Diana Darke’s Stealing from the Saracens is a dinner-party tour de force. It was written, as Darke explains, in response to the devastating fire that engulfed Notre Dame de Paris last year, as a follow-up to a blog entitled “The Heritage of Notre Dame – Less European Than People Think.” That article aimed to shed light on the decidedly Islamic underpinnings of that most Western-Christian architectural style, Gothic, which Notre Dame is one of the most famous examples.

Spread over 10 chapters, beginning with one on the insights of fellow Oxford University alumnus Sir Christopher Wren – whose presence peppers the book as a kind of Virgil to Darke’s Dante – and who, as Darke is at pains to explain, possessed a mind enlightened enough to enable him to “freely acknowledge the Gothic debt to ‘Saracen’ architecture.”  

Darke weaves a fascinating story, told in a highly readable and organic discursive style that takes in pre-Islamic pagan and Christian architectural heritage, the various Islamic golden ages, and the Renaissance period (including the bits we’re not generally taught about in school, such as the work of Mimar Sinan at the height of Ottoman architectural culture).

But perhaps most fascinating and enlightening is the translation and adoption in European contexts of Islamic architectural innovations, motifs and technologies, something that happened alongside the more familiar Western European import of the Islamic world’s developments in geometry, philosophy and mathematics. For instance, she suggests that Neoplatonism entered Renaissance Tuscany through the mathematicians of the 10th century Egyptian Abbasid court, and that their work directly enabled the completion of the dome at Santa Maria del Fiore. Its architect Filippo Brunelleschi is known to have read the work of Ibn Al Haytham.

Syria emerges as the cradle of architectural culture for both Christianity and Islam, although as Darke brilliantly explains, the ‘Saracens’ ultimately did a lot more with precedents such as Qalb Lozeh, St Simeon’s Basilica and the house church of Doura Europos than the ‘Westerners’ did. It was also in Syria that the most influential branch of Islamic architectural culture was born, that of the Umayyads. Darke describes in great detail the relationship of Abd al Malik’s Dome of the Rock – Islam’s first monument – to the Syrian precedents cited above, and its subsequent relationship to the early Gothic cathedrals of Europe.

As Wren knew, Islamic building styles were formed and executed at great speed and as Darke suggests, this may have been the spur to the kind of innovation that led to both the trefoil and pointed arches and stained glass, all Gothic staples and all of which were invented during the course of the execution of this building. The Crusaders mistook this building for the Temple of Solomon, and the Kufic Arabic script which adorns it as the ‘sacred language of Christ,’ which is why cathedrals such as the 12th century Notre-Dame du Puy have Kufic Arabic inscriptions on them (sometimes making sense, sometimes not).

The Islamic culture that spawned the Dome of the Rock would go on to new heights in Muslim Spain through Abdul Rahman I and his descendants, the dynasty which patronised Madinat al Zahra, the Córdoba Mezquita, the high point of Western Islamic architectural culture, built with the great speed impugned by Wren but not the ‎structural inferiority – its statically perfect cross-‎ribbed dome has never needed structural repair during its 1,200 year life‎ – and that last flourish of a dying empire, the Alhambra Palace at Granada. 

Executed too late to have influenced the development of Gothic, the Alhambra nevertheless inspired the Art Nouveau designer Owen Jones and the painter MC Escher, and according to Darke has more right than any other building to be associated with Goethe’s assertion that ‘architecture is frozen music.’ I’m inclined to agree. The architecture of Al Andalus inaugurated a second phase of Muslim influence on Christian architecture that can be seen in some form all over Europe. To cite just a couple of examples, the interlocking arches of the exterior façade of the Amalfi Cathedral of St Andrew are ultimately derived from those executed at the Córdoba Mezquita, as is the fan and rib vaulting seen today seen in Gothic cathedrals such as Kings College Cambridge. 

But it’s never just about the buildings for Darke. The book would be excellent even without the human stories behind the various religious upheavals, with figures such as St Denys, whose philosophy of light directly led to the character of the Gothic cathedral as we know it today; St Simeon Stylites who invented his own cult, leading to the largest church in Christendom, by standing on a pillar and preaching from it from days on end; and the Arab-Berber prince Abdul Rahman I, who fled Syria as a young teenager, aided only by a Christian servant, as his family and court were assassinated by the Abbasids. He went on to form new alliances in Spain, founding the most remarkable of Islamic dynasties, whose collapse would lead directly to the ‘discovery’ of America.  

This only touches the surface of what Darke ‘uncovers’ in this book, but much of what she discusses has been extant for some time, with many of the studies she references and scholars she cites being decades old. Given that the call for ‘decolonisation,’ precipitated by Black Lives Matter, has been particularly acute in the last months, this is a propitious moment for the publication of this book. I will certainly be bringing it to the attention of my Muslim students, friends and colleagues.

Yet it is a somewhat schizophrenic book. The first part sets the scene not only of the kind of study to follow but also of her intended audience; the Royals and various former professors. Her piles in Damascus and Kent are mentioned, as are the Skripal poisonings (that dinner party conversational aesthetic once again). The alacrity with which she glosses over the theft of ancient Arabic manuscripts by old Oxford dons and contemporaries of Wren, as well as the contributions of Oxford ‘outsiders’ to Wren’s career (such as Hawksmoor) leave you in no doubt as to her imagined readership.

Also less than convincing are her forays into early Muslim history, which slightly smack of Orientalism and rely on sources from the 1920s. For instance, it would be unacceptable to practically all Muslims that early Umayyad success be attributed to so-called ‘logistical and organisational skills’ inherited by questionable figures such as Muawiya and Yazid, without mentioning the achievements of close companions of the Prophet such as Umar, the Caliph who actually conquered Syria.

But then Darke pulls no punches in pointing out the irony in calling Muslims Saracens – a word derived from the Arabic for thief – or in pointing out the extent to which many in Spain today try to pretend that Muslims never existed there. Then there are the sheer lengths she goes to expose the fact that, as one historian she quotes says, “the history of Western medieval architecture, like that of Western Culture in general, cannot be written without reference to the lessons learnt from Islamic culture, whereas the history of Islamic medieval architecture can be written largely without reference to the West.”

The book comes full circle with chapters on the 19th century’s Gothic and Moorish ‎‎revivals – illustrating the extent to which Islamic influence ‎‎continued into the period of the first moderns, in the form of the ‎‎works and thought of John Ruskin, Pugin, Violet-le-Duc, Antoni ‎‎Gaudi – and finally on the ‎‎iconic buildings of Europe, in which Darke summarises the Islamic ‎‎origins of several features typical of Gothic or ‎Romanesque ‎architecture, such as ribbed and crossed vaulting, ‎towers, Merlons, ‎archivolts and even the rose window, with ‎annotated examples that ‎include Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame ‎itself and St Mark’s ‎in Venice.‎

While flicking through Instagram as I wrote this review, Darke’s book came to life as I viewed the feeds of various colleagues who seem to be dealing with the problems of 2020 by taking solace in the architectural heritage of old Europe. Once Darke opens your eyes to the Islamic influence behind myriad Western religious and institutional buildings, you can’t unsee it.