Culture
Almohad universities continued the knowledge of Greek and Roman ancient writers, while contemporaries cultural figures included Averroes and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides.
The style of Almohad art was essentially an oriental one, although most of the workers were from al-Andalus. The main sites of Almohad architecture and art include Fes, Marrakech, Rabat and Seville. Figurative arts suffered somewhat from the orthdox interpretation of the Quran, which forbade human representation, and thus the genre of art which flourished mostly in the Almohad lands was architecture, although it also did not reach peaks of originality.
The Almohads reduced decorations, and introduced the use of geometrical holes, following in general the principle of expressing a certain degree of magnificence. As centuries passed, the buildings had increasingly oriental appearance and similar structures: mosques with rectangular plans, divided into naves with pillars, as well as a wide use of horseshoe-shaped arches. The most common building material was brickwork, followed by mortar. Foreign influence can be seen in domes of Egyptian origin and, in the civil sector, the triumphal arches inspired by those in the same country. The construction of fortifications with towers was also widespread.
The main Almohad structures include the Giralda of the former mosque of Seville (founded in 1171), the Koutoubia Mosque and the Kasbah of Marrakech, the Hassan Tower of Rabat and the Atalaya Castle in Andalusia.
-
La Giralda.
-
Koutoubia Mosque.
-
The Almohad minaret in Safi
Read more about this topic: Almohad Caliphate
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)