Ibn Tulun Mosque

IBN TULUN MOSQUE

Ancient mosque in Cairo.

Constructed from 876 to 879 c.e. by Ahmad ibn Tulun, semiautonomous governor of Egypt for the Abbasid caliphs, this is not only one of Cairo's best-known monuments but is also the best surviving example of religious architecture from that period of Islam. The mosque was erected along with a palace and a government house in a new district known as al-Qataʿi (the Allotments), to the northeast of the oldest parts of the city.

Built of brick and rendered with a fine and hard layer of plaster, the mosque comprises a courtyard about 300 feet (92 m) square, with a fountain-house in the center. The court is surrounded by hypostyle halls covered with a flat wooden roof supported by arcades resting on piers. The prayer hall, on the southeast, is five aisles deep; those on the other three sides are two aisles deep. The mosque, 400 by 460 feet (122 by 140 m) is enclosed in an outer wall 33 feet (10 m) high, with an elaborate cresting adding some 10 feet (3 m) to its height. Beyond the wall on three sides is an outer court (ziyada), approximately 62 feet (19 m) broad, enclosed in a somewhat lower wall. In this outer court, opposite the prayer hall, stands the minaret (tower), the mosque's most distinctive feature. In its present state this tower consists of a square stone base supporting a cylindrical shaft and an elaborate finial; an external staircase winds around the tower. The interior of the mosque is relatively plain, although the arcades are decorated with nook-shafts at the corners of the piers, carved capitals, and bands of geometricized vegetal ornament around and on the underside of the arches and at the top of the walls. Beneath the roof are long wooden planks carved with verses from the Qurʾan written in an angular script.

Most of the architectural and decorative features of the mosque are foreign to Egyptian architecture in the ninth century, although they were common in the religious architecture of Iraq, the Abbasid heartland, and can be seen there in such buildings as the congregational mosques at Samarra, the Abbasid capital where Ahmad ibn Tulun received his training. It is therefore believed that workmen trained in these techniques came to Egypt in the retinue of Ibn Tulun.

The mosque was repeatedly restored and its functions changed. In 1077, the Fatimid vizier Badr al-Jamali restored the mosque and, in 1094, his son al-Afdal added a beautiful stucco mihrab (a niche indicating the direction of Mecca) to one of the piers. Under the Ayyubids, who believed that Cairo needed only one congregational mosque, the building fell into disrepair and served as a shelter for North African pilgrims to Mecca and also as a bakery. In 1296, the Mamluk sultan Lagin, who had taken refuge in the mosque during one of the struggles that eventually brought him to power, restored it extensively; he added a new mihrab, replaced the fountain-house that had stood in the court with the present domed edifice, and reconstructed the minaret, which had also fallen into disrepair.

By the early nineteenth century, the mosque was again deteriorated and, by the middle of that century, it was used as an insane asylum and poorhouse. In 1884, the newly formed Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe recommended the restoration of the building, and work was soon begun.

See also mihrab; minaret; mosque; qurʾan.

Bibliography

Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. Islamic Architecture in Cairo: An Introduction. Leiden, Netherlands, and New York: Brill, 1989.

Creswell, K. A. C. Early Muslim Architecture. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979.

jonathan m. bloom