The mosque of Ukhaiḍir has an exceptional interest. It is one of the earliest mosques known to us which retains its original form and decoration, and its plan may be regarded as one of the first examples which we possess of the systematized architectural scheme which, in slightly varying types, ruled the Mohammadan world until the fourteenth century of our era. It was a scheme which was derived from the inaugural sanctuary of the Faith, the Prophet’s house at Medînah. Recent research has made it abundantly clear that Muḥammad, when he constructed his new dwelling after the flight to Medînah in A.D. 622, had no other object in view than the purely domestic. It was not a mosque which he set himself to build, but a living-house, and he laid it out in the fashion which was customary in his day. It may indeed be doubted whether he contemplated the need of a temple of any kind.[382] In the view of the founder of Islâm there were but two sanctuaries in the world, the mosque of the Ka’bah at Mekkah and the mosque of the Aqṣâ at Jerusalem, the former being at that period an open space, bounded only by the buildings of the city, with the house of Abraham in its midst, the latter an area on the edge (_aqṣâ_ = extremity) of the sacred enclosure at Jerusalem, an area actually occupied by the ruins of Justinian’s Church of the Virgin, which had been destroyed by the Persians in A.D. 614. For the rest God could be worshipped in every place, and the nomads of Arabia could perform their religious exercises as satisfactorily in the open wilderness as in any other spot. But, as has been well pointed out,[383] even in the Days of Ignorance, the madjlis, the place of assembly--that is to say the courtyard of the Arab house--was itself invested with a kind of sanctity; the meetings held in it were conducted with gravity and order, and it may also have been used for cult purposes. To it the terms ‘madjlis’ and ‘masdjid’ were applied impartially, and it was not until after the advent of the Prophet that the word ‘masdjid’ was narrowed down so as to signify only such places of assembly as were connected with religious observances.[384] These places were not, however, used exclusively for cult purposes. In Muḥammad’s masdjid at Medînah, the court of his house was necessarily the centre of his domestic life; in it he lived and entertained his wives and took counsel with his friends, and, since he was the head of his community, it was the meeting-place of the Faithful, whether for religious or for secular needs. The homeless among his adherents found a lodging in it, and the wounded were tended there. Nor did the masdjid al-djamâ’ah, the mosque of assembly, lose its secular character until more than a hundred years had passed after the Hidjrah. For the mosque, as Wellhausen has put it (and the phrase cannot be bettered), was the forum of primitive Islâm. When the conquerors founded their camp-cities, the misrs of Mesopotamia and of Egypt, their first step was to _mark