Mosques

After oil was discovered, Abu Dhabi lost much of its architectural heritage, particularly its mosques. But on the islands, the traditional places of worship, built in the ancient Arab manner without minarets, survived long enough to be preserved and restored. Jonathan Gornall reports It began with an invitation to dine with the founder of the nation; it ended with a timely intervention that saved a vital and threatened part of the country's cultural heritage.

In the late 1980s, Dr Geoffrey King, an expert in Islamic art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, was part of an international team excavating at the ancient town of Julfar in Ras al Khaimah when he was invited to Abu Dhabi to meet Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, the minister for higher education. At Julfar, a major trading centre from pre-Islamic times until the 18th century, the archaeologists had discovered evidence of a mosque dating back to the 15th or even 14th century. Dr King recalls that Sheikh Nahyan asked what archaeology could be done in Abu Dhabi.

"I said we know absolutely nothing about the islands off the coast," Dr King recalled. Sheikh Zayed, the late founder of the nation, himself concerned with preserving the lessons of the nation's past for its people of the future, gave approval for the team to excavate those islands, starting on Sir Bani Yas. It was the beginning of a 14-year archaeological survey. "He arrived on Sir Bani Yas island when we were doing the excavation," Dr King said of his only meeting with Sheikh Zayed, in 1992. "We went to his palace on the island and showed him what we'd been finding. He looked at the flints and said, 'Oh, I know what you do with these', and demonstrated how to make a fire with a piece of flint and a knife. Then he looked at some of the pottery we had found and said, 'I used to use that when I was a boy'. For the rest of the excavation we referred to it as Sheikh Zayed-ware."

As a result of the meeting, the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey was founded, bringing together an international team of experts working under the sponsorship of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Dr King was made its academic director and Peter Hellyer the executive director. Dr King has documented the latest study, the fruit of more than a decade of fieldwork with his colleagues, in The Historical Mosque Tradition of the Coasts of Abu Dhabi, a book published by the National Centre for Documentation and Research, the organisation charged with acting as "the nation's memory".

In all, the book records 45 mosques, some of which are documented for the first time, ranging from simple stone outlines to complete buildings, on 14 islands. They are made from materials including fossilised coral, farrush (beach stone), limestone and, in one case, on the island of Marawah, entirely out of wood, apparently harvested from old packing cases and driftwood. The centre calls the book "a valuable contribution to the UAE leadership's drive to enhance national identity". But it is also the record of a period of history all but lost in the post-oil rush to modernisation.

The first season of archaeology on the islands, Dr King said, "was staggering". On Sir Bani Yas they found a Nestorian church from the 6th century; on Marawah, a major Neolithic site. And then, he said, "we started to stumble upon the mosque tradition". In Abu Dhabi city itself, all had been swept away in the process of modernisation. Evidence of only two or three early mosques survives, in the form of photographs, taken in the 1960s and preserved in the BP archives.

Little is known of all but one of these vanished mosques. The al-Utayba, the Friday mosque of Abu Dhabi until it was replaced during the city's post-oil reconstruction by the Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan Mosque, is thought to have been built in the 1930s by Khalaf al-Utayba. It served what was then a very small population and had a congregation of no more than 70. Today, Abu Dhabi city has many mosques, but all are recent, built in a variety of international styles. As many as 34 earlier mosques are thought to have been replaced with modern buildings.

On the islands, however, out of the mainstream of the tide of development, the older traditions have survived. Yet even here, says Dr King, the past was in imminent danger when fieldwork started in 1992. When the team arrived on Delma, the island about 200km west of Abu Dhabi, they found they had arrived just in time. As they investigated three standing but dilapidated mosques and a nearby pearl house in the town of Delma, they learnt "there was a proposition to knock them down and rebuild them; so we wrote a report and instructions were given by the Government of Abu Dhabi to preserve them".

The buildings, carefully restored in 1993-94 by a team from the Sharjah Department of Antiquities, led by Dr Abd al Sattar Izzawi, stand today. One, the Muraykhi mosque, built of beach stone and coral, serves as a museum, but the Dawsari mosque, found collapsing and with its roof gone in 1992, is a working mosque once again. The Muhannadi mosque, the "largest and the finest" of the three, was still in use in 1992 and, following its restoration, continues to be used for prayer.

Not all was saved, however. When the team examined the Muhannadi mosque, they recorded images of sailing boats carved into the plaster of the north wall of the portico. The scene appeared to refer to the maritime struggles of the past; in addition to local vessels, there was depicted what seemed to be a European ship, flying a chequered pennant and a flag with an "X" motif. It was shown in the act of sinking.

Although there is a long history of such boat carvings in the Gulf, none had previously been found in a mosque. Sadly, according to Dr King, the plaster scene, already crumbling in 1992, has since been lost. Only a drawing of it remains, and the date that was inscribed in the plaster, 1946, "which may be later than the drawings or ... may date them as a group". The age of only one of the buildings is known with certainty. An inscription in the Dawsari mosque, now displayed in the nearby Bayt Al Muraykhi pearl-house museum, reads: "In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate. The building was completed with the help of the Creator of heaven in Shawwal of the year 1349 [March, 1931]."

The underlying structures on the sites could, however, date back much further. During restoration, evidence was found under the Muraykhi mosque of an earlier building. Together, Dr King wrote, the three saved buildings "constitute the largest and best group of surviving examples of traditional mosque building still extant in Abu Dhabi emirate". "The real miracle is that we got there when we did," he said. "I think if we had left it a few more years they wouldn't have been there any more."

It is, he says, vital to protect even such relatively recent history, for the simple reason that it is all the country has left of its older mosques: "That is absolutely the case in Abu Dhabi. With the coming of the oil and money there was enormous rebuilding of everything. It was religious piety, not destructiveness; people thought they should have better mosques for Muslims. But the result was that between the coming of the oil and the mid-80s, almost everything just disappeared. All of old Abu Dhabi was just swept away."

He has nothing but praise for the Government, which "immediately realised what we were getting at, that their own traditions were going and that they had to do something to stop it. They were very good about it." The surviving mosque tradition on the islands is, he said, "completely different to what we see today". For one thing, all the old mosques lack the minarets that are ubiquitous today. "The minaret is a northern development out of Syria," he says. "The first minarets were introduced when the Muslims got to Damascus and built the Great Mosque, using the old temple there and utilising the old Roman corner towers, making them into what became minarets. All the places that were influenced by the very old Arabian tradition have none; that means east Africa and Oman and those on Delma are the same."

The islands are also home to some of the oldest Islamic remains in the region. The survey divided up the island mosques into four categories, the simplest of which were the many stone outline mosques that served the seasonal fishermen and pearl divers who made their livelihoods off the coast. They were, wrote Dr King, "built without cost in terms of their simple materials, gathered freely from the land ... they should be regarded as the simplest of Islamic architecture, bearing witness to the religiosity of the people, their devout adherence to Islam and their observation of the obligation of prayer".

The survey of the islands, Dr King said, found many of the sites "totally undisturbed; nobody had bulldozed anything or built anything; it was exactly as it was until the pearling trade collapsed". The simplest remains, built from small stones or slabs of beach rock, without roof or wall and ranging from one metre to 30 metres long, are impossible to date. Little more than defined spaces facing Mecca, they contained no dateable material - kept clean and certainly not used as sites for cooking or other household chores, they yielded none of the detritus of daily life.

What is certain, however, Dr King said, is that these sites echo the oldest Islamic tradition, dating back to the reported provisions for prayer made during the Prophet's military expedition to Tabuk, in present-day north-west Saudi Arabia, in 630: "When they prayed, they just laid out some stones to face Mecca." In his book, Dr King concludes: "The lifestyle that had produced these small mosques of the Abu Dhabi coasts changed forever... as the cities of the UAE and Arabia more generally were transformed.

"This older way of life was harsh and arduous, and in many places there was no wherewithal for major building. Yet whether the mosques built in an older Abu Dhabi were simple or more complex architecturally, everywhere we encounter them they give evidence of the attempts of past generations to fulfill the obligations of Islamic prayer in the context of a pre-modern, pre-oil and pre-concrete society."

jgornall@thenational.ae