The Koutoubia of Marrakesh

The Koutoubia, the Mosque of the Booksellers, is the great congregational mosque of Marrakesh and one of the masterworks of the architecture of the Muslim West. It was built in the twelfth century, over two campaigns, by the Almohads, the great Berber dynasty that rose in the mountains of the Maghrib on a movement of religious reform and went on to rule North Africa from Tripoli to the Atlantic and Muslim Spain beyond, with Marrakesh, the city below the snow-capped Atlas that they had taken from the Almoravids, as their capital. The mosque is built in the sober, powerful and disciplined manner of western Islamic architecture, with a wide many-aisled prayer-hall and an arcaded court; but it is famed above all for its minaret, a tall, square tower of warm stone rising high over the city, its faces articulated with broad panels of interlacing blind arches and the net-like lozenge ornament called sebka, and crowned by a smaller lantern-turret and a finial of gilded copper orbs. The Koutoubia minaret is the elder and the model of a famous family of towers: it set the pattern for the Giralda, the minaret of the great mosque of Seville (now the bell-tower of its cathedral), and for the unfinished Hassan Tower of Rabat, and through them for the religious architecture of the whole Maghrib and al-Andalus for centuries to come. It remains the chief landmark of Marrakesh. This scene depicts the Koutoubia mosque and its minaret. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.