orientalcairocit00sladuoft

154 Oriental Cairo
in its simplest form it is merely a bit of the desert walled
in from intruders. You have it in its simplest form in the
mosque of the Mahdi and the Khalifa at Omdurman, now
used as a drill ground. The next step was to give the
worshippers shelter from the merciless sun of Egypt. Instead
of a mere enclosure the mosque became a courtyard surrounded
by colonnades or apses, the eastern recess being
so deepened as to afford shelter wherever the sun might be.
This made the building cruciform, the long arm of the cross
being its head and the other arms frequently being quite
shallow.
When the fashion set in of attaching schools or univer-
sities to mosques, the scholastic buildings were erected in
the angles of the cross and sometimes all round them.
The mosque of Sultan Hassan, the premier mosque of
Islam, is even in its ruin an excellent example of this. It
belongs to the order of mosques which have their court-
yards surrounded by four great arches with apses or shallow
chambers behind ; the Barkukiya and the tomb mosque of
Sultan Kalaun are other notable examples of this style of
architecture. But most of the great old mosques, especially
the larger ones, were surrounded by colonnades instead of
single arches. There was an obvious reason for this : only
the very finest buildings could be given arches of such tremendous
span. The arches of Sultan Hassan's mosque are
almost as large as the arches of St. Peter's or the Basilica
of Constantinc at Rome.
The other type of medresa, or college-mosque, which
replaces these gigantic arches by long colonnades is, as a
rule, far more beautiful. There are many examples of that
in Cairo, El-Azhar (but its colonnade is modern and vulgar),
the mosques of El-Moayyad, El-Merdani, Ibn Tulun, Amr,
and El-Mas, and the Blue Mosque are sufficient to cite,
for they are the glory of Cairo. Sometimes the sanctuary,
which is generally two and a half or five times as deep as
the northern, western, and southern colonnades, is separated
from the courtyards by a vast oaken screen as at El-Moayyad.
Sometimes it has a balustrade, as at the Blue Mosque or