The story of Cairo . three acres of ground, gave room forthe largest assembly, whilst the covered arcades offeredshelter from the sun to the ordinary congregation andto the groups of students, ascetics, and beggars whohave always made their home in mosques. Thesouth-east arcade or liivan, with its deeper aisles, wasthe special sanctuary,^ where the mihrah or niche in thewall showed the direction {klhld) of Mekka, towardswhich the prayers of the faithful must turn, and thepulpit (^minbar) and platform [dikka) gave the 1 See Art of the Saracens in Egypt, 54-59. The grilles areprobably of later d
The story of Cairo . three acres of ground, gave room forthe largest assembly, whilst the covered arcades offeredshelter from the sun to the ordinary congregation andto the groups of students, ascetics, and beggars whohave always made their home in mosques. Thesouth-east arcade or liivan, with its deeper aisles, wasthe special sanctuary,^ where the mihrah or niche in thewall showed the direction {klhld) of Mekka, towardswhich the prayers of the faithful must turn, and thepulpit (^minbar) and platform [dikka) gave the 1 See Art of the Saracens in Egypt, 54-59. The grilles areprobably of later date. ^ The litvan of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun has been con-siderably altered since its foundation. The vezir Bedr el-Gemaly made some repairs in 1077, after the injuries in-flicted during the troubles of el-Mustansirs reign ; and hisson the vezir el-Afdal built a mihrah in 1094 : but the chiefrestoration was made in 1296 by the Mamluk Sultan Lagin,whose pulpit still stands in the mosque and bears hi«inscriptions. 80. WITHIN THE MOSQUE OF IBN-TULUN 8i The Faubourgs preacher and the precentors vantage to make theirvoices heard throughout the crowd of far there is nothing original about the form may have been adopted by the Arabs fromancient Semitic temples, or the great court may repre-sent the atrium of the Byzantine basilica and the liwanthe basilica itself, only supported on pillars instead ofvaulted roofs, with a relic of the apse in the concavemihrah ; but it was too obviously suited to the require-ments of the climate to need any curious derivation. The dome and minaret, so characteristic of laterCairo mosques, are here wanting. The odd-lookingcorkscrew tower with external winding staircase, likethe Assyrian ziggurat, has a fellow in the tower ofSamarra on the Tigris, from which it was doubtlesscopied, but the upper part has probably been restored;though the tower of Ibn-Tulun was certainly in existencein 1047, when it is mentioned by Nasir-i-Khusr
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