Dār al-Ḥadīṯ an-Nūrīyyā

 

Nuʿaīmī writes: “dār al-Ḥadīṯ an-Nūrīyyā, founded by Nūr ad-Dīn Maḥmūd bin Abi Saʿīd Zengī bin Āqsunqur. One reads in ibn al-Aṯīr: Nūr ad-Dīn founded a dār al-Ḥadīṯ and endowed it with many waqfs. He is the first as far as we know to have built schools for that purpose,” namely, the teaching of the oral tradition of Muḥammadʾs sayings, many of them apocryphal.

Madrasā al-ʿĀdilīyyā aṣ-Ṣuġrāʾ is inside the Bāb al-Faraǧ, east of the east gate of the citadel . . . founded by Zahrā H̱ātūn, daughter of al-malik al-ʿĀdil abū Bakr bin ʾAyyūb. It had been a house belonging to ibn Musk (1) and stands opposite dār al-Ḥadīṯ an-Nūrīyyā (2). 

The building is anepigraphic, but its identity is assured, for it actually stands opposite a building epigraphically determined as the “lesser ʿĀdilīyyā" (3). 

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1. Ancestor of the Qaymarī emirs. 

2. Henri Sauvaire. Description de Damas (p. 424). 

3. West of the ʾUmayyād Mosque. 

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Ernst Herzfeld. Damascus, Studies in Architecture I. Ars islamica v. 9, University of Michigan Press, 1942.