Turbat ibn al-Muqaddam

This mausoleum bears no inscriptions, hence the need to rely on architectural criteria and historical sources for its identification. According to Sauvaire (1): "The (Madrasā al)-Muqaddamīyyā extra muros at Marǧ Daḥdāh, known as the Turbat al-Muqaddam, was built by the emir Faẖr ad-Dīn Ibrāhīm, who died in 597 (2) and was buried there .... Faẖr ad-Dīn ibn al-Muqaddam, Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad ibnʿAbd al-Malik, owned Bārīn and other castles; aẓ-Ẓāhir Ġāzī (3) took everything except Bārin from him; he died at Damascus and was buried in the madrasā of his family outside the Bāb al-Farādīs."

This tradition permits one either to accept Ibrāhim as the founder of the turbā in the Daḥdāh Cemetery, in which he was buried in 597 as Khaled Moaz does (4); or to consider the turbā as that of his father Muḥammad, who died and was buried in ʿArafāt but had built it before 583 AH (5).

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1. Description de Damas p. 325, n. 205. See also an-Nuʿaymī V1 p. 460. 

2. 597 AH = 1200-1201 CE. 

3. Aẓ-Ẓāhir Ġāzī, son of Saladin, was the ʾAyyūbid emir of Aleppo between 1186 and 1216 CE. 

4. Le mausolée d'ibn al-Muqaddam. Mélanges de l'Institut Français de Damas. Section des Arabisants T. 1 (1929), pp. 67-74. 

5. 1187-1188 CE.

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

Photo credit: Terry Allen. Ayyubid Architecture. Solipsist Press, Occidental, California, 1999.