The Dome of the Rock is the first monumental building commissioned by a Muslim ruler. Abd al-Malik raised it only sixty years after the birth of Islam, five generations after the Byzantine Hagia Sophia — and he adopted the Christian-Byzantine architectural type directly: octagonal plan, central dome, double ambulatory. The form was borrowed; the surface was entirely rethought.

There is no figurative image inside. Stylised plants alluding to the garden of paradise, some of the most brilliant gold mosaics of the period, and a 240-metre Arabic inscription band cover the surfaces. That inscription is the earliest known monumental Qur'anic text in Islamic art, and it includes verses pointed at Christian theology — particularly the assertion that God has no son. Islamic visual art is, from its first surviving monument, loaded with theological argument.

Visitors circumambulate the rock at the centre; the building was designed not for congregational gathering like a church but to enclose a sacred point. For Muslims, this is where Muhammad ascended to heaven on the Night Journey; for Jews, where Abraham led Isaac to be sacrificed; for Christians, the centre of the Holy Land. The building sits, in the densest possible sense, at the point where three religions overlap.

The exterior cladding has changed over the centuries — Süleyman the Magnificent added Iznik tiles in the sixteenth century, and the dome was re-clad in gold-coloured copper panels in 1959-64 and again in 1993. But the plan, the inscription band, and most of the interior mosaics are unchanged since the seventh century. The visual language that begins here — calligraphy, geometry, and arabesque — set the shared grammar of Islamic art for the next fourteen hundred years, from Cordoba to Samarkand, from Istanbul to Delhi.