The Funerary Garden PDF

# The Funerary Garden The funerary garden remains one of the most profound and satisfying symbols in Islam. In essence it is the Paradisal Garden, which is itself none other than the Primordial Garden which man lost through sin. Grass, flowers and trees are inseparable from the Muslim cult of the d...

# The Funerary Garden The funerary garden remains one of the most profound and satisfying symbols in Islam. In essence it is the Paradisal Garden, which is itself none other than the Primordial Garden which man lost through sin. Grass, flowers and trees are inseparable from the Muslim cult of the dead. The tomb of Humāyün outside Delhi (dating from 1555-65) is one of the finest funerary monuments in the world, a central mortuary chamber in which the second ruler of the Mughal dynasty rests, with subsidiary chambers round it occupied by less important members of the imperial family. The whole is set within a formal garden, and marks the focal point where the axes intersect. ## Liturgical Focus Liturgically, the mosque may be said to have as its starting point two verses in the Qur'an; the second reads: - 'We have seen the turning of your face towards the heavens [for guidance, O Muhammad]. And now We will turn you indeed towards a qibla which shall please you. So turn your face [in prayer] toward the Sanctified Mosque, and ye [O Muslims], wheresoever ye find yourselves, turn your faces [likewise) toward it' (Sūra ii, 145). When these verses were revealed in a mosque that still exists on the outskirts of Medina, the congregation obediently turned around and prayed facing south towards Mecca instead of, as formerly, north towards Jerusalem. Picturesquely sited atop a rocky knoll on the outskirts of Medina, this mosque rejoices in the unique title of Masjid al-Qiblatayn (Mosque of the Two Qiblas). When, in the year 629, Mecca replaced Jerusalem as the focus of prayer, Islam gained a religious capital (though not a political one) in addition to a goal of pilgrimage. The notion of a directional axis operates on two levels: socially, as a focal point in relation to which the entire community, umma, is balanced; and liturgically, as the focus of prayer. ## Prayer is the Second Pillar Prayer, the Second Pillar, can be construed as use of the horizontal axis by which one relates oneself to the vertical axis as represented by the Ka'ba. In its simplest terms, a mosque is a building erected around a single horizontal axis, the qibla, which passes invisibly down the middle of the floor and, issuing from the far wall, terminates eventually in Mecca. Reduced to essentials, therefore, a mosque is no more than a wall at right angles to the qibla axis and behind, or rather before, that wall there can be anything. This may be seen from the musallā, or 'idgah, which is nothing but that: an expanse of ground with a wall at the end, a wall with inserted niche and engaged pulpit. ## Development of the Mosque over time The Prophet's Mosque in Medina formed the prototype to which all subsequent Islamic religious building adhered, establishing the bipartite division of the mosque as well as this principle of axial planning. At the point where the qibla axis meets the far wall of the mosque an indentation is produced, a directional niche called the mihrab, which is nothing less than the liturgical axis made visible. The mihrab takes the shape of an arched niche, mostly framed by one or more pairs of colonnettes. Being the visual as well as the liturgical climax of the mosque, where the imam stations himself to lead the congregation in prayer, the mihrab is usually the object of much lavish ornamentation. If a mosque have a lateral chapel, a flanking balcony, a royal or imperial loge, or îwans on the transversal axis, then these auxilliary areas, too, are provided with mihrabs, though on a proportionately humbler scale, in much the same way as each chapel in a church has its own altar. - The earliest mosques had no mihrab; and in the Prophet's Mosque at Medina a block of stone on the floor served the purpose of indicating the direction. This stone may have stood in for the Black Stone of the Ka'ba, which, as a sort of foundation stone, it symbolically represented. - When, however, Muslim armies fanned out from Medina in all directions and established the Islamic Empire, a means had to be devised to cope with the problem of prayer en route. The solution arrived at had the simplicity of genius; it was to trace in the sand with a spear the plan of an ad hoc mosque and then to thrust the spear, haft downwards, into the sand at the point occupied by the stone in the mosque in Medina. Once the worshipper had stepped over the boundary thus demarcated he was within a sanctified area in which all the Qur'anic taboos governing ritual purity were in operation. The spear, then, was the first general liturgical indicator in Islam, although within a few decades the niche, introduced for the first time at Medina, became the standard means of indicating the direction of prayer. The spear survives, iconographically, in the coinage of the Umayyad dynasty. On a dirham struck during the reign of 'Abd al-Malik, a spear is shown standing upright within the niche, which by this time had become normative as liturgical indicator. ## The Mihrab The mihrab is an early innovation in Islamic architecture, and its origins have been the object of controversy. The concave mihrab entered Islamic architecture in 707-9 when the caliph-to-be, 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz, brought Coptic masons to Medina for the purpose of rebuilding the Prophet's Mosque. These masons fashioned a niche in the qibla wall similar to those in the Coptic churches they had worked on, with the difference that what had been a devotional niche now became directional. A mihrab is an acoustic device, a resonator for the voice, shaped to bounce the sound back and magnify it at the same time. The concave mihrab was, therefore, no fortuitous innovation but the consequence of an order that the Muslim overseers must have given the Copts. Flat mihrabs, where they exist, are for the purpose of private, recollected devotion not public address, because their shape would disperse the sound instead of trapping it. The mihrab promptly became the central feature of any mosque and, indeed, of all sacred art and architecture in Islam. The same principle of directionality governs the design of mosques, mausolea and prayer-rugs, all of which feature the mihrab. Divested of liturgical significance, the niche figures as a design motif throughout the Islamic fine arts, from textiles to tombstones, where it is anomalous. The mihrab has little in common with the altar of a Christian church; indeed, in all essential respects it is its antithesis. Whereas an altar is convex, or at least protuberant, the mihrab is concave and this concavity, the symbolism of which requires that it be kept empty at all times, opposes itself aesthetically to the cluttered surface of an altar mensa. It is not the niche that is sacred but the direction it expresses; and precisely for this reason the mihrab is accorded extraordinary respect. As a corollary, while mosques are oriented towards the qibla, bedrooms and privies are deliberately disoriented to obviate the possibility of inadvertent sacrilege. Very occasionally the connection between the mihrab and its goal is made explicit: probably unique is the inclusion of stone fragments of the Ka'ba in the mihrab of the mosque of Sokollu Mehmet Paşa at Kadırga in Istanbul; and certain prayer-rug designs include miniature representations of the Ka'ba, fitted under the apex of the mihrab arch. ## External Features of the Mosque It is in relation to the qibla axis that the principal items of liturgical furniture are distributed, but considering the stages involved in the liturgical action it makes better sense to outline the external features of the mosque before moving inside. These features comprise minaret, dome and ablution fountain, the last of which occupies an intermediate position between external and internal features. ## The Minaret When Islam solidified into its present liturgical forms in Medina, some means of summoning people to prayer had to be devised, particularly for the congregational prayer at noon on Fridays, which involves the obligatory attendance of all adult males and the optional attendance of adult females. Muhammad disliked the Jewish use of the shofar, or ram's horn, and the Christian use of wooden clappers, both of which sounded cacophanous to his ears. After a dream in which one of the Prophet's companions saw a man chanting a summons to prayer, Muhammad turned to his Abyssinian freedman, Bilal al-Habashī, and said, 'Mount up, Bilal, and call the people to prayer'. Bilal, who was noted for the sweetness of his voice, was therefore the first muezzin in Islam. The muezzin's office is to chant the adhan, or summons to prayer, speaker, used to flow over the rooftops and never failed to impress travellers with its plangent, fragile beauty. This was not, of course, the origin of the minaret but only the motivation for its invention; it was the need for height from which to broadcast the call that led to the development of the minaret. The muezzin's balcony is analogous to the belfry: the higher one gets the greater the area over which the sound can be distributed. As K. A. C. Creswell has shown, the minaret developed out of the corner towers of the temenos of the Church of St John the Baptist at Damascus, when the entire area was taken over to build the Umayyad mosque; here, however, the resemblance to Christian architecture ends, for church towers have to be sturdily built to take the immense weight of the bells, which is why minarets are more slender and graceful. ## The Dome Though the column, the arch and the dome have been described as the trinity of Islamic architecture, the crowning glory of Islamic art is undoubtedly the dome, even if liturgically it is of minor significance. The earliest domes were small affairs erected over the qibla to define it externally and to light it internally. At a later stage the dome was used to cover the mortuary chamber in which the founder's body rested; then the dome moved from this lateral position to a central one, and grew in volume until it covered the entire sanctuary area around the qibla. And the mosque gained in utility what it lost in numinous impression, such as that conveyed by the Great Mosque at Cordoba; but, liturgically, either position had the effect of ensuring the visibility of the imam to his congregants. In early mosques he was highlighted against a dark interior; in later mosques he stood out less but everyone could read, not just those sitting near the windows. The dome is, of course, a cosmic symbol in almost every religious tradition; and, symbolically, in Islam the dome represents the vault of heaven in the same way as the garden prefigures Paradise. Since the dome stands for heaven, the Paradisal Tree provides an appropriate motif for the decoration of its interior surface. An outstanding example of such decoration is found in the Dome of the Rock, where a highly stylized Cosmological Tree - which in Islam grows upside down - spreads downwards from the apex of the dome to embrace all the widening stages of heaven by the time it reaches the foot. The use of the arbor inversus may seem odd, but in Islam Paradise is the opposite, or mirror image, of this world. The principle of reversibility recurs throughout Islam; thus, the visible Qur'an is but a reflection of the Preserved Tablet, the supernatural archetype which is laid up in heaven. Similarly, from the four quarters of the globe and in Mecca itself, one prays towards the reverse direction, that is, outwards to any of the four walls. But perhaps the best example of such reversal is from the rich fund of anecdotage left by the Turkish folk hero, the inimitable Nasr ad-Din Khōja, who said: 'When I am dead, bury me upside down so in the next world I may appear the right way up.' ## The Ablution Fountain Intermediate between external and internal features is the ablution fountain, generally located in the centre of the courtyard to emphasize the initiatic function of water in Islam, exactly as the font in Christianity is located just inside the west door to emphasize that it is through the sacrament of baptism one enters Christ's Church. Similarly, in Islam water is the vehicle of purification and enjoys an almost sacramental status. In addition to a courtyard fountain, supplementary ablution facilities may be provided inside the mosque, often in the shape of a colossal marble jar with basin and taps so that the elderly may comply with the law without risk of exposure to the inclemency of the elements. Ablution may be either total or partial depending on the state of ritual impurity in which the worshipper finds himself. Normally, partial ablution suffices, but carnal intercourse ranks as a major defilement, and in this case a bath is mandatory. Whether total or partial, ablution must be performed with running water. Among its amenities, the fountain has taps for lukewarm water and low stools so the user can isolate himself physically from the ritually impure floor. This latter factor is the reason why, if the taps, together with showers and latrines, be in an area of their own, this wet zone should be separated from the rest of the mosque by a low balustrade. This defines the boundary between the areas of ritual purity and impurity, the former being invariably carpeted for the comfort of the congregants and kept scrupulously clean. ## The Masjid Likewise, at the entrance to the mosque stands another barrier with identical purpose: to demarcate pure and impure areas, in this case the street or public thoroughfare. It is at this barrier that congregants doff their footwear before entering the sanctuary or crossing it to reach the ablution zone. This is to obviate the possibility of ritually impure substances adhering to the soles and being deposited on the mosque floor. Shoes are accommodated in racks at the entrance or against the walls, or in wooden troughs on the floor. In addition to doffing his footwear the worshipper should properly cover his head, which is the Oriental way of showing respect. On being admitted to audience with a caliph or sultan one would cover one's head out of respect for the royalty of the Presence; so in a mosque one covers out of respect for the Divinity. Any brimless headgear that does not interfere with prostration is permissible, although a skullcap is preferable. ## Formal Prayer in Islam Formal prayer in Islam consists of repeated sequences of standing, bowing, prostration and genuflection; prayer is thus not only mental and verbal but also physical, thereby involving the whole being. Behind this practice lies the central Islamic concept of God's overlordship; and the physical postures represent progressive degrees of acknowledgment of this fact, culminating in the total abasement of prostration. Prayer is established on four levels. Firstly, the daily prayers, which may be performed in congregation but are usually carried out individually. This office is held at the five liturgical hours of dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and evening. Secondly, the congregational prayer on Friday at noon, which replaces the noon office for that day. Thirdly, community prayer on the two major festivals, 'Id al-Fitr (Feast of the Breaking of the Fast) and 'Id al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice of Abraham). Fourthly, the annual ritual of the pilgrimage, which is a congregation of all the Muslims of the world. The four levels of prayer operate on an ascending scale: firstly, the individual; secondly, any congregation; thirdly, the total population of a town or city; and lastly, the entire Muslim world. Every level except the last has a corresponding sacred structure: for the first it is a masjid; for the second a jāmi'; and for the third a musalla, place of prayer, or 'idgah, place of 'Id, an immense, open praying area with nothing but a qibla wall with a mihrab and an open-air pulpit - in other words, a mosque reduced to its essentials. The Second and Fifth Pillars of Islam interact to produce a convergence on one day in the year, which is the climax of the liturgical calendar: the anniversary of the Sacrifice of Abraham, when the climax of the pilgrimage rites in the Plain of Arafat outside Mecca coincides with the 'Id prayers being said throughout the Islamic world. Thus the 'Id ritual is a local reflection of the pilgrimage. Just as the third level necessitated a musallā, so it is the second, or congregational, level which is the motivation for the mosque. And it is the congregational factor - that is, how to regulate an immense crowd in accordance with the needs of the liturgy - that entails an aetiology of mosque design to explain why each piece of liturgical furniture occupies a specific station on the floor, as well as how these pieces of furniture and the offices corresponding to them interlock to form the liturgy. Also, the morphology of the liturgical action determines what categories are embraced within a typology of mosques according to two criteria: the functional (e.g. collegiate, memorial, etc.) and the geographic or cultural (e.g. not just Iranian but Seljuq, Mongol or Timürid). ## The Directionality of Prayer The directionality of prayer is fundamental to the liturgical principles around which a mosque is constructed. A temple is a building designed to house a liturgical function. Churches developed as long, narrow buildings equipped with aisles as a result of the need to cope with a processional liturgy, whereas the mosque evolved as a square or rectangular building because it had to cope with a radial liturgy. For the architect of the mosque, two contradictory principles are involved. One of these stems from the insistence of Prophetic Tradition on the priority of the first row; that is, the first row of worshippers enjoys greater proximity to the source of blessing because it confronts the wall nearest to Mecca. There is then a prima facie case for extending the mosque laterally to accommodate as many as possible in the first row. But with a radial liturgy, the officiant in the middle would be invisible and inaudible at the extremities. As a result, two axes are in conflict; the primary liturgical axis of the qibla and the transversal axis, because of the superiority of the front row and the progressive inferiority of the rows behind. The success of a mosque architect may be measured by the degree to which he succeeds in reconciling these conflicting principles, taking into consideration the two axes and distribut-ing mass and volume accordingly, to produce that impression of total equipoise which a successful mosque never fails to convey. ## The Mosque for Daily Prayers While for the daily prayers an oratory with no more than a mihrab suffices or even merely a prayer-rug, which is really a portable mosque ensuring the ritual purity of the spot where the prayer is offered, there are small mosques known as masjids, literally, 'places of prostration', where such prayers are regularly performed behind an imām. A masjid should have no minbar because it is not used for Friday worship; this is the case in Turkey, where, practically alone in the Muslim world, the distinction between masjid and jāmi' is still recognized and the respective terms correctly used. ## The Jami Masjid The mosque par excellence, however, is the jāmi masjid, that is, 'collective' or 'assembly' mosque, whose primary function is the Friday service, and hence is known in Iran as the masjid-i Jum'a, or Friday mosque, Friday being Yawm al-Jum'a, or 'Day of Assembly'. Having to cope with such numbers, and influenced by the precedent of the Prophet's Mosque (which had a covered portion supported on palm trunks), as well as the sheer expediency of utilizing the plethora of columns from redundant churches, the early jāmi' took the form of an immense hypostyle hall preceded by a courtyard. ## Liturgical Furniture of the Mosque What chiefly distinguishes the Friday service from the daily liturgy is the inclusion of a sermon. Thus, in addition to the omnipresent mihrab, a jāmi' rejoices in the possession of a pulpit, minbar, to the right of the niche, so that the prayer-leader, or imām (properly, on this occasion an imam khatib, or preaching imam), can address the congregation. In early Islamic times, the sermon was political rather than dogmatic in content, which helps to explain why the shape of the minbar has nothing in common with the Christian ambo. In origin it was the throne of the leader of the community, set up in the place of assembly, from the top of which he, Muhammad, pontificated as lawgiver. Having completed the sermon, he would descend the pulpit and enter the niche to lead the prayer, for as leader he represented the people to God and led the prayer in that capacity. This double role is expressed in the practice whereby to this day it is the same man who delivers the address as leads the prayers. The minbar is, therefore, a symbol of authority as much as an acoustic elevation, and in the case of the imam, of delegated authority. Conceivably, this may account for the fact that at a later stage of its evolution it acquired a canopy or dome, the canopy being an attribute of the ruler and even, in Indian iconography, of divinity. Moreover, the imām always delivers his address not from the top but from a lower step, and it may be that the empty, canopied space stands for the absent Prophet, exactly as in primitive Buddhism there was no image of the Buddha, a canopy sufficing to indicate his presence. Similarly, the practice of flanking the pulpit with standards not only emphasizes the intimate connection between politics and religion in Islam, but goes back to the Prophet, who walked to the minbar flanked by standard-bearers. ## The Minbar The first minbar was a rudimentary affair of three steps fashioned from tamarisk wood, from the topmost of which Muhammad addressed the Companions. Out of respect, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, occupied the intermediate step, and 'Umar modestly used the lowermost; but 'Uthman said, 'Shall we descend into the bowels of the earth?', and thereafter everyone has used the first step from the top. During the reign of Abu Bakr, and even more with the sensational conquests of 'Umar, regional mosques proliferated, especially in the garrison towns of the Islamic armies. In these places the governor would lead the prayers, deputizing for the caliph in the same fashion as the latter deputized for the Prophet. The term imam survives with the meaning of prayer-leader, but as an exclusively religious office it dates only from the 'Abbasids. Until that time, the conduct of public worship was one of the attributes of the ruler. When the governor of a province placed himself at the head of the community assembled for prayer it was clear to everyone that he was the caliph's representative. Islam does not distinguish between spiritual and temporal powers. Their co-identity in the ambivalence of the imām, who uses both. ## Pulpits Pulpits are frequently of wood, richly carved and glowing with incrustation of nacre and ivory. Marble is no less common, and limestone and even iron have on occasion been used. Iran evinced a decided preference for the low pulpit, and the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent knows no other. In most countries the minbar became architecture in its own right, with folding doors admitting to a stairway crowned with a canopy or a bulbous cupola and topped with a crescent finial. But the most dramatic development took place in Turkey, where the stupendous Ottoman interiors required, both visually and acoustically, tall elegant structures, no less than ten metres high. ## The Respondents' Platform, or Dikka Of almost equal importance in the liturgy is the respondents' platform, or dikka. This usually straddles the qibla axis at a point about the middle of the mosque. But, since in a radial liturgy the first prerequisite is the visibility of the officiant in his niche, the dikka can also be positioned off the axis to the right. Although resorted to frequently in Turkey, this measure sensibly reduces the efficacy of the dikka. It is another prerequisite, not so much the visiblity of the imam as the audibility of his voice, that forms the raison d'être of the dikka. The dikka is a very early innovation and was already in widespread use by the 8th century, increase in congregation size having decreed its invention. Its closest approximation, outside Islam, is the choir stalls of a church. The respondents are known as muballighün, human amplifiers (of the imam's voice), but it is not an office in its own right, for in a mosque every muezzin doubles as a respondent. Their function, from their vantage point atop the elevation of the dikka, is to copy the posture of the imam and chant in unison the appropriate exclamation or response, thereby transmitting that stage of the liturgy to the ranks behind, for whom the imam is neither visible nor audible. To regulate the movement of the congregation, liturgical signals are used, the most important being the takbir, or Magnification, Allāhu akbar; and the importance of the muballighūn lies in the fact that by means of these signals they co-ordinate and synchronize the movements of all parts of the congregation. ## The Loud Speaker With the advent of the loudspeaker, platform and respondents alike fell into desuetude, at which point Islam embarked on its present course of liturgical decadence. Their function was absorbed into that of the qari', or cantor, whose lectern flanked the dikka. Known as kursi 's-sūra, 'chair of the sura' - because from it the cantor chants the Eighteenth Sura of the Qur'an in the half hour that elapses between the first and second adhāns - this is the last item of liturgical furniture to be considered. The art of tajwid, or cantillation of the Qur'an, is one of the most cultivated arts in Islam, being the phonic equivalent of calligraphy, the Islamic art par excellence. Most mosques have always had at least one lectern, or kursi. In Egypt the earliest-dated dikka bears the name of the 15th-century ruler, Qayitbay, but the earliest kursi goes back to Fatimid times (in the mosque within St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai). Like the earliest minbars (which ran on wheels), the kursī is a moveable item of furniture, albeit ponderous and awkward to shift. Made of wood with the habitual lavish incrustation, the standard kursi incorporates a little platform on which the cantor kneels facing the qibla as well as, optionally, a V-shaped slot to hold a copy of the Qur'an. Mosque Qur'ans are gigantic and are comparable to lectionaries and antiphonaries, sometimes requiring two men to carry a single tome of a thirty-volume Qur'an. Cantors are assigned in greater numbers to colleges and mausolea: in the former case so that students may learn the approved methods of reading the Qur'an, and in the latter so that the deceased may benefit from the baraka, or spiritual power that inheres in the words. ## Quasi-Liturgical items In addition to niche, pulpit, respondents' tribune and cantor's lectern, a mosque abounds in quasi-liturgical items, such as folding stools to keep the Qur'an off the floor, out of respect; safe receptacles, known as kursīs, used for holding the Qur'an; reliquaries; sanctuary lamps; another, but differently shaped, kursi for instruction; and prayer-rugs, either single or serial; as well as candlesticks which flank the mihrab, and which when lit during Ramadan envelop the qibla in an atmosphere of cultus. But all these count more as furnishing than furniture and command no place in the liturgy comparable to the intermeshing functions of mihrab, kursī and dikka. The latter in pre-electronic mosques now stands forlorn, lamentable to behold, while in the modern mosque it does not even exist. Its abolition, with consequent dislocation of the kursi due to the development of electronics, has been a catastrophe, for it entails a loss of the stereophonic character of the liturgy. St Augustine wrote that architecture and music were the highest arts because they were 'the sisters of numbers', an admission which shows he was a Pythagorean at heart. The aesthetic significance of the mosque resides not in the architecture alone but in the fact that it was a place where that art was always to be found in the company of its sister. # Mosques, Madrasas and Tombs ## The Collegiate Mosque, or Madrasa The functional criterion applied to a typology of mosques yields, in addition to separate structures for daily, congregational and community prayers, such other types as memorial, tomb, shrine and cemetery mosques as well as the monastic mosque, and one other type almost equal in importance to the jami': the madrasa, or collegiate mosque. The problem in Islam is that nomenclature is never other than confused and different categories overlap. Not only did the madrasa plan ultimately furnish a model for the monastic mosque but the monastic mosque at an earlier stage of its development may have influenced the plan of the first madrasa. This was in Khurasan whence the new plan was to embark on a career of conquest, revolutionizing society and architecture alike. In Islam, higher as well as elementary education is based on the religious sciences and related philological disciplines. The elementary school functions inside mosques, some of which, such as al-Azhar at Cairo, include facilities for higher education; in such places one can see a master on a kursi next to a pillar, his pupils forming a circle at his feet (hence the halqa, or 'circle', system of education). The credit for inventing a purpose-built structure incorporating lecture theatres and residential facilities for the students along with some basic liturgical features almost certainly belongs to Khurasan (of earlier madrasas at Ghazni, c. 1000, nothing is known); and its subsequent diffusion thence was in response to the prevailing political situation. By the time the Seljuqs appointed themselves guardians of the 'Abbasid caliphate in 1055, practically the entire Muslim world had lapsed from Sunni orthodoxy. Almost everywhere heresy was triumphant: the Fatimids (Sevener Shi'is) had an anticaliph enthroned in Cairo whence they controlled a vast empire; no less vast was the empire of the Buyids (Twelver Shi'is), based in Baghdad, the seat of the orthodox caliphate, which they stopped short of abolishing, and covering Iran as well as Mesopotamia. But they did not control the key province of Khurasan, which was virtually the only area where orthodoxy had not succumbed, with the result that the great Seljuq vizier, Nizām al-Mulk, decided to rally here the forces of orthodoxy: the key to his strategy was the madrasa. The Prophet's house, or more accurately its courtyard, had supplied the model for the jami'; and now it was another domestic courtyard that was adapted for the needs of the madrasa. The typical Khurasanian house was cruciform in plan, with four arched openings, known as īwāns, off a central courtyard. Quite fortuitously, this layout coincided with the ideal framework within which to teach the four legal schools of orthodox Islam that enjoyed canonical status: the Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali rites. The space between each iwan and the corner of the courtyard could be extended to accommodate the students in cells arranged in one or two storeys. It is the residential factor that relates the collegiate to the monastic mosque, but whatever its origins Khurasan thus witnessed the birth of a structure combining pragmatism and beauty to a degree seldom seen. The typical Khurasan madrasa consisted of two tiers of cells, or hujras, preceded by diminutive îwāns running around a courtyard, each side of which was punctuated in the middle by an îwän rising the full height of the façade or projecting in a frame above the line of the roof. The qibla iwan was given more prominence than the other three so it would serve as an oratory, qibliyya, without a pulpit however, as well as accommodating, between the liturgical hours, whichever was locally the most prominent of the rites. Such a building was at once symmetrical and yet articulated towards a focal point. A madrasa courtyard can be viewed as a scenario with the façades broken at intervals by the huge axial īwāns in which the rhythm of the rows of small iwāns culminates, since they describe the same outline but on contrasted scales. The relationship in which they exist to each other is also modified by the very different spatial relationship that obtains between them and such accents as minarets and domes. It is not surprising that the new invention soon eclipsed the less spectacular jāmi', even on its own ground, the liturgical. ## Khānaqāhs Probably the first madrasas were simply the houses of the teachers, whereafter the idea was reproduced on a monumental scale appropriate to the Seljuq Empire whose needs the new installation was intended to serve. The great vizier, Nizām al-Mulk, who was the real ruler of the empire during the reign of Malik Shāh, realized the unique potential of the madrasa for training cadres of administrators without which the state could not hope to combat the heresies which menaced its existence. But it would be wrong to view the madrasa as no more than a tool of Sunni (orthodox) reaction. From its inception, indeed from the very first word of the first revelation to Muhammad, Islam had the character of a literary and, therefore, learned civilization; in such a context the acquisition of knowledge and its transmission were paramount. Of these twin aims the madrasa was the instrument, and a network of madrasas was soon established, providing higher education in almost every urban area in the Islamic world. ## The Nizamiyya The most famous Islamic university, the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, was established in 1067. In jurisprudence it was Shafi'i and in theology Ash'arī: indeed, the role of the madrasa in speculative theology may have been decisive in canonizing Ash'arism as the official theology of Islam. Given its fame, we might have expected to know more about the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, but the site of Islam's greatest university remains unexcavated, although there is no lack of evidence about its location. As a single-rite (Shafi'i) madrasa, with some six thousand students, it may have had no more than one îwan. The Nizamiyya was eventually eclipsed by the rival establishment of the Mustansiriyya, the al-Mustansir Madrasa, founded in Baghdad in 1234. Excellently restored, the four-rite four-iwan Mustansiriyya represents the new genre in the perfection of its first flowering, before the collegiate function was overtaken by the liturgical. In teaching all four rites the Mustansiriyya was something of an exception; of some thirty madrasas in Baghdad all save two, the Bashariyya and the Mustansiriyya, taught but one rite. Nonetheless, one Nizamiyya, that of Khargird, disclosed on excavation a perfect cruciform plan, as did another excavated at Rayy. In early madrasas there seems to be no correlation between size and the number of iwāns, and probably the number of iwāns responded to local conditions or even political considerations. Pending further evidence, one can only assume that single and multiple madrasas ran in parallel until, in the end, the latter prevailed. ## The Seljuqs Madrasas built by the Seljuqs of Rum are both simple and multiple. A three-īwān version resulted in the T-plan mosque, which was standard for the early Ottoman period and was superseded only by the centralized, dome-dominated mosque that emerged in Edirne (the Üç Şerefeli Mosque) and then triumphed in Istanbul. A gradual evolution is discernible even at the Bursa stage. Based on Seljuq precedent, the Bursa mosque had a domed courtyard, which, by contraction of the iwāns, suddenly discloses itself a Selimiyye in miniature, anticipating Sinan's mosque of that name in Edirne by about two centuries. The apsidal structure containing the mihrab in the latter mosque can even be interpreted as a residual īwān-i qibla. Seljuq madrasas on the full-scale plan, as at Sivas, Divriği and Erzurum, are colossal structures; however, the single-īwān madrasas, such as the Büyük Karatay and the Ince Minare, both in Konya, were small enough to allow the roofing of the courtyard, not, as in Egypt, with a lantern but with a dome, which resulted in a very harmonious design. The Seljuq art of Anatolia began with blunt, almost brutal forms expressive of power to an uncommon degree and ended in the grace of these two madrasas, which would be peerless were it not for the presence in the same city of the exquisite Sirçali ('glass') Madrasa. It began in grotesqueries on the façades of Sivas and Divriği, reminiscent of the Romanesque at its most bizarre, and ended in the refinement of the Ince Minare portal, whose sculptural quality sublimates the inherent beauty of Seljuq design without diminution of its powerfulness. This sense of power is the first impression to be conveyed by a Seljuq building, be it the mausoleum of the princess Khwand Khatun at Kayseri in Anatolia or the tomb tower of Qābūs at Gorgan, near the Caspian. It was the Seljuq rebuilding of Isfahan's jāmi', after the fire of 1121, in the shape of a four-iwan madrasa that set Iranian architecture on a course from which it has never subsequently deviated. Not even the Safavid accession in the 16th century and the consequent proclamation of Shi'ism as the state religion, with the coercive conversion of the country's Sunni population, affected the supremacy of the madrasa. The standard Iranian mosque results from a fusion of the local 'kiosk' mosque, congregational in purpose, with the madrasa, collegiate in purpose; and to the product of this strange mésalliance are added minarets and dome. The dome surmounts the kiosk, to which the qibla îwan now forms a vestibule, and its importance is further emphasized by the addition of minarets at the side. The presence of a dome was accounted mandatory after the construction of the mosque at Zavare in 1135. That an invention so resolutely Sunnī should become normative in the most Shi'i country in the Muslim world is a baffling paradox. Whatever its functional drawbacks when adapted to congregational purposes (visibility of the imam