Abd al-Wâhid mosque

Located on the left bank of the ’Abu ‘Ali River, behind the jewellery suq, this mosque was built by ‘Abd Al-Wahid Al-Miknasi, a religious man who, as his name indicates, was from the city of Meknes, Morocco. He decided to settle in Tripoli, after the conquest of the city by the Mamluk some fifteen years earlier. The historical inscription, which gives his name and the date of construction, was originally on a fountain in the courtyard but was moved to the wall of the prayer hall during a recent restoration. Nothing is known of the life of ‘Abd Al-Wahid, nor of how he came to Tripoli. Local tradition, which no history source can corroborate, describes him as a pious man who decided to buy the khan where he was residing, as a reaction to the inhospitality of the Christian owner. He subsequently transformed it into a mosque. Furthermore, the waqf of the mosque, which no longer exists but the recommendations of which have been passed on orally, stipulates that the building must welcome the Maghrebin.

This is a small mosque with a central courtyard, of which three sides have two storeys, while the fourth, sheltering the prayer hall, only has one. The two floors consist of a ground floor with low, massive vaults and a upper level with a gallery of arcades behind which there are rooms. The rectangular prayer hall is covered with six low vaults resting on two pillars, and a dome in front of the mihrab. The latter is positioned at an angle from the wall. To the right of the mosque entrance there is a mausoleum covered with a ribbed dome containing the tomb of ‘Abd Al-Salam Al-Maghribi Al-Mashishi, also from Morocco as his name indicates. The tomb is flanked by a small eight-sided minaret at the summit of which open eight windows topped by a dome. The minaret is unique in its genre, and has no equivalent in the whole region, except for the tower of a Romanesque Crusader church in Tartus, 200 km north of Tripoli. The mosque is constructed of stone covered in a white coating.

Several architectural elements in this building corroborate the hypothesis of a khan transformed into a mosque. Thus the installation of a prayer hall in the south section of the courtyard required the removal of the arcaded storey for the use of travellers, merchants or pilgrims, while the ground floor sheltered merchandise or mounts. The fact also that the location of the mihrab is at an angle to the qibla wall confirms that the old wall of the building was preserved. It is very likely that because of limited resources, the construction project had to be limited to the transformation of an already existing building, and to the incorporation of other elements of the adjacent buildings, such as the tower, which could not belong to the khan. Although the ribbed dome is an element that is found to have already been used in Ayyubid architecture, it clearly originated from North Africa where it was used for the first time in the ninth century for the Great Mosque of Kairouan.