Ibn Tulun Mosque

The mosque of Ahmed Ibn Tulun continue along Sharia Saliba "Saliba St.," from the school of Sarghatmish and take the first right. If one has time to see only one Islamic monument in Cairo, it should be this one. Its simplicity and daughter of scale make it the most living of all the great mosque.
Ahmed Ibn Tulun was the son of a Turkish slave of the Abbasid caliph Al Ma’mun. He was sent to Egypt in 868 as a governor of Al-Fustat, but within two years he had been made governor of the whole country, shortly thereafter, by refusing to send the annual tribute to the Abbasid court, he established himself as an independent ruler of the province. His family ruled in Egypt until 905. Ibn Tulun founded a new royal city around the Hill of Yashkur near the Muqattam range to the northeast of Al-Fustat, razing the Christian and Jewish cemetery that was located on the hill to do so.
This was a site to which many legends were attached: it was believed that Noah’s ark had landed here after the flood, that here god had spoken to Moses, and Moses had confronted Pharaoh’s magicians; nearby, on Qal’at Al-Kabsh, Abraham had been ready to sacrifice his son to god.
The city which Ahmed Ibn Tulun built was called Al-Qata’I, the wards, descriptive of the allotments in which each group of his followers settled. In 905, when the Abbasids re-established control, the city was destroyed and ploughed under. Of its magnificence and scale all that survives is the mosque which formed its center.
The mosque was built between 876 and 879 and its important for several reasons. It is the oldest intact, functioning Islamic monument in Cairo. It also survives as a rare example of the era and architecture of the classical period of Islam, i.e. the ninth and tenth centuries, for it was dominant in the Islamic world. Its inspiration is thus almost exclusively Mesopotamian. Finally, this mosque provides one of the best examples of the classic congregational courtyard type of plan.
The terraced, verdant, slope which leads from the street to the outer wall of the mosque is a recent landscaping idea. Originally it was the ziyada, or addition the walkway between the outer and inner walls of the mosque which separated, rather like a dry moat, the mosque from the bazaars and secular buildings which pressed upon it from all sides. Early mosques in Islam had many entrances, which were located in each façade except the qibla façade, which usually had only a private connection with the ruler’s residence. The crenellations above the walls of the mosque bear a resemblance to paper cutouts of human figures with linked arms.
Inside the mosque one is immediately struck by its vast extent, which covers six and a half acres. This was the main congregational mosque of Al-Qata’i, the mosque in which the whole community or congregation joined together for the Friday prayer. The original courtyard was not paved and filled with pebbles as it is today, for this space was intended for prayer. The arcades around the courtyard, which are deeper on the qibla or sanctuary side, are formed by arches on brick piers. Rosettes and windows form a continuous and simple decoration. The arches are pointed two hundred years before similar arches made their appearance in Europe and spring from oblong supports rounded at the corners by pilasters or engaged columns. The arches are outlined with an edge of carved stucco similar to those, which have been restored in the southern arcade. The use of red brick covered with stucco decoration is a feature imported from the court city of the Abbasids in Samarra, sixty miles north of Baghdad. This royal city existed from 836-886. Because it extended over a vast area and was quickly built, an efficient and rapid way had to be developed to decorate vast surfaces of brick. Wet plaster was stamped with carved and patterned wooden molds. It is this so-called Samarian decoration which one finds around and under the arches; on the capitals of the pilasters, and on the wooden panels over the entrances in the mosque of Ibn Tulun. The ceiling is composed of palm logs boxed in by wooden panels.
The sanctuary is five aisles deep. In the middle of the qibla wall is the main mihrab simple in form: a form: around a niche. Above the niche is an inscription in simple kufic script of the shahada, the commitment that all the Muslims make: There is no god but God. Mohamed is the messenger of God. This is followed by Greetings of God upon him and peace. Near the mihrab on the right is the door through which Ahmed Ibn Tulun would have entered the mosque from his palace which adjoined it on that side.
The long band of inscription on sycamore wood which runs just below the ceiling and around the whole mosque contains verses from the Quran. The frieze is two kilometers in length and it is calculated that it is one fifteenth of the whole book. There is a legend that some of the boards used for this inscription are left over from Noah’s ark.
Over the years the mosque had been endowed with other mihrabs, which can be seen on the piers of the sanctuary. Two of them are on the piers which flank the didda, or Quran reading platform, and most probably date to the ninth century. Two others are on first arcade infront the courtyard.
On the right is the one with which Al-Afdal Shahansah, the son of Badr Al-Gamali, the great Fatimid vizier, placed a Shi’i mark on the mosque in 1094/487. The one on the right pier is a copy of this mihrab by Sultan Lagin. These are the only mihrans in Cairo which name the donors. The panel of plain kufic on the pier of the arcade behind is the dedicatory inscription by Ahmed Ibn Tulun.
The mosque of Ibn Tulun also shows that an interest in the restoration of important monuments in Cairo is not a modern one but goes back many centuries. The first such restoration belongs to the Sultan Lagin in 1296. The Amir Husam Al-Din Lagin was one of the accomplices in the murder of Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil Ibn Qalawun and during the period of unrest which followed, he successfully hid in the deserted mosque, much damaged by its use happened to the mosque.
Cross the courtyard to the north side, where a door leads to the minaret. From the top there is a splendid view in all directions of the mosque, of the Madrasa of the Amir Sarghatmish next door, of Sharia Saliba, of the citadel, and of Cairo extending west towards the Nile and the Pyramids.