From the street, al-Madrasā ar-Ruknīyyā appears much shorter than it did when it was new, as the ground level has risen by a good meter. Thus, all the windows have had their sills raised to keep out water and dirt from the street. The portion of the façade belonging to the cloister is easily distinguishable from the facade of the tomb: it is higher, lacks the cavetto cornice the tomb has, and is opened by the large arch of a typically shallow Damascene portal. The façade is executed in unbroken pink and white ablaq, coursed continuously across its entirety.
Ablaq was popular in aṣ-Ṣāliḥīyyā, and ar-Ruknīyyā was probably not the earliest major monument there to be executed entirely in striped masonry, which had been known in Damascus since the tomb chamber of Nūr al-ad-Dīn was built generations earlier. But ar-Ruknīyyā may be the earliest extant monument to employ the technique so unreservedly and to great effect: it unites the deliberately disparate shapes of the tomb and the cloister, the one marked clearly as an upper-class mausoleum by its elevation, the other concealing its squat dome behind a high facade. It is difficult to see the alternation of colors today, as both kinds of stone have weathered toward the same color, but it is very apparent when the stones are wet, as when it rains, and it would have been unmistakable, though not garish, when the building was new.
Terry Allen. Ayyubid Architecture. Solipsist Press, Occidental, California, 1999.
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