The story of Cairo . y arch. Thetransept towards the east, forming the liwan for prayer,is deeper than the other three, and is furnished withmihrab, pulpit, tribune, and other accessories forworship ; since worship takes place there, or may doso, though not as a rule the regular Friday congrega-tions of the gami*. Each of the four transepts was at or near Maks. In short, mesgid would appear to beapplied in the Topographers time chiefly to the earliersuburban chapels, and zawiya to outlying chapels of theMamluk period. 189 The Story of Cairo originally assigned—or ready to be assigned—to oneof
The story of Cairo . y arch. Thetransept towards the east, forming the liwan for prayer,is deeper than the other three, and is furnished withmihrab, pulpit, tribune, and other accessories forworship ; since worship takes place there, or may doso, though not as a rule the regular Friday congrega-tions of the gami*. Each of the four transepts was at or near Maks. In short, mesgid would appear to beapplied in the Topographers time chiefly to the earliersuburban chapels, and zawiya to outlying chapels of theMamluk period. 189 The Story of Cairo originally assigned—or ready to be assigned—to oneof the four orthodox schools, Shafiy, Maliky, Hanafy,and Hanbaly, and in each there might be found agroup of students following the instruction of theprofessor of the particular school. These professorsand students often had lodgings in the college, andthere were also a variety of lecture rooms, libraries,laboratories, and other adjuncts built in the spaces thatintervened between the cruciform interior and the rect-. PLAN OF MEDRESA angular exterior. The subjoined sketch representingthe later medresa of Sultan Hasan (1359) will givea general idea of the arrangement. This then was Saladins method of counteractingheretical tendencies by building and endowing anumber of orthodox colleges—state-supported theo-logical seminaries or divinity schools. The idea wasnot his own : he brought it with him from Syria,where his former sovereign Nur-ed-din had been190 Saladin s Castle zealous in founding similar colleges for Hanafis atDamascus and other cities; and Nur-ed-din himselfonly followed the example of the pattern of the agein Asia, the great Seljuk Sultan Melik Shah, whosevezir, the scarcely less famous Nizam-el-Mulk, thefriend of *Omar Khayyam, had established thesplendid Nizamiya college at Baghdad. The in-troduction of colleges into Egypt, however naturaland inevitable in the pupil of such masters, was littleless than a revolution in culture as well as in archi-tecture. The old
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