Great Mosque of Samarra

During the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (822 - 861), he commissioned several building projects. Up to 20 palaces are listed as his work, their cost totaling between 258 and 294 million dirhams.

One of his projects was a huge mosque in Samarra along the Tigris River. His desire for ostentatious displays of wealth and devotion made it the largest mosque in the world at the time, and it was completed in only three years.

The minaret (shown here) is 171 feet high and 108 feet wide, the top reached by a spiral ramp. It is all that remains of the original structure. The main building was constructed from baked brick octagon piers with four columns in the corners of imported marble. It had 17 aisles, and the walls were covered with dark blue tiles.

A total of 16 doors allowed the faithful inside, where light was provided by 28 windows, 24 of were oriented by the qibla, the direction to face when praying. A fountain in the center was believed to be carved from a single stone and delivered by elephants. That had been commissioned by al-Mutawakkil's predecessor, his brother al-Wathiq. The baked brick ceiling was 35 feet high, supported by 464 pillars.

In 1278, the mosque (but not the minaret or outer wall) was destroyed when Iraq was invaded by Hulagu Khan's Mongols. A restoration process started in 1956.

The construction of the Great Mosque was part of a plan to make Samarra the center of an expansive urban area, so there were other projects in the area. Part of this expanded area was named al-Mutawakkiliyya for himself. Another new city he founded needed water, and he commanded two courtiers, the brothers Muhammad and Ahmad ibn Musa, to make it happen. They ignored local engineers and turned instead to al-Farghani, an astronomer. He was very smart, and a good mathematician with a good reputation, but he made a tiny mistake with great consequences. That's a story for tomorrow.

The Astronomer Sultan

The Rasulids were a Sunni Muslim dynasty that ruled what is now Yemen and the Red Sea Coast of the Arabia peninsula from the early 13th century to 1454. Their third sultan, Al-Ashraf Umar II, was only sultan for less than two years, following a 46-year rule by his father, but he used his time as sultan-in-waiting to become highly educated. He understood medicine, mathematics, agriculture, and astronomy.

As an astronomer, he wrote a treatise about astrolabes (a device known to many in the east and the west) and sundials. In it, he describes the making of a qibla compass, designed to determine qibla properly wherever you are—that is, the direction toward Mecca for when you pray—a vitally important point in Islam. Al-Ashraf did not claim in the treatise that he invented it, but it is the earliest mention of a compass for determining qibla found in a medieval Islamic text, so his name is historically linked with its creation.

The qibla compass, of course, is a magnetic compass that points north. That is only the first step, however: once you find north, marks around the dial indicate major cities in which you might find yourself. The position of the city's name on the dial—if that's where you are when it is time to pray—show the compass direction from north that you must face.

Al-Ashraf also wrote one of the earliest known Islamic works on agriculture, a seven-chapter treatise that covers times for planting, cereal crops, seed crops, flowering plants, aromatic plants, vegetables, and even pest control. He lived in what is considered the Islamic Golden Age, and died in 1296.

The qibla compass is used extensively today; now, what about the magnetic compass itself? When was that discovered, and what did the Middle Ages do with it? Let's find out next time.

The qibla

I mentioned yesterday that Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur had an interest in building and re-building mosques. One was the Kutubiyya Mosque, the largest in Marrakesh. Started in 1147, it was rebuilt in 1158, with al-Mansur finishing the reconstruction in 1195 with the enormous 253-foot-tall minaret (pictured).

The reason for rebuilding of this mosque and others by the Almohads was that the originals, built by their rivals, the Almoravids, were considered heretical. The Almoravids were heretics in the eyes of the Almohads who built their mosques with the wrong qibla.

The qibla is the direction of prayer, the direction toward Mecca one faces when praying. More than that, it is the direction an animal is faced when slaughtered for sacrifice, the direction to avoid when spitting or relieving oneself, and the direction the deceased are aligned during burial. 

The Almoravid mosques were designed with the qibla facing too far east. From Marrakesh and the surrounding Almohad Empire in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, Mecca was more to the south. Therefore, in order to worship properly in the mosque, some mosques needed to be completely rebuilt.

What was the state of Muslim science that would allow them to determine the proper qibla from different cities? Wouldn't it be nice to have a compass that would point toward Mecca? It would, and something like that was developed by a sultan who was also an astronomer. I'll tell you about him next time.