The Bou Inania Madrasa, Fez

Pale marble paving surrounds the courtyard basin. Colorful zellij belongs mainly to the lower walls, beneath carved plaster and wood.

A low basin occupies the middle of the pale stone court, beside seated students and their books.

Small circles of robed students in white caps sit on the paved court with books and Qur'an stands before them, reading and reciting; this is a working madrasa, a college of the religious and legal sciences, caught in a lesson.

A tall minaret rises over the court, its upper shaft carried in carved blind arches and a band of green tilework, the mark of a Marinid congregational mosque; unusually for a college, this madrasa was also a full Friday mosque.

A monumental arched portal opens off the court into the covered prayer hall, its tympanum filled with carved stucco and a crown of stalactite muqarnas, the all-over carved idiom of fourteenth-century Maghribi craft rather than the domes and pencil minarets of the east.

This is a royal madrasa of the Marinid sultans of Fez, endowed by the dynasty to teach and to lodge students and to advertise its piety and patronage; Marinid Fez was one of the great learning-cities of the western Islamic world.

The college stands in the crowded medina of a great inland city of Morocco, in the far Muslim west, the Maghrib al-Aqsa, its architecture distinct from the lands of the Muslim east.

Abu Inan’s Marinid madrasa belongs to the mid-1350s. Its architecture is documented by monument surveys; Ibn Abi Zar’s earlier chronicle is not a direct account of this building.