Great Mosque of Mahdiyya

The Great Mosque of Mahdiyya was built on a rocky spur in the year 916 under the reign of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mahdī (r. 909–934). Nothing dating from this period remains as is except the entrance porch and the northern gallery of the courtyard. The rest of the building was rebuilt in the 1960's.

The projecting entrance porch is composed of a pointed horseshoe arch resting on door jambs. Its outer façade is carved with horseshoe-arch niches on two storeys separated by a moulding. In the lower section the niches are flat, while those in the upper section are flat at the back but semi-circular at the top.

This is the first example of a projecting porch in Maghrebian religious architecture. It is reminiscent of the triumphal arches of the Roman era and the entrances to Umayyad castles. This monumental entrance is fraught with symbolic and spiritual values related to the Shi’ite doctrine.[1] Its example was followed in Fatimid architecture in Egypt[2] and taken up in some Almohad mosques.[3] Niches used as decorative elements existed already in the Aghlabid and Abbasid architectural repertoires.[4] They appeared here for the first time on the façade of an Ifriqiyan mosque and were to be widely reproduced in the region.[5] They cropped up in Muslim Sicily and then in Norman Sicily on buildings in Palermo.[6] From Sicily the decoration was passed on to southern Italy and used on several religious monuments in Pisa. Mudejar art, the heir to Islamic art in Spain, was to use this ornamentation extremely well and several monuments offer a harmonious range of these niches: Santiago del Arrabal Church in Toledo (1245–1247), Santiago de Talavera Church (fourteenth century) and the tower of Saint Lorenzo de Sahagun (thirteenth-fourteenth century).

At the corners of the same façade, two towers assuming the role of cisterns may have also served for issuing the call to prayer. For this mosque, like the first Fatimid mosques,[7] does not seem to have had a minaret.

The Great Mosque’s present-day plan is faithful to the tenth century one. Rectangular in shape, it comprises a prayer hall that is wider than it is deep, preceded by a porticoed courtyard. The only original portico, the northern one, is a groin vaulted structure with ashlar pillars bearing pointed horseshoe arches. The other three porticos were rebuilt during renovation programmes between 1961 and 1965. According to excavations undertaken in the 1960s, running down the middle of the courtyard was a walkway whose layout was unique in religious architecture in Ifriqiya. Roofed with groin vaults that were placed on pillars surmounted by arches, it connected the entrance porch to the prayer hall.

The prayer hall is divided into three bays laid out parallel to the qibla wall and nine naves. The elevation consists of pointed horseshoe arches resting on double columns.

The central nave, enhanced by the presence of columns grouped in fours, meets the bay of the qibla wall to form a T shape that is reminiscent of the layout of the Great Mosque of Kairouan (836). This layout would be copied in the religious architecture of Fatimid Cairo. The juncture of these two aisles is marked by a cupola containing the mihrāb, in the style in force at the time of the Zirids. Carved into the niche are narrow semicircular ribs crowned with shells. The half dome overhanging the niche opens in a horseshoe arch supported by two corner columns.

[2] Mosques of al-Hākim (990) and al-Aqmar (1125) in Cairo.

[3] Tinmal Mosque (Morocco, twelfth c.); al-‘Ubbād Mosque in Tlemcen (Algeria, 1339).

[4] Baghdad Gate in Raqqa (Syria, early tenth c.). 

[5] They can be seen on the side façade of the Great Mosque of Sfax (849), the Sidi Ali Ammar Mosque (Sousse, mid-ninth–early tenth c.), Qubbat Bin al-Qhaoui (Sousse, eleventh c.), the cupola of Qubbat al-Bahou (Tunis, 991) and Zitouna Mosque (863, Tunis) as well as on the minaret of Qal'at Bāni Hammād (1007–1008).

[6] Façade of Ziza Mosque (twelfth c.); recessing on the outer façade of La Cuba Mosque (Palermo, 1180); San Giovanni del Ermiti Church (1132); Palatine Chapel (1131).

[7] Amr Mosque, Cairo, seventh c. http://archnet.org/library/images/one-image.jsp?location_id=3447&image_id=103291