Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 4 (2023) 188–209

brill.com/mcmw

Drawing the Isolated Mosque

Ziad Jamaleddine
Assistant professor, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation,
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
[email protected]

Received 12 July 2022 | Accepted 4 January 2023 |

Published online 22 February 2024

Abstract

From the early-nineteenth century onwards, Orientalist visual constructs heavily shaped
European depictions and analyses of mosque architecture. Over time, these representations
shifted from the Orientalist exoticized scenographic model to the “scientific” language of the
orthographic drawing. This article analyzes that process, tracing the evolution of a series of pub-
lished plan drawings for five historical mosques. Unpacking their authors’ drafting techniques
and examining the relationship between the isolation of the drawing and the understanding of
the mosque as a timeless monument highlights the gaps of knowledge reproduced within the
canonical texts of Islamic architecture and their disciplinary impact.

Keywords

mosque – preservation – representation – survey book – typology

1 Introduction

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western scholars produced a series of survey
texts that shaped disciplinary understandings of “Islamic” architecture. These surveys
and their varied representations of the built environment reflected the cultural and
intellectual context of their production. As the survey book became the arbiter of his-
torical knowledge, the plan – the constructed visual representation of that knowledge –
played a critical role in defining the presence of the “historical” mosque in the “modern”
city. Transitioning from specificity to abstraction, the plan increasingly reinforced an
understanding of the mosque as an isolated monument rather than an actively used
space. As many of the archeologists, architects, art historians, and preservationists who
authored these surveys led or consulted planning and preservation agencies across
the Middle East and North Africa, this conceptual shift resulted in concrete impacts
on the physical structures of mosques, rescripting their forms and their relationship to
their surroundings.1
In this text, I argue that a close reading of the graphic language of the mosque
plans produced for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century surveys of Islamic architec-
ture exposes a progressive reduction to the “essential,” as the building survey drawing
was gradually transformed into a diagram – a simplified, autonomous compositional

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 189

representation.2 My argument follows architect and historian Robin Evans, who, in his
study of the drawing in the Western architectural tradition, warned of the impact of the
“pieties of essentialism,” insisting that a drawing “operate either through insistence on a
true and irreducible expressiveness … or in the demand that only pure geometric forms
and ratios be employed” (Evans, 1997).3 The scholars who produced the mosque plans
printed in the canonical texts of Islamic architecture embraced the strategies against
which Evans cautioned, abstracting their subjects. In their efforts to define the mosque
as an autonomous object and sort it into clear typological categories, these scholars
foregrounded formal language, obscuring the mosque’s history of responsive adapta-
tion and its imbrication within social, urban, and environmental networks.4 The plan’s
diagrammatization reframed the mosque as a fixed “historical” monument whose pur-
pose existed only in the past – associated with a specific period, patron, or program –
and denied its continued value to the modern or modernizing city.
In this article, I focus on five extensively studied and widely taught historical
mosques, mapping how their plans evolved through their appearances in the canonical
survey texts of Islamic architecture. I argue that these case studies evince a demon-
strable resonance between the abstraction of each mosque’s plan, understanding of
its relationship to the environment, and the treatment of its physical structure. The
selected mosques represent a spectrum of physical and social environmental embed-
dedness. I have excluded mosques that were initially conceptualized as detached from
their urban surroundings, such as Samara’s Great Mosque of al-Mutawakkil (c.246/860).
While the Ibn Tulun Mosque (262–5/876–9) is often compared to al-Mutawakkil, by the
late-nineteenth century, its ziyada had become physically enmeshed within its neigh-
borhood context. Istanbul’s Süleymaniye mosque (964/1557) sat at a clear distance from
the surrounding residential fabric but was central to a larger imperial complex embed-
ded in the life of the surrounding city (Ugurlu, 2020). A new religious structure was
attached to the outer wall of Cairo’s al-Hakim Mosque (380–403/990–1013), causing
the building to spill outside of its original footprint (Sanders, 2008). The varied quali-
ties of historical embeddedness exhibited by the selected case studies posed different
graphical challenges to their authors. As they strove to draft their subjects of study, they
had to make intentional decisions regarding what contextual information to include or
exclude. While my analysis focuses on a close reading of plan drawings, I also demon-
strate how those plans’ representational abstraction was reflected in the accompanying
textual analysis.
From the early nineteenth century onwards, Western scholars’ analysis and repre-
sentation of mosque architecture were heavily shaped by orientalist visual constructs
(Bozdoǧan, 1988). Early orientalist paintings romanticized the Islamic city; however,
they simultaneously depicted the mosque as actively embedded within urban and envi-
ronmental networks. Over time, this exoticized, scenographic image was shed in favor of
scientific abstraction. Archeologists, architects, and historians produced orthographic
and axonometric drawings that methodically surveyed the forms of the mosques they
studied. Illustrating them as technical objects, these drawings abstracted their sub-
jects, severing them from their context and dissecting them into component parts. This
abstraction was part of a trajectory of Western architectural thought originating dur-
ing the Enlightenment. Prizing empirical observation, scholars sought to uncover the
universal laws that they believed underlaid the surrounding world. Eighteenth-century
architects such as Julien-David Leroy and Jean-Nicholas Louis Durand applied these sci-
entific frameworks to architectural production, seeking to expose general principles of
various building types. For these scholars, each epoch of building represented a link in
an evolutionary chain of development that progressed towards ever-greater perfection.5

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190 Jamaleddine

Figure 1
Julien-David Le Roy, “Plan des
églises les plus remarquables,
baties depuis l’an 326 jusqu’en
1764”
Source: Le Roy (1764).
Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

Constructing these comparative frameworks necessitated the suppression of detail and

focused attention away from social, temporal, or environmental factors and towards
purely formal concerns. Diagrammatization through drawing allowed these scholars to
“reveal” the latent commonalities concealed within historic buildings, facilitating their
systematic comparison (Fig. 1).6
Early nineteenth-century Islamic architectural surveys maintained a measure of ori-
entalist painting’s scenographic impulse; these large format and Beaux-Arts-influenced
works featured illustrated plates presenting plans surrounded by fragmentary sections
and elevations, details of ornament, and perspectival vignettes. Through this pastiche,
these plates communicated a mosque’s planimetric organization while also offer-
ing glimpses of its spatial qualities and modes of observation (Fig. 2). Their content
focused primarily on limited geographical areas, notably the encyclopedic Description
de l’Égypte (1809–22), or Émile Prisse d’Avennes’ L’Art Arabe D’Après Les Monuments Du
Kaire Depuis le VIIe Siècle Jusqu’à La Fin du XVIIIe (1869) focused on Egypt, while others,
such as the Usul-u Mimari-i Osmani (Usul), a survey of the “classical” Ottoman mosque
produced for the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition described the architectural pro-
duction of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1907, Henri Jules Saladin and Gaston Migeon’s Manuel D’art Musulman initiated
a shift from the regional study to the comprehensive survey. Surprisingly small in for-
mat, its chapters focused on individual regions of the Islamic world. Inline plans and
photographs depicted mosques that the authors considered geographically representa-
tive. Following the Manuel’s publication, the comprehensive survey became the com-
mon structural model for texts on Islamic architecture, continuing to dominate such
scholarly production through the mid-twentieth century. With chapters dedicated

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 191

Figure 2
“Le Kaire: Plan, élévation, coupes
et détails d`ornement de la
mosquée de Touloun”
After Description de
L’Egypte. Etat Moderne
vol. I. Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

to individual geographical regions, dynasties or typologies, these surveys juxtaposed

diverse buildings and objects to argue for coherence in the artistic and architectural
production of the Islamic world.7
If these surveys’ structures remained relatively consistent, their graphic strategies
shifted to meet a range of representational desires – illustrating mosques and con-
structing arguments regarding their formal qualities, “origins,” and contextual rela-
tionships. Drawings by architectural historian K. A. C. Creswell and others utilized
historically coded wall poché, centerlines, and other annotative symbols to commu-
nicate their search for the formal essence or “true” origin of the mosques they stud-
ied (Fig. 5).8 As scholars simplified or “corrected” mosque plans to clarify periodization
or reinforce typological arguments, this redaction of detail led to increasing planimetric
abstraction.9
Essentializing the mosque into a diagram facilitated the classification of the diversity
of buildings constructed across the Islamic world into a singular and linear narrative.
Additionally, it reframed the mosque as a fixed formal object or monument, erasing the
realities of its history. By understanding the mosque as a “historical” structure, these
scholars relegated its function to the past, obscuring its adaptations to or role in the
contemporary city.

2 Al-Hakim Mosque

In his canonical text, The Muslim Architecture of Egypt (1952), Creswell illustrated
Cairo’s al-Hakim Mosque (380–403/990–1013) in an as-found condition. Widely dis-
persed, his plan utilized graphical devices to present the plan as an archeological site.
Vast blank areas emphasized the missing piers of the sahn’s colonnade, and annota-
tive survey dimensions and chronologically coded wall poché excavated the mosque’s
historical layers for viewers (Fig. 3). Twenty years later, art historian John D. Hoag pub-
lished a radically transformed plan of al-Hakim, graphically restoring the mosque to an

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192 Jamaleddine

Figure 3
Comparative diagram showing
three plans of al-Hakim Mosque
Source: Ettinghausen
et al., (1990), Hoag (1977),
Hillenbrand (1994),
assembled by the author

“original” state for Islamic Architecture (1977) (Fig. 3). Hoag redrew the missing piers and
regularized the wall poché, expunging the passage of time. His correction of al-Hakim’s
plan was mirrored by the eventual “purification” of its actual built structure. Drawn and
redrawn by various scholars, evidence of the mosque’s history was progressively erased.
A Mamluk-era tomb, expunged from the drawing, was eventually physically removed
from the mosque itself.
Initiated in 380/990 by Fatimid Caliph al-Aziz, al-Hakim was completed twenty-three
years later by his son, Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. In the late 1970s, the Egyptian
government granted the Dawoodi Bohra community permission to renovate al-Hakim
and several other Fatimid-era Cairene monuments. The Bohras, an Ismaʿili Shiʿa group
centered primarily in India and Pakistan, locate their spiritual origins in the Fatimid
era. Through architectural restorations and the construction of new neo-Fatimid
mosques, the Bohras have instrumentalized architecture to create a cohesive identity
for their geographically dispersed community (Sanders, 2008). The group’s restoration
of al-Hakim was controversial, not least for removing the tomb – a redaction justified
by the structure’s complication of the mosque’s Fatimid periodization. However, the
tomb’s presence typified Cairo’s urban development; additions and adaptations over
time were characteristic features of the city’s architecture (Reid, 1992).
In his plan for The Muslim Architecture of Egypt (1952), Creswell represented the
tomb as an ambiguous presence, a lightly drawn square tangentially attached to the left
corner of the mosque’s entrance (Fig. 3). Previously, an obscure survey drawing of the
ruined al-Hakim Mosque captured its physical dilapidation and transformation, includ-
ing the Museum of Arab Art structures in the sahn, and the tomb’s detailed plan. This
drawing illustrates the tomb as an extension of the mosque gate into the surrounding
urban fabric (Fig. 4). Isolated from the city and drawn as merely an outline in Creswell’s
plan, the tomb’s lack of detail offered a sharp contrast to the rest of the drawing, graphi-
cally framing it as intrusive and separate from the mosque. Hoag’s plan, the next sig-
nificant iteration, consolidated the annotative hatches and erased the tomb completely.
This latter action was reinforced by an accompanying photograph labeled “monumental
entrance,” which strategically cropped out the tomb (Hoag, 1977) (Fig. 5). Subsequent
plans by George Michel (1978) and Robert Hillenbrand (1994) also removed the tomb
and the adjacent medieval city wall, representing the building as a self-contained and
decontextualized form (Fig. 3).
Increasingly abstract, these plans represent a willful desire to purify the mosque’s
footprint, fixing its Fatimid-era boundaries and removing evidence of its transforma-
tion over time. In parallel to al-Hakim’s planimetric essentialization, the texts those
plans accompanied began to reflect that singular dynastic narrative.10 In the early 1980s,

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 193

Figure 4
Arcille Patricolo, survey drawing
of al-hakim Mosque
Source: Courtesy of the
Rare Books and Special
Collections Library, The
American University in
Cairo (1914)

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194 Jamaleddine

Figure 5
A photograph of the Monumental
Gate of al-Hakim Mosque, from
Islamic Architecture
Source: Hoag (1977)

the Bohra’s reconstruction of the mosque’s exterior mimicked the purity argued for
in the drawings.11 The Mamluk tomb, which the European-led conservation organiza-
tion the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arab (Comité) had long sought
to remove, was finally dismantled and cleared from the Fatimid mosque (Riad, 1951).12
With the tomb’s removal, the exterior façade of the sahn – designated by Creswell as
original – was uncovered, thus achieving the version of the building represented by
Hoag’s plan.

3 Qayrawan

The belief in a “true” origin was frequently paralleled by the belief that these mosques
possessed an intrinsic formal logic, one following a framework imposed by the viewer.
Although early drawings of the Qayrawan mosque (50–223/670–838) captured its imper-
fect mass, the texts they accompanied often framed that quality as a fault. Gradually,
the plans reflected an imposed and “corrected” formal interpretation. One of the earli-
est plans of Qayrawan was from the Manuel D’art Musulman (1907). While its level of
detail was uneven, Henri Jules Saladin’s plan depicted the building’s plinth – registering
the mosque’s mass in relationship to the ground and capturing its irregular form. Clear
outlines showed the plinth wrapping three sides of the building, the perimeter of the
stylobate surrounding the depressed sahn, and the edges of the city fabric. The plan
presented the mosque’s exterior as highly articulated: recording the deformation of the
eastern exterior wall – particularly visible at the prayer hall entrance – and of the inte-
rior courtyard wall at either side of the minaret, and representing the varied sizes, pro-
portions, and spacing of the exterior buttresses (Fig. 6). In his text, Saladin compared
Qayrawan to the “primitive” and “typical” mosque of the Maghreb, thus establishing a
typological relationship (Saladin, 1907).
The plan in Early Muslim Architecture (1932) marked the next significant represen-
tational shift (Fig. 6). Much like Creswell’s other plans, it included annotative pochés,
centerlines indicating formal relationships, and survey dimensions that affirmed its sci-
entific accuracy. However, simultaneously, it began to “correct” the form of its subject.
Creswell simplified the western façade, removing details, and most notably, straighten-
ing the angled courtyard and entry walls. A second version of the drawing from A Short

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 195

Figure 6
K. A. C. Creswell, A plan of the
Qayrawan Mosque from Early
Muslim Architecture, part two
Source: Creswell (1940).
Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

Figure 7
A comparative diagram showing
plans of the Qayrawan Mosque
Source: Saladin (1907),
Creswell (1958), Hoag (1977),
assembled by the author

Account of Early Muslim Architecture (1958) went further, redacting the small room
behind the mihrab and flattening the pochés into a single hatch (Fig. 6).
Creswell’s textual depiction was negative in tone, nuancing the interpretation of his
regularization of the plan and highlighting his valuation of form and monumentality.
In A Short Account, he critiqued Qayrawan’s “irregular and unsatisfactory appearance,”
writing that its mismatched forms and erratically distributed exterior buttresses rep-
resented “the work of many hands and denote[d] various makeshift attempts to keep
the walls from collapse” (Creswell, 1958). This haphazard effort, he argued, distracted
from the production of a monumental effect on the exterior. Only the qibla façade, with
its formally uniform buttresses, was described as monumental. The text asserted that
the domes and minaret, clearly captured in Creswell’s plan, were the exterior’s “only
redeeming features” (Creswell, 1958). In addition to its comprehensive plan, Early
Muslim Architecture contained a fragmentary plan of the mosque’s exterior sanctuary
walls, reconstructing the supposed original locations and regular forms of its buttresses.

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196 Jamaleddine

Figure 8
K. A. C. Creswell, suggested
reconstruction of original scheme
of buttresses from Early Muslim
Architecture, part two
Source: Creswell (1940).
Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

The projected uniformity of the fragmentary drawing appears to offer a precursor to

Hoag’s even more simplified 1977 plan (Fig. 8).
Adapted from a plan from Alexandre Lézine’s Architecture de L’Ifriqiya, Recherches sur
les Monuments (1966) that depicted a hypothetical and fully reconstructed Qayrawan
Mosque,13 Hoag’s interpretation smoothed away details, regularizing many of the exte-
rior’s idiosyncrasies: the wall behind the mihrab was solidly pochéd and the angled
entry chamber removed; the exterior walls were straightened and their buttresses redis-
tributed to present the appearance of uniform spacing and proportion; the chambers
along the northern wall and domed prayer hall entry were removed; and the support
piers of the arcades and hypostyle hall standardized. The lines indicating the plinth at
the southern façade were erased entirely, leaving the mosque groundless (Fig. 7).
This systematic graphical essentialization of the mosque’s tectonic structural ele-
ments highlighted its T-shaped plan. To further emphasize this underlying structure –
real or projected – Hoag included a series of centerlines that sought to establish align-
ments across the mosque’s form. One centerline passed through the minaret, highlight-
ing its asymmetrical relationship to the prayer hall entrance. Hoag’s text described this
misalignment as “perhaps a miscalculation,” postulating that the builder may have
intended to eventually construct a portal on the axis with the mihrab (1977: p. 64).
Several exterior photographs accompany the text – one captures the mosque’s roof
from above, foregrounding the relationship between the minaret and the domes.
The plans produced by the scholars who studied the Qayrawan Mosque appear to
express their desperate search for the “rational order” they believed was concealed
within its “irregular” geometry. Instead of accepting a conscious design decision or a de
facto effect of the mosque’s organic growth, the supposed misalignment of the minaret
was attributed to a theoretical missing portal whose presence would have provided the
axiality those scholars prized. Lost in their readings was a plan form whose logic did not
conform to their projections of rational composition, clear typological precedent, or
standards of artisanship. Through the process of drawing and redrawing, they produced
an idealized version of the Qayrawan Mosque that bore no resemblance to the forgiving
and plastic reality of its architecture.14

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 197

4 Ibn Tulun

In plans of the Ibn Tulun Mosque (262–5/876–9), the progressive abstraction of the
ziyada focused disciplinary attention on the building’s form, restricting an understand-
ing of its urban relationships. First unlabeled and unexplained, as the ziyada gained a
spatial identity and designated purpose, the drawing of its geometry began to reflect
greater rationalization15 (Fig. 9). Early plans only vaguely indicate the ziyada. The draw-
ing included by Prisse d’Avennes in L’Art Arabe (1869), a nearly exact reproduction of
the plan from Description de L’Egypte (1809–1829), shows Ibn Tulun detached from
its environs and artificially squared geometry. The mosque’s perimeter is defined by a
U-shaped, walled zone, empty except for the minaret. Saladin’s plan, following Julius
Franz Pasha’s 1907 drawing, conformed to its predecessors but represented the ziyada
with greater specificity: its geometry was less square, a wall divided the western extent,
and several masses penetrated into the perimeter. Most remarkably, the exterior bound-
ary of the ziyada was represented as part of the adjacent urban fabric rather than as
a freestanding wall. The text reinforced this impression, describing the annexes and
minaret as “outside” of the mosque (Saladin, 1907).
By 1915, the representation of the ziyada acquired both greater detail and annotation.
Following Karl Baedeker’s adaptation of Max Herz’s survey, art historian Ernst Diez’s
plan named the ziyada’s spaces Außenhöfe, or exterior courtyards. Diez drew them as
discontinuous, obstructed by what his text labeled “debris” (1915: p. 43). Areas of gray
hatch interrupt the dashed lines of the exterior wall, capturing what are now defined
as urban intrusions. Corresponding to Diez, Creswell, in his 1939 plan, noted debris –
“several meters deep” – in the ziyada. Hatched forms represented additional construc-
tion in the ziyada’s eastern corner; however their purpose was unannotated. Creswell’s

Figure 9
A comparative diagram showing
plans of the Ibn Tulun Mosque
Source: Prisse d’Avennes
(1877), Saladin (1907), Diez
(1915), Creswell (1940) from
the Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University; Grabar (1977),
Hillenbrand (1994),
assembled by the author

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198 Jamaleddine

Figure 10
K. A. C. Creswell, an exterior
photograph of the sahn of
Ibn Tulun, from Early Muslim
Architecture
Source: Creswell (1939).
Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

text and photographs framed the ziyada as a buffer between the mosque and its urban
environment. In his photographs of the façade, the outer elevations of the sahn are cap-
tured as if they were the building’s exterior. The mosque emerges as an assertive object,
disengaged from the unruly city beyond (Fig. 10). Discussing the Comité’s razing of that
adjacent fabric in the 1920s, Creswell argued that the resultant isolation of the ziyada’s
wall “in no way represent[ed] the original condition” (1958: p. 306). For Creswell, the
ziyada demarcated a threshold between the “secular” city and the “sacred” space of the
mosque. He wrote that “on entering [the mosque] one is struck by its air of peace and
serenity, completely cut off as it is from the noise of the street, by its chaste ornament
and devotional atmosphere” (1958: p. 305).16
Describing Ibn Tulun in Islamische Baukunst in Ägypten (1966), Dietrich Brandenburg
argued even more explicitly for a reading of the ziyada as an urban buffer. Utilizing
affect rather than historical evidence, he wrote that the ziyada shielded the mosque
from street noise, asserting that after stepping through it, one would be “surrounded
by peace and silence and caught by the devotional atmosphere” (1966: p. 107). His plan
bolstered this description, representing the ziyada as an uninterrupted U-shaped space.
Hillenbrand’s 1994 plan, thumbnail-sized and annotated only with a figure number,
became a diagram of itself. Details were removed, the overall geometry was squared,
the ziyada’s walls were solidly hatched, and the entry doors and minaret stairs were
removed. The outer courts were emptied and equalized, and the sabil was removed.
Hillenbrand’s plan thus reproduced Prisse d’Avennes’ early representation of the build-
ing, composed more than a century earlier.
Through this progressive clearance and geometric rationalization, the ziyada, his-
torically an overspill space for Friday prayers and a container of other varied functions,
became an empty vessel into which scholars projected meanings and spatial qualities,
finally coming to be understood solely as a buffer between the mosque and the city.
The graphic treatment and scholarly understanding of the ziyada developed in parallel:
shifting from an ambiguous urban zone (Saladin) to an exterior courtyard distinct from
the mosque (Diez) to a graphic separation between the “sacred” mosque and the “secu-
lar” city (Creswell and Brandenburg) to an unprogrammed abstract void (Hillenbrand).

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 199

5 Sultan Hasan Complex

In their readings of Cairo’s Sultan Hasan Mosque (757–63/1356–62), scholars focused

on the building’s monumental scale – an interpretation closely tied to the clearance of
its surrounding medieval fabric initiated by the 1870s Plan général de la Ville du Caire.
This urban transformation erased the relationship between the mosque’s form and the
urban context that had shaped it, allowing the subsequent drawings to stage Sultan
Hasan as an exemplary medieval Islamic monument. The analyses preceding Cairo’s
urban restructuring, such as Pascale Coste’s plan in Architecture Arabe ou monuments
du Kaire (1837–9), acknowledged the contextual drivers of Sultan Hasan’s idiosyncratic
form but lamented the “noticed irregularity” of their effect. Coste’s drawing shows the
figure of the mosque emerging from the historic suq el selhah; a solid hatch merged
the suq’s fabric with the pochéd walls of the mosque, angled to face Makkah (Fig. 11).
As the surrounding buildings were demolished to form the “Place Sultan Hasan,” arche-
ologist Max Herz produced a site plan enshrining that erasure within the scholarly
canon, producing an understanding of the mosque as an autonomous object floating
with an open plaza. Rather than linking form to context, Herz’s drawing characterized
the adjacent structures as an encroachment, its legend distinguishing “historic” con-
struction from “modern” build-up (Fig. 12).
Although the “Place” was only partially realized when Herz published La Mosquée
du Sultan Hassan au Caire (1898), the report captured the area’s urban transformation.
Herz wrote that the northwestern extent of the mosque sat alongside a “vast terrain” –
a consequence of the razing of the suq accompanying the construction of Muhammed
Ali Boulevard (1898: p. 1). Exterior photographs included within Herz’s text highlighted
the mosque’s object quality, angled to capture multiple sides of the building or high-
lighting the free edges of the façade. Herz also produced a restoration site plan, graphi-
cally implementing the version of the “Place” from the Plan General; within it, he
recommended further demolition at the mosque’s northwest to remove the “modern”

Figure 11
Pascal Coste, a plan of Sultan
Hasan, from Architecture Arabe ou
monuments du Kaire
Source: Coste (1837–9).
Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

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200 Jamaleddine

Figure 12
Max Herz, a restoration plan of
Sultan Hasan, from La Mosquée du
Sultan Hassan report
Source: Herz (1898).
Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

Figure 13
Sheila Blair and
Jonathan M. Bloom, a plan of
Sultan Hasan, from The Art and
Architecture of Islam 1250–1800
Source: Blair and Bloom
(1994)

urban infill that “encroach[ed] on spaces which would have remained free in the inter-
est of the monument,” however, he cautioned that “total clearing” was still impossible
(1898: p. 29).
Capturing a projected urban reality, Herz’s plan graphically separated Sultan Hasan
from the fabric that had shaped it, pacifying the “abnormality” of the mosque’s irreg-
ular form and illustrating further “necessary” clearance of its surroundings. Multiple
versions of Herz’s 1898 plan were reprinted in later survey books, including those by
Diez (1915), Marçais (1946), Hoag (1977), Michell (1978), Hillenbrand (1994), and Blair
and Bloom (1994) (Fig. 13). Obscuring the historical relationship between the mosque’s
primary mass, angled portal, and the adjacent context, Herz’s plan paved the way for
twentieth-century scholarly discourse to focus on its superlative scale and monumental-
ity. His plans of the mosque became representative of the type of late-nineteenth-century
urbanism that had served as the impetus for the clearance of historic Cairo’s opaque
fabric. In the decades to come, this process underpinned the eventual total clearance of
the site and its transformation into an isolated vehicular island.

6 Süleymaniye and the Ottoman Mosque

The scholarly classification of the Ottoman mosques of Istanbul by their dome struc-
tures influenced not only the direct understanding of those buildings but also the 1930s

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 201

master plan for Istanbul designed by French urban planner Henri Prost. Even though
driven by different historiographic aims, European historians and archeologists, and
Ottoman scholars created diagrams arguing for typological frameworks driven by the
formal characteristics of mosque domes. This classificatory structure reflected an evo-
lutionary drawing process where the ground was gradually dematerialized, refocusing
viewer attention on discrete formal elements above. It further spurred an understand-
ing of these mosques that centered an abstract, cross-referential reading of their domes,
thus obscuring their urban embeddedness.
One of the earliest plans of the Süleymaniye Mosque (964/1557), an eighteenth-
century etching by Austrian architect and historian Johann Bernhard Fischer von
Erlach, included such a paucity of detail that the dome appeared to float unsupported
by any structure. Despite its overall simplicity, the plan portrayed the attached royal
cemetery and the stone fence and tree line framing the grounds. An accompanying per-
spectival drawing activated the space, capturing a royal parade occupying the mosque’s
grounds (Fig. 14).17 Charles Texier’s plan (1833), produced more than a century later,
was significantly more accurate than its predecessor, rendering the full extent of the
fenced grounds and depicting the royal cemetery and the paths leading to the mosque’s
entrances (Fig. 15). Texier used this detail to argue that Süleymaniye was buffered from
its direct context, describing the stone fence and line of trees as a double enclosure
that separated the “sacred building from the profane buildings” (cited in Pedone, 2012:
p. 291). Notable, too, was the plan’s accurate representation of the grand central dome.
Texier was one of the first scholars to delineate Süleymaniye’s relationship to Hagia
Sophia and the Byzantine architectural tradition, and thus to the “classical” Ottoman
mosque (Necipoğlu, 2007). His careful depiction of the dome provided visual evidence
of that lineage.
The plan of Süleymaniye included in the Usul-u Mimari-i Osmani (1873) erased the
dome altogether. This erasure indicated a desire to deemphasize the reference to Hagia
Sophia and instead advocate for the “superiority of Ottoman architecture” (Necipoğlu,
2007: p. 144). The next significant drawing of Süleymaniye was by German architect
and art historian Cornelius Gurlitt, published in his Die Baukunst Konstantinopels (1912)
(Fig. 15). The plan captured the mosque, its dome, and the royal cemetery with great
detail, although the grounds were unrepresented. As indicated by the care taken with his

Figure 14
Johann Bernhard Fischer von
Erlach, a plan of Süleymaniye
Mosque from Entwurff Einer
Historischen Architectur, Book 3,
plate 4 (Constantinople)
Source: Fischer von Erlach,
1725. Avery Classics, Avery
Architectural and Fine
Arts Library, Columbia
University

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202 Jamaleddine

Figure 15:
A comparative diagram showing
plans of the Süleymaniye Mosque
Source: Charles Texier
Charles Texier, Plan of Süleymaniye Cornelius Gurlitt, Plan Albert Gabriel, Plan of
(1833), Cornelius Gurlitt
from RIBApix, 1833 of Süleymaniye from Die Plan of Süleymaniye from
(1912), Albert Gabriel (1926),
Baukunst Konstantinopels, Les Mosquées de
assembled by the author
1912 Constantinople, 1926

planimetric depiction, the mosque’s dome gained a new significance in Gurlitt’s analy-
sis; rather than citing Hagia Sophia as a generative influence, he compared Ottoman
architecture to that of the Italian Renaissance (Necipoğlu, 2007).
Albert Gabriel’s plan (1926), following Gurlitt’s, cropped the cemetery and rendered
Süleymaniye’s domes with solid – not dashed – lines, further emphasizing their pri-
macy (Fig. 14). In his text, the plan was followed by a set of linear diagrams dropping
all planimetric detail, representing a series of mosque types classified solely through
their dome support structures. Süleymaniye, along with the Bayezid and Kilic Ali Pasha
Mosques, was classified as type C: “a square hall covered with a central dome that is sup-
ported along the main axis by two semi-domes” (Gabriel, 1926: p. 362). For Gabriel, the
Ottoman mosque was primarily understood through the syntax of its domes, regardless
of the genesis of an individual monument (Fig. 16). This reading was reinforced by the
work of Celâl Esad Arseven, who produced a similar classification system and series of
dome diagrams for his book La̕rt turc: depuis son origine jusquà ̕ nos jours (1939) (Fig. 17).
Commissioned by the emerging Turkish nation, Prost’s 1938 master plan for Istanbul
was heavily shaped by this reductive understanding of the peninsula’s monumental
mosques, derived from his familiarity with the work of Gabriel and his contemporaries.
The influence of Gabriel, a friend and colleague of Prost, was clearly visible in the lat-
ter’s 1943 plan for the “Place Eminonu.” There, the area’s mosques were simply drawn,
with circles outlining their domes and centerlines connecting them to points in the
new square. Further arrows and annotations established the domes of the Sultan Pasha
and Yeni Mosques as brackets framing the view of Süleymaniye, itself foregrounded
by a massive greenspace. The centerlines established the view corridors around which
Prost’s plan was organized (Fig. 18). With attention focused on the mosque domes,
their ground was freed for radical transformation. The “parasitic” buildings adjacent to
the Sultan Pasha and Yeni Mosques were cleared, leaving those mosques, historically

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 203

Figure 16
Albert Gabriel, Dome diagrams
from Les Mosquées de
Constantinople
Source: Gabriel (1926)

Figure 17
Ernest Diez, a typological chart
of the Ottoman mosque, from
Turk Sanati, 1946. After Celâl Esad
Arseven, Dome Diagrams from
La̕rt turc: depuis son origine jusqua
̕nos jours, 1939
Source: Diez (1946)

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204 Jamaleddine

Figure 18
Henri Prost, Place Eminonu
Plan, 1943
Source: Cité de
l’Architecture et du
Patrimoine

nestled within Istanbul’s urban fabric, floating within pocket parks (Gül, 2012). Gabriel,
who frequently wrote favorably on Prost’s work in Istanbul, commended the clear-
ance of Place Eminonu and the resultant uncovering of the Yeni Mosque’s silhouette
(Yildirim, 2012). While Prost’s master plan was only partly realized, it paved the way for
the gigantic boulevards and squares constructed around historical mosques under the
tenure of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in the following decades (Gül, 2012).

7 Conclusion

Throughout the nineteenth century, the plan drawings of mosques produced by Western
scholars became increasingly technical. As they shed the exotic and atmospheric in
favor of “scientific” analysis, they also discarded their representation of mosques’ his-
torical development and connection to their physical environs. By the early-twentieth
century, this planimetric precision, in conjunction with photographic objectification,
was used to classify the mosque into typological, dynastic, and regional historical
schema, facilitating comparative analysis.18 The establishment of those classificatory
schema required the forging of a “doctrine of essentialism” (Evans, 1997) made possible
by diagrammatic readings of the mosque. The erasure of history and regularization vis-
ible in the evolution of the plans of the al-Hakim and Qayrawan Mosques resulted in
those structures’ medievalization. Through graphical urban clearance and decontex-
tualization, the plans of the Ibn Tulun, Sultan Hasan, and Süleymaniye Mosques were
monumentalized, and made into “masterpieces.”
The scholars who produced the canonical survey texts of Islamic architecture were
products of their classical European architectural educations and cultural milieus.
Believing that the mosques they studied possessed intrinsic “pure” forms, they struggled,
through their rigorous drafting techniques, to capture that “truth” – often viewing the
realities of a building as an impediment to their analysis. Prisse D’Avennes, who visited
Ibn Tulun in the 1870s, wrote that its division into small poorhouse dwelling rooms was
“an act of vandalism, hidden under a masque of philanthropy,” and complained that
their presence prevented him from properly drawing the mosque’s plan (D’Avennes,
1869: p. 95).19 Believing this translation from sacred space to poorhouse diminished the
mosque’s status as a monument, he produced a hypothetical plan that expunged evi-
dence of the poorhouse program (Fig. 9). That drawing was soon followed by the Comité’s
actual clearance of the poorhouse from the mosque’s riwaqs (Corbett, 1891).

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 205

The essentialization-through-documentation undertaken by Prisse d’Avennes and

other scholars privileged an idea of “authentic” form and origin over active use. Their
work neatly classified the mosque into a series of “unambiguous” building types, forever
fixed in specific historical periods.20 With the rise of nation-states across the Islamic
world, local actors instrumentalized this knowledge for nationalistic aims. Describing
Jeddah’s Juffali Mosque (1986), designed by Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil and funded by
the Saudi state, architectural historian Kishwar Rizvi argues that even though the
mosque was inspired by local historical precedents, its freestanding state “evokes a
nineteenth-century architectural experience: that of Orientalism, in which ‘Eastern’
architecture would be displayed as decontextualized and detached from human inhabi-
tation” (Rizvi, 2015: pp. 77–8).
The monumentalized plans of these mosques have been widely proliferated through
their inclusion in survey books of Islamic architecture – taught in art history depart-
ments, but also in schools of architecture.21 While the isolated and fixed image of the
mosque that they enshrine is expressive of a particular historical moment, how might
its resonances have continued to impact contemporary mosque design practices?
I argue that the twentieth century offers numerous examples of the effect of this reduc-
tive reading on the relationship between the mosque and its environment: from the
isolation of Kuwait City’s mosques within traffic circles during the urban redevelop-
ment of the 1950s, to the isolation of Mashad’s Imam Reza shrine within a green ring
during the 1970s (Fig. 19), to the unmooring of religious edifices within vast shopping
plazas resulting from the post-civil war reconstruction of downtown Beirut in the 1990s,
to the building of new mosques within traffic islands in contemporary Sharjah (Fig. 20).
The drawing and codification of the masterpieces of Islamic architecture has come at
the detriment of a holistic understanding of their historical development and social
function. The physical operations enacted on many of these buildings mirror earlier
“corrections” enshrined within their plan drawings, affirming the plan’s truthfulness
and propagating that reading through future analyses. The white frame of the page and
the cleared spaces of the city have become two expressions of the same form of isola-
tion, detaching the mosque from its ground.

Figure 19
Michel Ecochard, Mashad Center
Renovation Plan, 1971
Source: Aga Khan
Documentation Center

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206 Jamaleddine

Figure 20
Khan Saheb Mosque, Sharjah,
U.A.E. 2008
Source: Sharjah
Architecture Triennale

About the Author

Jamaleddine is an assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of

Architecture, Planning and Preservation and co-founder of L.E.FT Architects (Beirut/
New York). His writings have been published in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary
Imaginary (2016), The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (2016), and Places
Journal (2020). Among his built projects are the awards-winning Moukhtara Mosque
(2017) and the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices, Vassar
College (2022).

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Notes

1 For example, the archeologist Max Herz was the chief architect of Egypt’s Comité de Conservation des
Monuments de l’Art Arabe from 1890–1914.
2 Lorenz Korn analyzes the inconsistent evolution of the illustrations published in Islamic architecture
surveys as they moved toward a more “exact” depiction, thus providing more “reliable” documentation
of the building. Here, I probe how this desire for exactitude facilitated the identification of the supposed
“original” forms of historical mosques, and consequently, their typological diagrammatization; see Korn
(2021: pp. 171–90).
3 Evan’s argument was informed by his study of historical drawings, including Jean-Nicholas Louis
Durand’s early nineteenth-century work, Précis des leçons d’Architecture; see Sci-Arc Media Archive
(2017) Robin Evans (November 18, 1985) Part 1 of 2. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=4y7s_CRfSzg. In his survey of Roman monuments, Durand modified the plans of his subjects to pro-
duce clearly classifiable types, systematically regularizing them to conform to an applied system of geo-
metric principles. For Durand, see Madrazo (1994: pp. 12–24).
4 Oleg Grabar makes a similar argument by discussing the inability of planimetric drawings to capture
the diachronic form of the Grand Mosque of Isfahan; see Grabar (1990: p. 18). For the “epistemic impor-
tance” of the plan and its use in formally freezing the typological lineage of Selijuk-Beylik-Ottoman
mosques, see Pancaroğlu (2007: p. 68).
5 In his comprehensive study of the Renaissance, Marvin Trachtenberg analyzes Alberti’s regime of
“building-outside-time,” arguing that it and Alberti’s representation of the architect as the sole author
of quickly-built buildings, possessed of immutable design integrity, were formative to notions of the
“perfection” and “coherence” of monumental buildings. Contra Alberti, Trachtenberg articulates a
pre-modern framework of “building-in-time” in which long-duration construction (sometimes unfold-
ing over centuries) denies buildings a formal ideal or absolute origin; see Trachtenberg (2010).

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Drawing the Isolated Mosque 209

6 For Leroy, the modern scholar no longer merely accumulated data but selected and juxtaposed that
information to expose underlying patterns and connections; see Kisacky (2001: p. 272).
7 As art historian Avinoam Shalem observes, this concept of the unity of Islamic art has resulted in
a harmful flattening of disciplinary understandings, obscuring the importance of cultural and tem-
poral specificities and projecting a false framework of comparison. He links this drive to identify a
unified narrative to a fin-de-siecle Western interest in recognizing the “geist” of the Islamic world’s
artistic production; see Shalem (2012: pp. 9–12).
8 Many of Creswell’s incredibly detailed planimetric drawings, such as his color-coded plan of
al-Azhar in The Muslim Architecture of Egypt (1952), carefully explicated the complex chronologies
of frequently altered mosques.
9 Alexandre Lézine’s two drawings of Tunisia’s Mahdiya Mosque, published in his 1965 book, Mahdiya,
Recherches D’Archéologie Islamique, offer an example of this “correction.” Figure 29, “Plan de la
Fouille,” represents the archeological plan as found, including the remnants of a peculiar central
colonnade that bisects the sahn. Figure 30, “Plan de XI siècle,” reconstructs the mosque’s original
plan – erasing the central colonnade. Only Figure 30 is reproduced in survey books.
10 For a discussion of the placement of al-Hakim Mosque, see Hoag (1977: p. 136), in the chapter “The
Classic Islamic Architecture of Egypt: The Fatimids”; Michell (1978: p. 224), the mosque is classified
under “Fatimid and Ayyubid periods”; Behrens-Abouseif (1992: p. 63), in the chapter “Architecture
of the Fatimid Period”; and Ettinghausen et al., (1990: p. 192), in the chapter “Central Islamic Lands:
Part I, The Fatimids in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.”
11 Aliasger Najam Madraswala quotes Hasan Fathy’s descriptions to argue that the “authenticity” pre-
served by the project was one predicated on formal qualities and undertaken with the desire to
adapt the historic structure to contemporary use; see Madraswala (2020: pp. 86–7).
12 Founded in 1881 by Khedive Mohammed Tawfiq, the organization’s mandate to advise on preserva-
tion activities and on the classification of buildings as monuments quickly expanded to include the
implementation of conservation projects; see El-Habashi (2001: pp. 82–8).
13 Digital archive Archnet.org credits this plan to Creswell; however, there is no documentation
to substantiate this connection in Creswell’s archive at the Ashmolean Museum. While Creswell
bequeathed his photographic prints and negatives to the Ashmolean, his drawings were not included
in that gift, leaving their copyright ambiguous and their reproduction difficult to verify.
14 Recent studies have associated Qayrawan’s trapezoidal footprint with models such as the North
African ksour, whose flexibility of form allowed it to adapt to diverse environmental, material, or
terrain conditions; see Apotsos (2016: p. 49).
15 See O’Kane (1999: pp. 157–8); and pointing to the covered spaces of the Great Mosque of al-Mutwakkil,
which “accommodate[d] additional faithful,” Alastair Northedge argues for evidence of construction
occurring within the ziyada (2005: p. 123).
16 Contemporary religious scholarship questions the “religious-secular” binary in conceptualizations
of Islam, for example, see Ahmed (2016: pp. 176–245).
17 Gülru Necipoglu describes the Süleymaniye grounds as accessible to the “general public” (2005:
p. 210).
18 For architecture photography as an art object, see Payne (2017: pp. 99–118).
19 Years later, the Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy echoed this sentiment in his description of the tomb
attached to al-Hakim Mosque. Fathy, a consultant on al-Hakim restoration, characterized the origi-
nal construction of the tomb as “vandalism,” cited in Sanders (2008: p. 13).
20 I reference Thomas Bauer’s use of “unambiguity” or “intolerance to ambiguity,” which he identifies as
central to modern Western understandings of truth. This reaction to the “diversity” and “ambiguity”
of Islamic culture manifests as a search for and representation of a singular “true” building form; see
Bauer (2011: p. 31).
21 On the present-day mobilization of the diagram for typological classification, see Peker (2021: p. 325).

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