Ibn al-ʾAthīr says: “Nūr ad-Dīn, born 17 Šawwāl 511 (February 11, 1118 ), died the 11 Šawwāl 569 (May 15, 1174) and was buried in the madrasā which he had founded at the Sūq al-H̱awwāṣīn, bazaar of the basket-makers.”
The interior court measures 16.6 by 20.6 m. (relation 4:5). The tank, 6.5 x 7.8 m. (relation 5:6), has the canonical form, but has an unusual connection, by means of a channel, with the fountain in the back wall of the west ʾīwān, where the water pours out of a niche with archaic muqarnaṣ.
The front on the street, east side, has a monumental entrance: a bay with an outer door, an inner doorway (Persian, dirkāh), a second door, and an inner ʾiwān. The disposition is the same in the māristān. The cross vault of the dirkāh is old, so is the twelve-lobed niche in the tympan, the rare broken horseshoe arch over the little door that leads into the tomb chamber, and the benches below with their old-fashioned small molding. The original design remains intact.
Left of the entrance is the tomb chamber. It measures 6.64 by 6.67 m. The miḥrāb in the south wall has two antique colonnettes. Oil paint of the worst taste disfigures the masonry of the interior, but I did not observe any material alterations.
On the right of the entrance hall a staircase leads up to the living rooms of the upper story. A great number of such chambers, in which students and professors live, is essential for a madrasā. Madrasās share all other features with mosques, ribāṭs, caravanserais, but this distinguishes them as a species within the larger genus.
The entire breadth of the south side of the court is occupied by the prayer hall with a flat roof and an old miḥrāb. About half the width of the opposite side of the court is taken by an ʾiwān, 8.25 m. wide, 7.6 m. deep. The smaller ʾiwān with fountainhead on the west side is 4.45 m. wide, 3.9 m. deep.
The plan as a whole has no regular geometrical shape. This was the rule, at that time, with buildings in the crowded cities. Ibn Ǧubayr says Damascus, the largest town of the Muslim world of his days, was so densely populated that most houses had three stories. The streets were crooked and angular, the premises extremely small, and a tiny corner may have been a separate lot, not belonging to a large building. Most of the Syrian madrasās are not strictly symmetrical. There the function dominates the plans: never is a necessary part left out, nor is an existing part superfluous. The parts are arranged in a balanced correspondence, the main ones (prayer hall, ʾiwān) indicating the axes, but not in symmetrical repetition. That is Iranian and does not appear in Syria before the third and last phase of the ʾAyyūbīd period, 634-58 CE.
Ernst Herzfeld. Damascus, Studies in Architecture I. Ars islamica v. 9, University of Michigan Press, 1942.
-imageonline.co-merged.jpg)
