under two-tier red-and-white horseshoe arches, now a cathedral; the Giralda of Seville, a minaret turned bell tower; the Alhambra of Granada (14th century), with its Court of the Lions and muqarnas ceilings, beside which Charles V later set his Renaissance palace; the Koutoubia of Marrakesh. Horseshoe arches, carved stucco, tile mosaic called zellij, cedar ceilings.
• Persian and Central Asian, 10th–17th centuries. Brick, four-iwan courtyards, pointed domes on high drums, turquoise tile: the Friday Mosque and the Shah Mosque of Isfahan (1629), the Registan of Samarkand, the mausoleum of Tamerlane, the tomb of Oljaytu at Soltaniyeh with a 200-foot dome of 1312, the model for later domes east and west.
• Ottoman: Turkey and the Balkans, 14th–18th centuries. The answer to Hagia Sophia, which Mehmed II took in 1453: a single great dome on half-domes over a square hall, thin minarets, lead roofs, Iznik tiles. Sinan's Süleymaniye in Istanbul (1557) and Selimiye in Edirne (1574), the Blue Mosque (1616).
• Mughal: India, 16th–18th centuries. Persian domes and gardens in red sandstone and white marble with Hindu craft: Humayun's tomb in Delhi, Fatehpur Sikri, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, and the Taj Mahal at Agra (1653), the tomb of Shah Jahan's wife Mumtaz, a white marble dome on a platform at the end of a four-part garden, inlaid with semi-precious stone, the most famous building in Asia.

Other branches: the Mamluk mosques and madrasas of Cairo with their striped stone and carved domes; the mud-brick Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali (rebuilt 1907), the largest mud building in the world; the wooden mosques of Xinjiang and Indonesia; and the Arab-Norman buildings of Sicily such as Monreale, where Muslim craftsmen worked for Christian kings.

What Islamic architecture gave to Europe

The pointed arch, which entered Europe through Sicily and Spain and became the basis of Gothic; the rib vault, which some historians trace to the crossed ribs of Córdoba's mihrab dome of 965, two centuries before Durham; the pleasure garden with water channels, copied at the Alhambra by the Renaissance and in every formal garden after; the paper, the arithmetic and the geometry that architects drew with; and, in the 19th century, the Moorish Revival of synagogues, theatres and bathhouses from Budapest to New York, and the Islamic pattern that fed Owen Jones's "Grammar of Ornament" and through it Art Nouveau. In the United States the style shows up in Moorish Revival synagogues, the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, the Shrine temples of the 1920s and the Alhambra-inspired houses of Florida and California. The building that connects the two worlds, Hagia Sophia, is in Byzantine architecture; the whole sequence of Western styles in architectural styles in chronological order.

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