The “Fatimid” Doors Of The Fakahani Mosque In Cairo

Abstract

In 1969, soon after he had arrived at Harvard's Fine Arts Department, Oleg Grabar presented a paper at the international colloquium celebrating the millennium of Cairo in which he proposed a new and provocative explanation for the prominence of figurai iconography in Fatimid art.1 Following the publication of the article three years later, in the fall of 1975 he conducted a graduate seminar on the art of the Fatimids and two years after that published a reassessment of Fatimid art.2 Several of the students in that seminar, myself included, went on to work further on the subject of Fatimid art and architecture, and five years later, after extensive travel around the Mediterranean, I presented a dissertation on early Fatimid art in North Africa and Egypt.3 Its scope (I covered only the years before 400 AH) was limited principally by Professor Grabar's insis tence that I finish writing quickly and get my degree. Otherwise, he feared my project might continue for many more years, if not decades. In the following years I published several articles on various aspects of Fatimid art, some of them extracted from chapters in my dissertation and some of them representing new work, but I never felt that the dissertation itself was worthy of publication.4 Professor Grabar himself returned occasionally to the subject of Fatimid art and dealt with it somewhat uneasily in the revised edition of Islamic Art and Archi tecture: 600-1250, the Pelican History of Art volume he had coauthored with Richard Ettinghausen and revised with Marilyn Jenkins-Madina.5 The authors had a problem with Fatimid architecture and art, which straddles almost all the categories they had established for early Islamic art (i.e., architecture/decorative art, early/late, east/west). They placed most but not all of it under the rubric Islamic Art of the Cen tral Islamic Lands, noting in their preface, To these organizational divisions we made one partial exception. The rich and brilliant period of the Fatim ids (909-1171) could not, we felt, be cut into separate temporal or regional components in order to fit into our broad order of Islamic history. It belongs to the Muslim west as well as to the area of the central lands and it flourished during a period covered by both of our broad categories. We ended by putting most of its art in the Medieval Islamic section and in the central lands for reasons that will be explained in due course, but some early Fatimid objects are discussed under western Islamic lands in the earlier period. This is, no doubt, a shaky accommodation to a reluctant history.6 I myself, after many years exploring other aspects of Islamic art, have recently returned to the art and architecture of the Fatimids in a book that attempts to finish what I had begun several decades earlier.7 One of my conclusions is that the medium of fine woodwork, which scholars have often overlooked, is remarkably important throughout the Fatimid period, with literally dozens of dated or datable examples that document the evolution of styles of writing, carving, and decoration in religious and secular milieux. (A notable exception to the overall scholarly inattention to this medium is the survey by Ettinghausen, Grabar, and Jenkins-Madina, who discuss and illustrate sev eral examples of Fatimid woodwork.8) Just when I had nearly finished the typescript of my book, I was asked by the Nederlands-Vlaams Instituut in Cairo (NVIC) to consult on a Getty Foundation-funded project con cerning the advisability of restoring the al-Fakahani (Fruitsellers') Mosque. This apparently Ottoman-era mosque has two pairs of Fatimid-style wooden doors, presumably dating from an earlier Fatimid mosque on the site. These had already been noted by such scholars as Max van Berchem and K. A. C. Creswell.9 Over a century ago van Berchem declared that the building was enti?rement restaur?e ? l'?poque turque et n'offre d'autre int?r?t arch?ologique que la date de sa fondation,10 while Creswell reported that the two sets of doors were decorated with good crisp Arabesque carving of the Fatimide period, and may well be the original ones.11 A close reexamination of the doors sheds surprising light not only on a lost