The Bou Inania Madrasa, Fez

The Bou Inania Madrasa at Fez, built around the middle of the fourteenth century under the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris, is among the finest works of the Marinid dynasty that ruled Morocco and much of the Maghrib after the Almohads, and one of the great monuments of the western Islamic architectural tradition. It was a royal madrasa, a college endowed by the sultan to teach the Qur'an, hadith and the religious and legal sciences and to lodge its students; unusually among the madrasas it was also a full congregational mosque, so it carries a minaret banded with green tile, rare for a college. Its court is a masterpiece of Maghribi craft: the floor a black-and-white geometric zellij mosaic, the lower walls a tiled dado, and above them broad bands of deeply carved stucco and screens of finely fretted cedar around the arcades, with a low marble fountain at the centre and a monumental portal opening into the covered prayer hall under a crown of muqarnas. Ibn Abi Zar' al-Fasi in the Rawd al-Qirtas and al-Jaznai in the Zahrat al-As record the Marinid building programme at Fez, and Ibn Khaldun, who knew the Marinid court, places the dynasty and its patronage of learning within the history of the Muslim west; the famous water-clock of the Dar al-Magana, the house of the clock, stood across the narrow lane outside, an emblem of the city's science. Fez under the Marinids was one of the great centres of scholarship in the Muslim west, its colleges and the older Qarawiyyin mosque drawing students from across the Maghrib and al-Andalus. This scene depicts the court in use: small circles of robed students seated on the patterned pavement around the marble basin with their books and Qur'an stands, at their lessons in the finished madrasa, beneath the carved cedar and stucco galleries and the green-banded minaret. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.