Bû ‘Inâniya madrasa : courtyard-facing façades, prayer hall, minaret

The prayer hall is reached via the traditionally-decorated, white, marble-paved courtyard. Following the example of the rooms at the Nasrid palace, the Alhambra in Granada, the lower part of the pillars that form the gallery arches are decorated with mosaic tiles arranged in a network of intersecting white lines, which frame black, blue and red geometric shapes. Narrow green tiles frame the whole arrangement. Looking up, one sees tiles bearing an excised epigraphic decoration - the tiles’ black glazing has been partially chiselled away to highlight the cursive inscriptions on the ochre background of the clay. As in the Hall of the Two Sisters at the Alhambra palace, a tiled frieze with black merlon motifs ends the tiled decoration, giving way to stucco. Similar merlons, in pierced wood, crown the parapets of the courtyard galleries. Their upper parts are crowned with sculpted wooden panels.

The prayer hall forms a rectangle that is wider than it is long. An arcade supported by white marble columns subdivides it into two naves, which are parallel to the qibla wall, and are covered by gables. Four marble columns support horseshoe arches. These columns have onyx capitals, and their archivolts are decorated with accentuated scrolls of single and double palmettes.

On the side façades of the second nave are two lintel-topped doors, one leading to the oratory via the door on the little tâl‘a (the great rise), and the other leading to the corridors and cells. The decoration recurs at the same height as on the walls of the nave the length of the qibla wall; it is similar in appearance, shape and layout, to that covering the Kitubiyya minbar in Marrakech, the inside wall of the funduq al-Shammâ‘în portico, or that of the minbar of the great mosque at Taza (1292-93).

The qibla wall has a recess in the middle where a hipped gable mihrâb juts out on the building’s external façade. It forms a niche, topped by a small dome with muqarnas, perhaps echoing the mihrâb of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, dating from 966, which constituted an entire room. The mihrâb opens via a broken horseshoe arch, supported by black marble, engaged columns, topped with capitals. It is echoed by a polylobed, broken horseshoe arch, which borders an archivolt of false voussoirs. Above it, a strip of vegetal epigraphy forms the background for an open panel of pointed, raised niches, decorated with stained glass. A series of niches, framed by inscriptions from the Koran, borders the frame of the mihrâb, and runs along the three facades of the qibla’s nave. To the right of the mihrâb is the wooden minbar.

At the south-west corner of the madrasa, is a quadrangular minaret. Its four-flight staircase winds around the stairwell, then ends in a lantern, topped by a small dome. It is decorated with panels, some of which, with their concentric diamond shapes, enhanced by glazed tiles, resemble the walls of the minarets at the al-Shrabliyîn mosque and the Chella madrasa.