In the 9th century, while the other great dynasty, the Abbasid, controlled the Muslim world. Ibn Tulane a young ambitious governor was sent by the caliph to the city of Cairo, he will build a remarkable monument.
There, the ibn Tulan mosque is considered a jewel of Abbasid architecture of all the mosques in Cairo. It is the oldest, it is the affirmation of a sober bear architectural style. A real break from the flamboyance of the Umayyad, with its huge square courtyard, it is also the largest in Egypt. The most important thing about this mosque is its simple architecture. It is not flashy it's not glitzy, it's an architecture that does not have colors in its decoration. No tiles, no paintings, it's all very pure, and it's built by simple material.
It's built off by firebrick that was plastered over and that's it a remarkable sobriety as seen in the foundation of ablutions. A simple black marble placed in the middle of the vast courtyard, surmounted by a dome devoid of artifices. Ibn Tulum the commissioner of this mosque is the son of a slave from Samara in Iraq. When he arrived in Cairo in the year 868 one of his first visionary decisions was to create a new city whose heart would be a mosque.
He demands a new style from his architects, but he wants an element that echoes the mosque of his hometown Samara, With its unique minaret of helical shape points. Ibn tulan had a copy erected attached to his mosque as the mark of the Abbasid presence in Egypt.
He launched projects that heralded a major breakthrough in Muslim architecture. When ibn wanted to build his mosque, he told the architects, no columns should be used in my muscle. And the architects told him why go through all this difficulty, it's easy, we go to any ancient monument. We go to churches, we go to synagogues old that were destroyed.
Probably we get the columns, and we've been like the previous mosque were built this way. He said no I don't want any of that, I don't want you to go and destroy ancient monuments or churches or synagogues or any of that. I want you to build me this type of peer that I want these robust piers support arches and these are pointed arches. It's the first pointed arch that we have in Egypt, and probably the oldest pointed arch in the history of architecture is right here. The archers themselves are very graceful in his desire, to distinguish himself from his predecessors, ibn Tulane imposed a new conception of Islamic art inspired by the Iraqi deserts.
In which he spent his childhood, he highlights this heritage, favoring the sobriety of the decoration. This meant a complete breakaway from Umayyad art, which was based on elaborate mosaics in the Byzantine style. The mosque of ibn tulun is different from what was before, like in the dome of the rock and in Cordova there were big huge areas that are made of mosaics. But it is vases and flowers and trees and pearls and jewelry, the revolution was by the Abbasid our bassets came over, and they obliterated everything that was Byzantine.
And to imply a new character for Islamic art, they went into the abstract. The 128 windows of the mosque pierced in the thickness of the walls are all different, a work of incredible finesse that alternates the geometric shapes carved into the stucco a type of plaster. The raw material for all the cladding of the mosque, a mixture of plaster glue pulverized marble slate, lime chalk, and pigments all bonded by water.
Stucco allows the creation of thick coatings with an aspect and hardness of the stone, while leaving the craftsmen the freedom to fashion their creations manually. Inherited from the Greeks and Romans, stucco is now a characteristic artistic signature of Abbasid art. The Toulon came from Samara and there everything was made of stucco, almost everything in the whole of Mesopotamia is famous for stuck work. Yeah, I don't think there are workers now who can do this work anymore.
The decorations are very elegant it's like for me, it's like lace it's very delicate designs how they put the designs together, interlacing circles with the leaves yeah I find it very, very chic. We find that the windows are never centered with any arch. So, we want to enter the windows unconsciously and once you center one window you're seeing the second, so we move within the building until center without knowing.
And once you center the second you are centering the third and fourth, and then it becomes endless in the movement within the building and once you reach that point of entering a building that you are constantly moving in it shows the ultimate degree of architecture. Because architecture in itself is the sense it's the art of movement not the art of static structures. Because you are living within the building, now during the five daily prayers the ibn Tulane mosque comes out of its silence for a momen facing the merib which points to the mecca.
The faithful men of the neighborhood arrived to worship at the height of the greatness, that he returned to Egypt under his mandate as governor. We can imagine Eben Tulane here facing this merib with a large crowd behind him, yet today few remember ibn he would rest in anonymity a few steps from the mosque in the middle of the city's great cemetery in this mausoleum unknown and ignored for centuries, historically known as the tomb of the opposites. On the walls stucco decorations and verses from the Quran, on the ground two graves, one large and one small. It is in the smaller of the two that the remains of the great leader would be found, before the Abbasid the cemeteries and the domes of the mausoleums were not ornamentally rich.
Many new cemeteries after the advent of the Abbasid, these were characterized by their ornamental richness with plants stucco and calligraphy. All this highlighted the beauty and magnificence of these mausoleum domes, following an ancient Egyptian tradition as a sign of eternal life. The guardian of the cemetery places a cup of water on each tomb, men, and dynasties disappear, leaving only traces of their passages engraved in stones.
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