Zawiyya of Sidi Qasim Jelizi

This monument is named after a saint, originally from Fez, who lived in Tunis and died there in 1496. He worked for part of his life as a manufacturer of Jaliz (enamelled tiles), having learned the techniques in Andalusia. Originally the building consisted only of a funeral chamber with a pyramidal roof. The courtyard and the rooms encircling it were added in the course of the seventeenth century, and the prayer hall was built on under the reign of Hussein ben Ali (1705-1735).

The green-tiled pyramidal cupola covering the funeral chamber is a kind that is commonly used in Tunisia for roofing certain mausoleums in the medinas of Tunis and Kairouan (mausoleum of Sidi Abid in Kairouan, second half of fourteenth century, mausoleum of Sidi Ouhaychi in Kairouan, seventeenth century).

The walls are built of rubble stone and covered with rendering inlaid with panels of tiles decorated with cuerda seca, a technique well known in Spain, Morocco and the East. The star motifs of the decoration are surmounted by a double frieze of interlacing patterns and chevrons. However, as in the case of Hispano-Maghrebian capitals, it would be vain to look for examples of facings exactly identical to these anywhere but in Tunisia. Quite appreciable differences may be noticed, especially in the colours, probably due to the use of colourings with a particular chemical composition.

The cuerda seca (or “dry cord”) technique consists in creating separations between decorative elements to prevent the coloured glazes from mingling with one another during the firing process. In cuerda seca decoration the glazed surfaces, which are outlined with a matte contour made out of a greasy substance, remain slightly in relief. This technique must not be confused with the technique whereby outlines are incised in a mould and reproduced in relief on tiles, forming fine crests that partition off slightly concave surfaces, to which various colours are then applied.

The funeral chamber leads to the courtyard ringed with porticos, where the walls are decorated with large geometric figures and a combination of rectilinear interlacing patterns and discs, all created by inlaying braids of black marble into white marble. Similar motifs can be found in the midhat al-Sultan (Tunis, 1448–1450), the zawiyya of Sidi Abid (Kairouan, second half of the fourteenth century) and the courtyards of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tunisian homes. The same kind of decoration, inherited from Byzantine art and already used in the Umayyad era, adorns the interior of several buildings in Cairo[1]. Are these elements directly borrowed from Mamluk Egypt, or did they appear late in the Ottoman period?

The hypostyle prayer hall is built on a plan that is rather uncommon in the Maghreb: the naves lie parallel to the qibla wall. This is a tradition inherited from the Great Mosque of Damascus.n conclusion, the architectural model of this zawiyya is reminiscent of the models of the madrasa of Sidi al-Uhayshi in Kairouan (mid-seventeenth century) and the zawiyya of Sidi Abid in Tunis, but also brings to mind the model of certain Hispano-Moresque[2] type North African mausoleums.

[2] Mausoleum of  Moulay Idriss , Meknes, Morocco, sixteenth century.