 Islamic funerary art is dominated by architecture. Grave goods are discouraged to the point that their absence is frequently one recognition criterion of Muslim burials. Royalty and important religious figures were typically buried in plain stone sarcophagi, perhaps with a religious inscription. However, funerary architecture often offered a means of "moving beyond the strictures of formal Muslim burial rites" and expressing social dimensions such as status, piety, love for the deceased, and Muslim identity. A number of distinct architectural traditions arose for expressing these social elements. The Islamic tradition was slow in starting; the hadith "condemn the building of tombs, and Muhammad himself set the example of requesting burial in an unmarked grave in one of the chambers of his house" in Medina, though by at least the 12th century, buildings of the vast Al-Masjid an-Nabawi complex already marked the site. The earliest identified Muslim monumental tomb, in Samarra in Iraq, only dates from 862, and was commissioned by the Byzantine princess whose son was buried there. At some point, the tradition incorporated the idea of a garden setting, perhaps following the Islamic concept of Paradise, an association certainly made when the tradition was mature, although the difficulty of reconstructing gardens from archaeology makes the early stages of this process hard to trace. At any rate, gardens surrounding tombs became established in Islamic tradition in many parts of the world, and existing pleasure gardens were sometimes appropriated for this purpose. Versions of the formal Persian charbagh design were widely used in India, Persia and elsewhere.
