Minbar of the Great Mosque of Algiers

The minbar of the Great Mosque of Algiers is made up of seven steps held together by two pentagonal lateral cheeks decorated with triangular, square and trapezium-shaped panels assembled by means of mortises. On two supports at the foot of the stairs stands a pointed horseshoe arch set in a tall rectangular frame; the sides of the structure have two superimposed horseshoe arches. The frontal arch is decorated with vegetal and epigraphic motifs and edged with a curled braid; its spandrels are adorned with leafy scrollwork and the rectangular frame is inscribed with Kufic script.

On the cheeks several original panels carved with various bas-relief decorations are still extant. Eight panels are adorned with geometric interlacing, remotely inspired by Byzantine art. There are also starred polygons, eight-pointed stars. This shape was already prevalent in Egypt in the early eleventh century: Van Berchem noted it in the old Fatimid minaret of al-Hakīm that dates from 1002. It can also be seen in the Great Mosque of Cordoba (tenth century).

The minbar was mounted on wheels and slid along jointed rails; in this way it could be moved from a back room to the right of the mihrāb and brought into the prayer hall[1]. It is noticeably similar to the one in Kairouan (ninth century), mainly in its pentagonal cheeks. In both cases, the side facings are decorated with sculpted panels held in place by beading, and the sloping upper edges level off at the top to form horizontal sections. The panels in Kairouan are also laid out in an arrangement closely resembling the ones in Algiers. For these reasons G. Marçais suggests that the minbar of Kairouan is the prototype of the one in Algiers. Are we then to believe that for two hundred years or more, the classic arrangement of the minbar, probably derived from the Christian ambo, had changed very little and that these two prayer pulpits provide two examples of a form adopted by the various provinces of the Muslim East?

Although the Algiers pulpit calls to mind the old Tunisian one by virtue of the overall composition of its sides, the composition of the front and all the detail of the decoration are similar to the monuments of Andalusia and the Maghreb. The elegant pointed horseshoe arch that opens before the steps is also found in the doors of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. The stark letters in the Kufic inscription do not in any way affect the flowery shapes of eleventh-century Tunisian Kufic or the contemporaneous Kufic of the funerary hall of Achir. On the contrary, the style of the script is strikingly similar to the style of the string-courses excavated in Madinat al-Zahra near Cordoba. This ornamentation, especially the one that uses vegetal shapes, fits closely into a series that started out from Cordoba and Saragossa and eventually reached Tlemcen and Fez.

This minbar, intended to grace a Berber mosque but created by a craftsman trained in the school of Spanish Muslims, who were decorating the Aljaferia during the same period, is a reference point that helps us understand how the Hispano-North African style came into being.