Elements of a screen wall

These four cross-shaped pieces are pierced with a circular hole in the centre and covered with a turquoise glaze that has become white in places. Small holes on their edges were once fitted with metal dowels for joining the pieces together to form a geometric grid. This system of open grids was used to screen off parts of a room and to allow the air to circulate freely. Whether used as partitions—screens or windows—or as railings, they were made out of marble or stucco. Such partitions had the same function as moucharabieh[1], or wooden screens. Excavated wall screens or railings are always in fragments and consequently can be sometimes confused with the structure of stained glass windows. In Islamic productions, stained glass windows are often in stucco or plaster. The stained glass is held in openings cut at an angle to maximise the light from outside.  A number of such fragments composed of openwork plaster and still fitted with their coloured glass have been found at the site of  Qal‘a.

Some of these screens are still in place in the minaret of the mosque, placed at the level of the openings or inlaid in the stucco, like those at the height of the tympana of the twin blind windows on the fourth floor.

The Qal‘a site has also offered up a large amount of ceramic material, a testimony to its use in the mosque’s ornamentation. Apart from the cladding of walls and floors, fragments of ceramic screens vary in shape from octagonal, pierced with circular holes, to open crosses or eight-pointed stars, or quadrangular with refined geometric openwork ornamentation.

The partitions of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascas, of the ‘Amr ibn al-‘As and ’Ibn Tûlûn mosques in Cairo in stucco openwork are among the oldest examples of what has been discovered so far. Their use continued in edifices dating from the 10th to 11th centuries.  There are also some remains in Nishapur, Iran, in Egypt in Fustat and in the Maghreb, such as at Sabra al-Mansuriyya. Another notable use of this architectural form are the partitions in Sicily, in particular those remains that date from the 12th century in Saint-Jean-des-Ermites, Palermo.

The screens and shutters described above were also present in the Byzantine and western world, used similarly to close openings or to divide up a space. In churches, the chancel is hidden from the eyes of the infidel by the enclosure or the jube. In the Orient, as in the West, they were made from stone, marble, stucco or wood, and composed of small pieces assembled together in the manner of this screen from Qal‘a.

[1] Derived from the Arabic root sharaba, which designates a water jug or ewer in qulla earthenware—a material used to keep its contents cool. Among its many uses, the ‘moucharabieh’—a screen over a window—allows one to look out without being seen from the exterior, much like the ‘Jalousie’ (celosia), invented in Spain.