Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/194

106 at Delhi, Musalman architecture had its established canons, but no great original masterpieces to hold up as examples for the Hindu builder. The Arabs had borrowed their builders from Rome, Byzantium, and Persia. The combination of the three schools, working together under conditions laid down by Islamic law, produced what is called Saracenic architecture, which, however, had not developed into an independent style before Islam began to draw upon the artistic resources of India in the same way as it had borrowed Indian science—mathematical, medicinal, and astronomical—to build up the schools for which Arab culture became famous in Europe.

Before the advent of the Prophet, Mahāyāna Buddhism, besides converting the Far East, had spread all over Western Asia; and the description given by Arab writers of the Kaaba, the most venerated shrine in Arabia, which was the first model of a Muhammadan mosque, strongly suggests a Buddhist temple or monastery filled with Mahāyānist images. It had been for all Arabs a place of pilgrimage from a very remote period—Muhammadan tradition says from the time of Abraham. It contained hundreds of images, among them those of Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin. As M. Foucher has pointed out, Hariti, the Buddhist Madonna, is one which occurs in Mahāyānist iconography all over Asia; and it is not at all improbable that in the seventh century an ancient Buddhist shrine in Arabia contained images of Hariti and her partner, which were confused, as is so often the case, with Christian images.

That which happened in later times in every province of India where Muhammadan rule was established