[Illustration: From a photograph from the
Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc
Fez—Medersa Bouanyana]
In the thirteenth century, with the coming of the
Merinids, Moroccan architecture grew more delicate,
more luxurious, and perhaps also more peculiarly itself.
That interaction of Spanish and Arab art which produced
the style known as Moorish reached, on the African
side of the Straits, its greatest completeness in
Morocco. It was under the Merinids that Moorish
art grew into full beauty in Spain, and under the Merinids
that Fez rebuilt the mosque Kairouiyin and that of
the Andalusians, and created six of its nine Medersas,
the most perfect surviving buildings of that unique
moment of sober elegance and dignity.
The Cherifian dynasties brought with them a decline
in taste. A crude desire for immediate effect,
and the tendency toward a more barbaric luxury, resulted
in the piling up of frail palaces as impermanent as
tents. Yet a last flower grew from the deformed
and dying trunk of the old Empire. The Saadian
Sultan who invaded the Soudan and came back laden
with gold and treasure from the great black city of
Timbuctoo covered Marrakech with hasty monuments of
which hardly a trace survives. But there, in
a nettle-grown corner of a ruinous quarter, lay hidden
till yesterday the Chapel of the Tombs: the last
emanation of pure beauty of a mysterious, incomplete,
forever retrogressive and yet forever forward-straining
people. The Merinid tombs of Fez have fallen;
but those of their destroyers linger on in precarious
grace, like a flower on the edge of a precipice.
Moroccan architecture, then, is easily divided into
four groups: the fortress, the mosque, the collegiate
building and the private house.
The kernel of the mosque is always the mihrab,
or niche facing toward the Kasbah of Mecca, where
the imam[A] stands to say the prayer. This
arrangement, which enabled as many as possible of the
faithful to kneel facing the mihrab, results
in a ground-plan necessarily consisting of long aisles
parallel with the wall of the mihrab, to which
more and more aisles are added as the number of worshippers
grows. Where there was not space to increase
these lateral aisles they were lengthened at each
end. This typical plan is modified in the Moroccan
mosques by a wider transverse space, corresponding
with the nave of a Christian church, and extending
across the mosque from the praying niche to the principal
door. To the right of the mihrab is the
minbar, the carved pulpit (usually of cedar-wood
incrusted with mother-of-pearl and ebony) from which
the Koran is read. In some Algerian and Egyptian
mosques (and at Cordova, for instance) the mihrab
is enclosed in a sort of screen called the maksoura;
but in Morocco this modification of the simpler plan
was apparently not adopted.
