Abstract

The Ka’ba in Mekah and the Prophet’s house in Maddinah are the archetypes of Islamic architecture. They are situated in, for Muslims, most sacred places (al-haramayn). The Ka’ba represents the beginning and the Prophet’s mosque the end of forming a fundamental cultural matrix, or in other words macroparadigm, of the People of the Book as a basis for amalgamating all the crucial forms of spirit generating on the principles of Tawhid, on the consciousness about God’s uniqueness, transcedency and unexplicable. Although they have nothing in their premodial form to place them in the world of art, these archetype Islamic buildings, obviously not characterized by an immanent artistic form will become the fundamental starting point of Islamic art through their symbolism and powers concealed in their universal spiritual and religious meaning. Symbolism which is inseparable part of these buildings, their form and theolatrous sense, ¨holds the seed of all that a sacral Islamic art would present¨. In this paper we try to show that Ka’ba in Mekah, like an archetype of Islam and axial point of its religious and sacral architecture, has fundamental importance in creating a spirit and unique historic being of Islamic art. The paper stresses the importance of Ka’ba in developing a unique nature of architectural expression of Islam. Ka’ba, together with the Prophet’s mosque in Maddinah, not only determined the uniqueness of spiritually-aesthetic nature of Islamic architecture and its historicallyartistic expression, but it also became a starting point of new experience of architectural space, as well as marked new perspectives of its clearly different understanding in the horizon of Islamic civilization. Keywords: Ka'ba, Islamic Architecture, Islamic art, Prophet’s mosque in Maddinah

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