Minaret: Symbol of Islam.

AuthorWhelan, Estelle

Jonathan Bloom has undertaken a study of the adoption of the tower in conjunction with the congregational mosque, a study requiring considerable courage, persistence, and erudition because of the rarity of texts bearing directly on the subject. Although many such towers survive in various forms, their function and development thus remain primarily a matter of interpreting insufficient evidence and formulating hypotheses. In this instance, Bloom's main hypothesis is largely an ideological one: Despite regional variations in form, such towers were originally intended as symbolic markers, rather than places for the call to prayer. He believes that the tower reflected a shift in emphasis on height from secular to religious contexts and was introduced in Baghdad in the early ninth century - a not unreasonable hypothesis but one for which he has been able to adduce no direct evidence.

Nonetheless, oblique evidence provides some support for it. The pattern emerges most clearly in two chapters on the Maghrib, in which Bloom argues that in Aghlabid and subsequent Hammadid domains the mosque tower was adopted as a sign of adherence to the Abbasid caliphate, whereas in Umayyad Spain the significance was rather that of adherence to Sunnite Islam, in opposition to the rising power of the Fatimids, who were ideologically opposed to the mosque tower. Although the Almoravids did not construct such towers, the Almohads conceived of them as "architectural statements . . . of the Almohad offensive against the Christian reconquest of Spain."

Egypt and Syria present Bloom with a more complex situation. He considers the earliest mosque tower in Egypt to have been the one at the mosque of Ibn Tulun (876-79), emulating the spiral towers at Samarra. In contrast to his interpretation of the Aghlabid tower at the congregational mosque in Qayrawan, datable thirty years earlier, he considers that Ahmad Ibn Tulun built his "to spite the Abbasids." This example was followed, beginning at the turn of the eleventh century, by two towers flanking the facade of al-Hakim's mosque outside the northern city wall; by a series of towers attached to mosques and shrines in upper Egypt, which Bloom believes reflect architectural practice in the Hijaz; by Badr al-Jamali's commemorative structure with tower on the Muqattam hills above Cairo; and by a series of towers of the late Fatimid period, reflecting in Bloom's view "the caliphs' weakness and the popular rejection of Isma ilism."

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