Raised in Jerusalem under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, the Dome of the Rock is the earliest known major work of monumental Islamic architecture. It is not a mosque but a domed structure (a shrine) enclosing a sacred rock at its centre; its plan is built around that centrality.

The structure is centralised: at the middle, a circular ring of columns and piers around the rock carries a tall drum and the wooden dome above it. An octagonal ambulatory in two rings wraps around this. The visitor thus circulates around the rock — the plan organises movement around a centre. This centralised octagon-and-dome scheme is taken directly from the Byzantine-Roman tradition of mausolea and baptisteries; what is new is the adaptation of that formal language to the ceremonial space of a new religion.

On the exterior, the faces of the octagon were originally clad in mosaic and later (in the Ottoman period) in İznik tiles; the figureless, geometric and vegetal decoration is an early herald of the later surface language of Islamic architecture. But the architectural lesson is structural-spatial: the Dome of the Rock shows how an entirely new religious typology can be built from an existing grammar of form (centralised plan + dome) — the starting point of Islamic architecture.