Creswell and the Origins of the Minaret

JONATHAN M . BLOOM CRESWELL AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MINARET K . A. C. Creswell's articles on th e origin and the devel develop ed regional minaret typ es. In Egypt and Syria, opme nt of the minaret, whic h appeared in 1926, were an Creswell derived a new th eory for the formal devel early product ofhis characteristic method of arra nging opment of the M amluk minaret, determining that th e buildings and texts in precise ch ronological order to un typical minaret had a squa re sh aft supporting a finial derstand th e evolution of a building typ e.I H e was dome resting on an octagon, eac h story separated by brought to write about th e minaret because th e subject stalacti te corn ices. Over tim e, th e squa re shaft became had been surrounded by decades of misunderstanding increasingly elongated and th e dome increasingly elab and confusion.? orate. Eventuall y, th e square shaft atrophied to leave C reswell believed that th e fun ction al core of the min octagon al minarets surmo unted by sm all lanterns, aret was th e adhan, or call to prayer. The first Muslims whi ch became popular under th e influ enc e ofthe octa came to pray witho ut any preliminary call, but " having gonal minarets that were relati vely commo n in th e east heard that theJ ews used a ho rn and th e Christians a na ern lands oflslam in th e period before th e Mongoi con qus or cla pper, th ey wa nted something equiva lent for quest. Creswell' s conclusion is worth repeating: " By th eir own use." " One ofthe Prophet's Compan ions sug merely arranging our material in st rict chronologica l ges ted using th e human voice , and afte r some deliber order , we are brough t to a concl usion ... that th e octa ation the Prophet agreed an d ordered his herald to call gon al type of minaret ca me from Syria to Egy pt and th at th e peo ple to prayer. T he earliest mos ques lacked mina in its evolution th e Ph aros played no part. "! That the rets, for at first, th e adhan was chanted from city walls ninth-century helicoidal minarets ofSamarra and ofthe or from the roofs ofmos q ues or ot her buildi ngs. mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo derived from ziggurats T he idea ofa minaret first arose under th e U mayyad was self-evide nt, H ad Creswell's interes ts carried hirn dynasty in Syria, where M uslims first came in con tact beyond the tenth century in the eas tern Islamic world, with Syrian church towers, which th ey ado pted and he would have undoubtedly related the circular mina spread th rou ghout th e lands th ey conq uered. In 673, rets oflra n to ancient or Indian sources and th e slende r four saiodmt: (sg. ~awma(a) were erec ted on th e roof of th e minarets of Ottom an architec ture to Iranian prece mosque in Fustat by th e Umayyad govern or of Egy pt. dents. Creswell identified th em as th e first minarets built as O ver th e following decad es Creswell repeated his such in Islam. As th e Umayyad ca liphs rul ed from Da th eories and amplified his conclusions in Early Muslim mascus, wh ere th e mosque retained four squat corner Architecture and The Muslim A rchitectureof Egypt.5 His me towers from th e pre-I slamic temple enclosure, Creswell ticulous method and magisterial voice ens ure d th at his presumed th e Fustat deed was inspi red by a Damascene statem ents would be widely accepted. Even th e discov precedent, for he believed th at the mu ezzins th ere mu st eries of recent decad es have brought only minor mod have used th e four towers left over from th e ea rlier tem ificat ions." For exa mple, C reswell believed th e frees ple enclos ure. His hypoth esis was apparently confirmed tanding tower at Q asr al-Hayr East to be th e " third by the U mayyad construction offour corne r towe rs at oldes t exis ting minaret in Isl am," but excavation ofthe th e mosque of Medina during th eir renovation of th e site reveal ed th e tower to date no ea rlier than th e thir build ing in th e first decade ofthe eighth cent ury. C res teenth cent ury.' Altho ugh Creswell included many Ira well believed that these ea rly minarets were called satu- nian and eastern Islamic minarets in his original art i ma:« because th ey were likened to the small square cells cles, th ey were eliminated from fur ther consid eration in used by the C hristian mo nks ofSyria. Sq ua re minarets his la ter volumes by his increasing focus on Arab and followed Umayyad expansion in to North Africa and Egyptian architec ture. Most scho lars dealing with the Sp ain, where minarets continued to be square towers minaret in eas tern Islamic lands realized that Cres known as saunna:« throughout med ieval times. well's work did not answer man y of th eir questi ons; Coming in contact with other tower traditions, Islam while some proposed alternative solutions, others tried , 56 JON ATHANM. BLOOM with varying success, to reconcile their theories with built assuchin Islamwere for th e mosque of 'Amr in Fus Creswell's ." tat, a minor victory." Creswell's sober and logical investigation of the his Creswell's apparently exha ustive history ofthe min a tory of the minaret mu st be understood in the context of ret nevertheless neglected several important qu estions. several decades of wild speculation about the origins If the first mosques to have had min arets, such as the and meaning of this most distinctive Islamic building mosque of(Amr at Fu stat, had multiple minarets, why type. Not surprisingl y, classi cists such as A.]. Butler then did most later mosques, especially those ofAbba and H. Thiersch had seen the origins of the min aret in sid tim es, which followed immediately thereafter, have either antique lighthouses, particularly the Pharos of onl y one? Why did som e mosques, such as the Umay Alexandria, or in commemorative colurnns." Philolo yad Mosque of Medina, ha ve four minarets, while gists , such as R. Hartmann and R. J. H. Gottheil found others, such as th e contemporary mosque surrounding the origins ofthe minaret (Arabic manära) in the use of the Ka -bain Mecca, had none? Was the number of'min fire (när) signals by th e ancient Semites, and they de arets a mosque might have entirely arbitrary? Why did rived its form from th e ziggurats of the ancient Near most early Fatimid mosques lack minarets, but why did East.!" The most farfetched hypotheses were thos e pro the mosque ofal-Hakim in Cairo have two? posed by the art historiansJ. Strzygowski , E. Diez, and Intrigued by these and other qu estions, I was led to G. T. Rivoira. The first two likened minarets to Central reexamine the history and development ofthe min aret. Asian pillars ofthe uni verse and derived them from an My work has brought me to conclusions quite different cient Indo-Aryan practices, such as the pin e trunks from Creswell 's, but I have been consistently impressed which the Nagas of the Himalayan valleys erected in by Creswell 's careful and logical ana lysis, which was front ofth eir wood en temples to symbolize the deity and conceptually bas ed on the work of the " perfeet friend the ma ypole (maibaum) of the western Ary ans.!' Rivoira and perfeet scholar," the noted Swiss Arabist and epig proposed that th e charac teristic Mamluk minaret de rapher Max van Berchern.l" Van Berch em himselfhad rived from the " no less bizarre forms" found in Indian written about the min aret in his study of the Arabic in architecture of the eighth to thirteen th centuries.'? scriptions of Egypt. " He stated that in order to under Creswell's explanation ofthe origin and development stand the minaret one had to ana lyze the problem's of the minaret must also be understood in terms of the philologieal, functional, and form al components log contemporary understanding of Islam and Islamic ar ically, rather than haphazardly as most earlier scholars chitecture. Belief that the min aret was invented in the had done. By accepting van Berchem's analysis, how Umayyad period reaffirmed a concept of a monolithic ever , Creswell hirnselfmad e three inadvertent assump Islam , whos e normative institutions were introduced at tions about minarets, which, paradoxically, were also a relat ively early date. It also confirmed Creswell's be philologieal, functional, and formal. liefthat no significant architecture existed in Arabia be Philologically, he and virtually all his contemporaries fore Islam to have had any appreciable impact on the believed that the three Arabic terms used for towers at course of Islamic architecture. Rather, the form ative tached to mosques - manär(a), mi'dhana, and saioma:a moment in Islamic architecture was in Umayyad Syria, - were and had always been synonyms. He believed particularly the construction of the Great Mosque of that in an y Arabic or Persian inscription or text, these Damascus . There, Islamic architecture grew directly terms meant "tower" ; use of one or another indicated out of the lat e antique and early Christian architecture only geographieal, not form al or functional, differences.

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