fishfacethegrand replied to your post “One time in class we were discussing how towers express power...”
wrt religious stuff like minarets and cathedrals i always assumed that it was a drawing one's gaze towards the heavens thing? but idk much about islam
Maybe in Christianity? Idk. The funny thing about Islam was that it was actually the opposite--minarets were positioned opposite the qibla (direction towards Mecca) specifically so that people didn’t make them an object of contemplation/focus during prayer (because that could accidentally become idolatry). (Of course that changes a little over time but generally when they first started putting them on mosques, and when it was only one minaret and not multiple, it was behind--but it depends on time and place). But then once the minaret became a specifically Islamic symbol (it wasn’t always, especially when it started out, it was more of a political thing connected to the Abbasids), it was used to mark spaces as Islamic (not necessarily just mosques but also religious schools and such)...so kind of like a sign post I guess. That sounds very reductive lol. But idk. And of course meaning changes based on time and place and who’s looking. And from the outside idk how your gaze could avoid being drawn up.
(All of which is different from the high ceilings and domes found in both cathedrals and later mosques which...idk we haven’t gotten to discussing that yet in my class but I imagine a lot of that was for the Atmosphere.)
(Ref: The Minaret by Jonathan M. Bloom)
