The Carved Stone Ornament of the Mosque of al-Ḥākim

by Terry Allen

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Chapter Nine. Ornamented Inscriptions

The inscriptions of the Mosque of al-Ḥākim are part of its carved stone ornament, although both Arabic script and its freely distributed decoration are inherently unlike the generally repeating patterns that make up most of the mosque's ornament. Some of the inscriptions include foliate ornament growing from the letters, making Arabic script here another category of design (along with geometry) with which foliate elements are integrated.

Below is a list of original Fāṭimid carved stone inscriptions on the Mosque of al-Ḥākim.

I am not an epigrapher and I am certain I am unaware of some of the epigraphic literature on these inscriptions. I am not concerned here with the style of the script, but with its ornament, and specifically with whether that ornament is related to the other carved stone ornament.

The lightly ornamented inscriptions in the medallion of the second register of the cylindrical section of the northern minaret, in the frame of the window facing west in the third register of the same section, and in the frieze in the eighth register of the western minaret offer little to analyze; the foliate ornament of the letters in the frieze is hollowed out or slant-cut to develop internal detail, unlike the letters, while the foliate ornament of the other inscriptions is as flat as their letters. There is nothing much to link this ornament with the rest of the carved stone ornament.

The inscription on the exterior of the cubical buttress constructed around the western minaret resembles not the original stone ornament, but the stucco of the antemihrab dome: both have foliate forms not seen in the original stone ornament and particularly in the stucco these forms are distinctively articulated or enlivened with groups of small round holes.151

Figure 96. Stucco inscriptions below antemihrab dome; Flury, Ornamente, pl. 2 (cf. Creswell, Muslim Architecture of Egypt, pl. 109, a, b).

The remaining inscriptions and those of the interior (of which more later), as well as stucco inscriptions in the Mosque of al-Azhar, have a prominent place in the discussion of so-called foliated Kūfic (coufique fleuri, Blumenkūfī), which Flury and Adolf Grohmann consider first to have been developed fully in Cairo and in these very monuments.152 Whatever the priority of Cairo in the development of a style of epigraphy that became widespread in the Islamic world, Kūfic with stems and foliation attached clearly did not come from Spain.

As few photographs, so far as I know, have been published of the tall inscription friezes of the two minarets my conclusions from the material at hand must remain tentative. I think it clear that, like the entrance to the staircase of the northern minaret and the six loose limestone blocks, its foliate ornament is entirely consonant with that of the nonepigraphic ornament.

While Flury's photograph of the inscription above the entrance to the staircase of the northern minaret shows perhaps more than half of it, the section published shows only a single leaf form, on a grooved stem, but that leaf is familiar from the material already discussed.

All of the leaf forms in the group of six limestone blocks in the Museum of Islamic Art are found in the nonepigraphic ornament, and one, at the left of the top row in Grohmann's illustrations (no. 2638?) has a grooved ringed stem that splits at a small pointed oval, then splits again on both sides, very much like the element in the bottom right loop of the northwestern niche head on the main entrance (see Figure 63).

The ornament of the inscription frieze of the fourth register of the cylindrical section of the northern minaret is more elaborate than that of, say, the window frames in seventh register of that minaret: the grooved stems occasionally vary in width, and a few leaves have more internal detail, but they otherwise they are rendered in the same way, with grooved outlining and occasional hollowing out. The especially noticeable five-lobed leaf in the upper right of Flury's pl. 28, 3 (Figure 94) is paralleled in the more crudely carved elements flanking the center of the top of the window facing east (see Figure 32). The split palmettes in which the two tops form stems curving across each other (Figure 93) are absolutely typical of the carved stone ornament of the mosque; one of the two sets of vertical axes of the main entrance frieze (Figure 1) is marked by such elements. The inscription frieze in the eleventh register of the western minaret seems to me quite similar, sharing variation in the width of the grooved stems and the same five-lobed leaf, although in the details published there is not so much internal detail.

I do not see how to separate the ornament of these original, richly decorated inscriptions from the bulk of the foliate carved stone ornament. It is from the same craft tradition and distinct from that of the stucco and the slightly later inscription on the exterior of the buttress of the western minaret, so I conclude that it was all executed by members of the same group of stonecutters, of whom I imagine the calligrapher was not one.

Now while I would expect the foliate ornament of these inscriptions to have been designed by the calligrapher, it may not have been so: the calligrapher may have provided only the letters, or he may have indicated the layout of the ornament but not its details, or the man carving the inscription may have substituted his own familiar motifs for those indicated by the calligrapher. Perhaps most plausibly, the stonework designer collaborated with the calligrapher (which is likely in any case for the laying out of the inscription if not its enlargement from a smaller-scale original). Such an arrangement would not have required the stonecarvers to execute unfamiliar foliate forms, which they might not have been expected to do well.

It might prove interesting to find other cases in which the ornament of architectural inscriptions can be compared with contemporary but nonepigraphic ornament from the same monument.


147. Width inferred from Creswell, Muslim Architecture of Egypt, v. 1, fig. 33.

148. The reference in Flury's text, p. 48, where the measurement is given, is to the wrong plate. Adolf Grohmann, “The Origin and Early Development of Floriated Kūfic”, Ars Orientalis, v. 2, 1957, pp. 183–213, fig. 25 on pl. 10, is a shorter length of the same section, from a different photograph, localized in the “seventh band” in the caption because Creswell bobbled his description of the inscription (never actually using the word “eighth”, Muslim Architecture of Egypt, v. 1, p. 96).

149. For the first publications see Bloom, op. cit., p. 35, no. 11. I have used the photographs in Adolf Grohmann, Arabische Paläographie (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Denkschriften, v. 94), 2 v., Vienna, 1971, v. 2, pl. 24, 1; they also appear in Grohmann, “The Origin and Early Development of Floriated Kūfic”, pp. 183–213, fig. 20 on pl. 7. For their localization see Bloom, op. cit., p. 19, speculating that they may have come from the main entrance, which is likely considering the date of restoration work there.

150. Creswell, op. cit., v. 1, p. 90, citing al-Maqrīzī; pl. 27, d.

151. There were also some remains of a stucco inscription below the springing of squinch of the dome in the south corner of the original prayer hall, ibid., pl. 109, c.

152. For the contents of the inscriptions see the appendix to Bloom, “The Mosque of al-Ḥākim in Cairo”. For “foliated Kūfic” see Flury, Ornamente and for al-Azhar “Le décor épigraphique des monuments fatimides du Caire”; Grohmann, “The Origin and Early Development of Floriated Kūfic”, pp. 207–13, and Arabische Paläographie, v. 2, pp. 139–40. The term “foliated Kūfic” is poorly chosen: while flowers appear later, in these inscriptions, anyway, what grows from letters and stems is leaves, rarely or never flowers.