Mosque of Qal‘at Bani Hammad

The Great Mosque of the Qal‘a is situated on the southern slope of one of the mountains around Takerboust. Its plan bears some resemblance with the plan of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in Spain and Kairouan in Tunisia.

From the very first phase de construction, it would seem that the building had a prayer hall that was divided into thirteen naves perpendicular to the qibla wall, separated by arcades on pillars connected to each other by frames. The niche of the mihrāb lay in line with the central nave, which was wider than the others; on either side of the niche was a door: one opened out to the hall where the minbar was kept, while the other gave into the apartments of the imam. The naves gave out onto the courtyard, which was edged with a row of porticos, through openings. Ceramic pipes ran from the courtyard to the cistern, which was under the stone paving of the courtyard, to drain off rainwater from the roof of the prayer hall. In line with the mihrāb. within the northern wall, stood a minaret built on a square plan similar to those in Syria.

During the second construction phase, a portico running all the way around the courtyard was added and the facade of the prayer hall that gave out onto the courtyard was reinforced, in particular by closing up some of the bays. Edifices were added in the corners of the courtyard: to the north a two-room construction, originally vaulted, with niches in the walls that may have served to hold previous objects, perhaps books; to the north-west is what appears to be a mīdha’ or ablution facility made up of two rooms with stone benches and a small basin. It was no doubt during this phase that the trapezoidal maqsūra was built in front of the mihrāb with three naves parallel to it. This important element showed on the building’s roof, perhaps by a dome. The minaret underwent major modifications: its wooden staircase was replaced by a masonry staircase and the stairwell covered with a barrel vault. The southern facade was richly decorated with ceramic.

The final construction phase, carried out with materials from the demolition, belonged to the period of the city’s decline. It drastically changed the building’s original arrangement and axial layout, giving the mosque a profile similar to certain Almohad edifices such as the mosque of Hasan in Rabat, or that of al-Mansūr in Tlemcen (end of twelfth century).

The minaret of the Qal‘a may have another prototype as well: the minaret of the Great Mosque of Kairouan. Only the south facade is decorated; it is organised into three longitudinal registers which accentuate the structure’s verticality. At the centre are superimposed arcades, some blind and others not, varying in shape from semicircular to pointed. Blind niches are arranged symmetrically on either side of this register: some are topped with shell-shaped motifs, others have a ground of ceramic mosaic or crosses modelled in stucco. The first researchers saw in some of these decorative elements a link with the Byzantine palace of Hebdomor. Shell decorations belong to the ancient repertoire. Prevalent in the Maghreb, they were also well known in Fatimid Egypt (the al-Aqmar mosque in Cairo) and in the Iranian world.

Perhaps a crowning termination similar to that of the Kutubiyya[1] mosque should be reconstructed on this minaret. Its shape and decoration should be related to contemporaneous edifices, the Giralda in Seville and the Hasan tower in Rabat, or Cordoba’s ‘Abd al-Rahmān III minaret, which is no longer extant, but which is known from two bas reliefs dated 1562–1571, above one of the doors of the mosque of Cordoba: Santa Catalina[2].

[2] Built in the first half of the tenth century, the minaret was shorn of its stone facing in the fifteenth century and severely damaged by an earthquake and a hurricane in 1589. It disappeared definitively in the sixteenth century and was replaced by a bell-tower.