The Malwiya at Samarra

A vast new city laid out on the east bank of a great river on a flat alluvial plain in northern Mesopotamia. The river, the Tigris, is broad and green; the city stretches northward along its bank for many farsakhs in a planned ribbon of palaces, residential quarters, and cantonments. There is no older city beneath: this is a city of the Caliph's command, founded barely twenty years earlier.

At the centre of the scene, an enormous rectangular precinct of fired brick rises from the plain, the largest mosque ever built in the Islamic world to its date, and one of the largest of all time. The outer walls are an unbroken expanse of dressed brick, articulated with semi-circular bastion-towers at regular intervals, enclosing an inner sahn and a vast hypostyle prayer hall on hundreds of brick piers.

To the north of the precinct, set on its own platform connected to the mosque by a stone causeway, rises a spiral minaret of unprecedented form, the Malwiya, the 'snail-shell', a great helical brick tower, 52 metres tall, with a continuous external ramp winding five times around it to the summit. The form has no precedent in the prior Sunni mosque tradition; it is an Abbasid invention of monumental brick.

The city is Surra Man Ra'a, 'He Who Sees It is Delighted', the new Abbasid capital founded by the Caliph al-Mu'tasim (rahimahu Allah) in 221 AH (836 CE) to house the Turkic and Khurasani regiments. The Caliph al-Mutawakkil 'ala Allah (rahimahu Allah), eighth Abbasid caliph, has now commissioned in 234 AH (848-849 CE) the great congregational mosque to serve the city; the work is nearing completion in 241 AH (855-856 CE), the date preserved by Sunni historical tradition.

Below the great helix, brick masons and labourers organise the final courses of the precinct wall; carts bring bricks from the kilns on the river bank; foremen in plain Abbasid dress consult plans on parchment. The workforce is the disciplined imperial workforce of the Abbasid caliphate at the height of its institutional reach.

The scale is the public sign of the Abbasid caliphate as the patron of Sunni Islam at the height of its imperial reach. The Caliph al-Mutawakkil (rahimahu Allah) is the Abbasid caliph remembered in the Sunni tradition for restoring the Sunni position after the mihna, the trial over the createdness of the Qur'an, and for returning patronage to the Ahl al-Hadith of Baghdad, the Sunni traditionists led by Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (rahimahu Allah). The great mosque is the public monument of that Sunni restoration.

The light is the high silver light of central Mesopotamia in spring. The horizon is flat in every direction except along the river, where date palms and irrigated gardens give a thin green band. The Malwiya is the highest structure for a hundred miles.

The construction of the Great Mosque of Samarra and its Malwiya minaret is preserved in the Sunni historical tradition (al-Tabari's Tarikh, al-Ya'qubi's Kitab al-Buldan, used here for topographical detail only, al-Mas'udi, Ibn Kathir). The construction date 234-241 AH and the patron are firm; the architectural form is preserved in the standing fabric of the Malwiya itself.

al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa-al-Muluk (early 10th c.): The principal early Sunni historical narrative. al-Tabari was himself a resident of Baghdad in the years following the Samarra period and the dating of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil's (rahimahu Allah) commissioning of the mosque (234 AH) and the political context of the Sunni restoration after the mihna is preserved in his Tarikh.

Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya (14th c.): Standard Sunni history. Synthesises the construction with the broader account of the reign of al-Mutawakkil (rahimahu Allah), his ending of the mihna, and his patronage of the Ahl al-Hadith.

Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh (early 13th c.): Sunni historical synthesis. Used for the broader Abbasid chronology and the Samarra period.

al-Dhahabi, Tarikh al-Islam (14th c.): Major Sunni historian and hadith critic. The biographical entry on al-Mutawakkil (rahimahu Allah) preserves the Sunni reverence for him as the reviver of the Sunna and the ender of the mihna.