The Mosque of al-Hakim
(990-1003 AD)

June 9, 2006

The northern entrance to medieval Cairo was Futuh Gate.. and unlike many of the old gates and much of the wall itself, Futuh Gate survives. If one looks immediately to the left, from the above picture, one sees the following:

The turreted wall in the foreground represents a continuation of the main defensive wall. Behind that rises a minaret that is part of the mosque of al-Hakim, another early mosque. Interestingly, originally the mosque stood just outside the defensive walls, but when those walls were rebuilt at the end of the 11th century, they incorporated the mosque.

Despite the fact that this picture presents an ablution fountain and small structure made from red marble, the original mosque would have featured simply an open courtyard. Also, the floor would not have been polished white marble.. but more likely gravel (all the big marble floors I have seen or read about in mosques, from the Umayyad mosque in Damascus to the Haraam in Mecca to al-Azhar in Cairo, are fairly recent additions).

The important architectural feature to note in the above picture is the slight rise in the center of the wall, which marks a transept leading directly to the qiblah. A small dome is located directly above the qiblah.

The idea of a "transept" was somewhat hard for me to imagine, but it is nothing more than a long hall leading to the qiblah. The hall is also rather ornate, as it features three large chandeliers and marble columns on the side. These are not the original chandeliers, but we know from al-Maqrizi that there were indeed chandeliers in this hall.

The prayer niche, with its marble paneling and gold did not strike me as medieval. Looking back at Doris Behrens-Abouseif's book, I see that she notes: "In the nineteenth century [the mosque] was restored by Shaykh 'Umar Makram, who added a prayer niche inlaid with marble" [65]. I take it that this is what she is referring to.

A number of the original stucco windows survive. I always find these windows beautiful, but they are also not what a westerner expects. When it comes to churches we immediately imagine stained-glass windows.. which feature lots of glass interspersed with thin lead moldings. The windows are also ornate in medieval Islam, but as they use stucco for the grill, they appear quite different.

Along one of the minarets these crenellations can be seen. The rest of the mosque features a quite ordinary looking design running around its top, and no doubt that was a product of later restoration. But these are perhaps a clue to the original appearance of the mosque. (Remember the ornate crenellations for the mosque of Ibn Tulun.)

Here is the meeting place between the new and the old. In the imagination one must continue with the crenellations on the right..

The minarets for this mosque are once again a controversial feature. There are two main minarets, each encased in a turret. It seems that the eccentric al-Hakim decided to hide the two minarets, which had been built by his father, behind castle-like towers. So, believe it or not, inside that square turret lies the original minaret, nicely preserved but invisible. Reasons can only be guessed at, but Jonathan Bloom in an article in Muqarnas ("The Mosque of al-Hakim in Cairo" vol. 1) finds a political motivation:

At the turn of the [11th century] a decline in Egyptian-Meccan relations presumably led al-Hakim to terminate any association that had been established between the new mosque and Mecca or Medina. Rather than simply tearing the minarets down, he made the extraordinary decision to cover them up. That way he could remove their visual reference to Mecca and still retain their practical function as beacons or watchtowers. [28]

This makes more sense when considered alongside Bloom's earlier comment:

Thus at the time of the building of the Hakim mosque, only two, or perhaps three, mosques in the entire Muslim world are known to have had more than one minaret. [22]

In which case this innovation of two minarets would have called to mind the mosque in Mecca or Medina.. which al-Hakim may have had reason to avoid. In any case, we find two beautiful minarets which for almost their entire history have been encased in a stone turret..

Doris Behrens-Abouseif adds to the strangeness when she concludes that the original turrets were much higher and covered the entire minaret, not even, mercifully, letting the tops stand out. And she ventures an interesting idea:

The fact that the original minarets were only hidden, not pulled down, may have been the architect's device to preserve these two masterpieces of stonework, which are unparalleled in Cairo's minaret architecture. [64]

So we wind up with a possible case of preservation.. al-Hakim's intentions are subverted and the minarets are preserved. I don't find this implausible since something similar has gone on in the case of the mosque of ibn Tulun, where the original minaret has been refurbished.. but again not torn down. It seems there is alive in these centuries a sense of historic importance, at least when it comes to monuments of the Islamic history.

Another unusual feature of the mosque is the level of decoration present on the portal, or entranceway. The picture above is a detail of some of that decoration.

In this fuller picture some of the monumentality of the portal is visible. Bloom calls this kind of monumental portal a feature of Fatimid mosque architecture (24). He also quotes Creswell:

Down to the end of the 3rd/9th century... no mosque had a monumental entrance. All mosques, large or small, were entered by simple rectangular doorways in the enclosure walls. [24-5]

Bloom's article is particularly important as it points out that much of what we take for granted in a mosque is actually the result of historical development. What could be more "Islamic" than a minaret? What is unexpected about an ornate portal? Since these things become standard within the tradition, they do not catch the visitor's eye, but to understand the importance of this mosque.. what makes it not just an early mosque, but an important early mosque.. it is necessary to see these features as the innovations they were.