improvements were carried out by ‘Uthmân, but it was not until the time of the Umayyad khalif Walîd ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (A.D. 705-715) that the old simplicity of construction was abandoned. In the year A.H. 87 or 88 he pulled down the mosque and rebuilt it. The workmen whom he employed were Greeks and Copts from Damascus and Egypt.[390] The walls and columns of the new edifice were of cut stone; gold, silver, and mosaic were used to adorn it; the miḥrâb and the maqṣûrah were of teak.[391] The maqṣûrah, the enclosure reserved for the khalif, had already, according to Balâdhuri, been introduced into the mosque by Marwân (A.D. 683-685), but his maqṣûrah was of stone. The miḥrâb was a new feature: ‘the first who introduced the novelty of a concave miḥrâb was ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-Azîz when he restored the mosque of the Prophet’ (by order of the khalif Walîd).[392] Both maqṣûrah and miḥrâb were borrowed from Christian usage; the maqṣûrah was copied from the Imperial enclosed dais of Byzantine churches, the miḥrâb from the Christian apse--it was ‘min shân al-kanâ’is’, an attribute of churches, and was adopted with some reluctance by Islâm.[393] Concerning the Medînah mosque Professor Becker quotes an exceedingly suggestive anecdote. Walîd, boasting of his construction to a son of the khalif ‘Uthmân, who had been the last before him to restore the mosque, said: ‘How far our building excels yours.’ ‘True,’ replied his interlocutor, ‘we built after the manner of mosques, but you after the manner of Christian churches.’ Elsewhere the development followed similar lines. The Ḥaram of Mekkah stands apart; its arrangement could never be the same as that of ordinary mosques. Yet it is interesting to observe that it was at first innocent of any building except the Ka’bah. The khalif ‘Umar enlarged the area by pulling down adjacent houses, and enclosed it with a wall lower than a man’s stature; ‘Uthmân is said to have been the first to furnish it with riwâqs. Again here, as at Medînah, it was Walîd who first beautified the mosque with marble columns and with mosaic.[394]