Early Islam’s architecture and coinage defined itself against Christian rivals

Evidence

In a sense, early Islam defined itself against Christian faith and power. The earliest Muslim religious monuments, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the great Umayyad mosque in Damascus, were consciously built to vie with the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem and the great Christian churches of Syria. The inscriptions inside the Dome and on the gold coins, struck by the Caliphs in deliberate defiance of what had until then been a Roman prerogative, announce the rejection of Christian errors and the supersession of Roman power by the bearers of the new Islamic order. In medieval Muslim writings, the Byz­ antine Empire is the “House of War” par excellence, against which the final and greatest jiha¯d must be waged. These were no simple heathens to be instructed and absorbed, but the supreme rivals, and they are treated with the suspicion— and respect—appropriate to that status. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 655

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: The Dome of the Rock as deliberately competitive architecture — an article angle on sacred buildings erected explicitly to outshine a rival faith, extending the grafting/trees infrastructure piece into rivalrous built space.
• CANDY: The first Muslims struck gold coins in defiance of what had been a Roman prerogative — a nice elevator fact that coinage itself was imperial signaling.

Related

• Early Islamic identity was forged in rivalry with Christian Rome (similarity 0.88)
• The Dome of the Rock’s architecture and inscriptions declared Islam supersedes Judaism and Christianity (similarity 0.84)