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108 a projecting porch or balcony for it. The law of the Kurān, which, like the Mosaic law, forbade the making of a graven image or the likeness of anything which is in heaven or earth, dictated the character of Muhammadan decorative art so long as the Sunna—the canonical law of Islam—was strictly observed. Texts from the Kurān, in the beautiful scripts of Arabia and Persia, were used with great effect as architectural decoration both carved and painted. But this rule was not held to be valid by the Shiāhs, the dissenting sect, who both in Persia and in India allowed themselves a free use of animals and human figures, so that in all Muhammadan countries there was the same difference between Sunni and Shiāh architecture as there was between Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna architecture in India.

The stūpa-dome was another Buddhist contribution to Muhammadan architecture, in which a dome was likewise a symbol of a tomb or relic shrine. The domes of the earlier Khalifs were constructed after Roman or Byzantine models; but when the Muhammadan builders began to be recruited from the Gandharan districts on the north-west frontier of India, and Indian influence on the building craft of Islam gradually became stronger, both the form and system of domical construction in the West were discarded, and the types familiar to Buddhist builders were substituted for them. Thus the "bulbous" dome of Muhammadan Persia is undoubtedly derived from the stūpa shrine of the type sculptured in the stūpa-houses XIX and XXVI at Ajantā. The principle of its construction, by which the outward thrust is counteracted by a system of internal ties in the form of a wheel with eight spokes—the eight-petalled lotus—instead of by external abutments as in the Roman and Byzantine