The Kutubiyya Minaret of Marrakesh

The Kutubiyya mosque of Marrakesh and its great minaret are the signature monument of the Almohad empire, raised in the later sixth century AH (later twelfth century CE) when Marrakesh was the capital of the Muslim West. The Almohads (al-Muwahhidun, the affirmers of God's oneness) were a Berber religious reform movement that grew in the High Atlas and swept across the Maghrib and into al-Andalus, replacing the Almoravids and building an empire that stretched from Morocco to central Iberia. They were austere reformers, and their architecture matched their temper: grand in scale, restrained in ornament, and unmistakable in its forms. The Kutubiyya, built in two phases under Abd al-Mu'min and his successors and completed in its present form under Ya'qub al-Mansur, is a broad hypostyle mosque of horseshoe and lobed arches dominated by a tall square minaret of red stone and brick. The minaret's upper faces are decorated with the sebka, a net of interlaced lozenge arches, and its summit is crowned by a lantern and a finial of graduated gilded bronze spheres, the jamur. This minaret became the model for the great Almohad towers across the empire, the Giralda of Seville and the unfinished Hassan tower of Rabat being its sisters. The mosque takes its name, Kutubiyya, from the booksellers' market that once stood beside it. Around it Marrakesh was a city of red pisé walls and gardens, set on its plain beneath the snow-capped High Atlas, the southern capital of a Berber empire at its height. The monuments and the dynasty are recorded by the Maghribi historians Ibn Idhari and al-Marrakushi and by Ibn Abi Zar. This scene depicts the Almohad capital: the red square minaret with its sebka lattice and golden finial rising over the hypostyle mosque, the red ramparts of the city, and the white peaks of the Atlas on the horizon, the architecture of the Muslim West at the summit of its power.