The minaret

A minaret is a tower built at a mosque so that the muezzin can climb it and give the call to prayer from above. According to the sources, the first to build one was Maslama ibn Mukhallad al-Ansari, governor of Egypt for Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan. He enlarged the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As at Fustat "and gave it minarets, and there were none before that" ¹. In the year 53 AH he then had the people of Egypt build minarets for their mosques, and the minaret was built with his name written on it ². Yeomans dates this to 673 CE and describes these first minarets as towers at the corners of the mosque, rising only a little above its roof ³.

It is a piece of architecture, not a machine or a tool. As the sources describe them, the first minarets had three features:

• Towers at the corners of the mosque, rising only slightly above the roof-line ³.
• They were climbed by staircases on the outside ³.
• Their purpose was for the muezzin to climb them for the call; Shurahbil ibn Amir was the first to climb the minaret of Egypt for the call ¹.

The word comes from Arabic "manara", a place where light or fire appears; in some lands it is also called "mi'dhana", the place of the call ⁴.

Amr ibn al-As built his mosque at Fustat in 641–642, fifty cubits by thirty, of mud-brick and palm trunks, much like the first Prophet's Mosque. It had no minaret and no courtyard, and its floor was covered with pebbles ³.

In the Prophet ﷺ's time there was a place on the qibla side of the Prophet's Mosque called the "ustuwana", which Bilal climbed by a rope to give the call. It can be seen as the first form of the minaret; high places around the mosque were used too ⁵. When Egypt was conquered, the call was given only at the congregational mosque. The first to head its muezzins was Abu Muslim Salim ibn Amir al-Muradi, who had given the call for Umar ibn al-Khattab (may God be pleased with him) and came to Egypt with Amr as his muezzin; Amr put nine men with him, and he made the tenth. After him his brother Shurahbil ibn Amir headed them ¹.

Mu'awiya gave Maslama ibn Mukhallad both Egypt and the Maghrib, the first to hold the two together, and he governed them into the reign of Yazid ⁶. The Muslims had grown in number, and Maslama enlarged the congregational mosque that Amr had built ². Yeomans says he enlarged it on Mu'awiya's orders, to hold the whole Muslim population, and added the corner minarets ³.

In the year 53 AH he then made the people of Egypt build minarets for their mosques. His name was written on the minaret. He spared Khawlan from this, because he was related to them by marriage ⁷. Al-Maqrizi reports that when the mosques where the Friday sermon was given had multiplied, Maslama ordered minarets for all the mosques except those of Tujib and Khawlan ⁸.

Al-Maqrizi also tells how Maslama once went into retreat in the minaret of the mosque and heard church bells ringing loudly in Fustat. He complained of it to Shurahbil ibn Amir, who said he would draw out the call from midnight until close to dawn. Maslama then forbade the bells to be rung at the time of the call, and Shurahbil drew out the call through most of the night until he died in the year 65 ⁹.

Maslama ibn Mukhallad ibn al-Samit al-Ansari al-Khazraji, also called al-Zuraqi, Abu Sa'id. Ibn Hajar gives him entry 8248 in al-Isaba. Ibn al-Sakan, Abu Nu'aym and others count him among the Companions; he was born when the Prophet came to Medina and was ten when the Prophet died. He governed Egypt and the Maghrib for Mu'awiya and died in Egypt in the year 62. Ibn Hajar quotes Ibn al-Sakan: "he was the first to set the building of minarets on the people of Egypt" ⁶.

The sources say that he ordered the minarets and made people build them; they do not name the builders. His role is therefore recorded here as the one who commissioned them, not as the builder ².

The idea is to raise the voice. The muezzin climbs the tower by its stairs and gives the call from above the roof of the mosque, so his voice carries further than it would from the ground ³.

In Fustat the call took on an order: the muezzins of the congregational mosque called first, and when they had finished every muezzin in Fustat called at the same moment, with a great roar ⁸. The diagram on this page shows what the minaret was built on and what was built on it, as the sources tell it, and nothing more.

The spread began in Egypt itself: Maslama ordered minarets for all the mosques of Egypt except those of Tujib and Khawlan ⁸. Minarets were then built of stone, brick and wood: stone in Spain and Egypt, brick in North Africa, stone and brick in Arabia, Syria and Anatolia ⁵. From North Africa and al-Andalus to Syria, minarets became square towers of several storeys; in the east they were mostly round and slender ⁵.

• Bilal's ustuwana in the Prophet's Mosque, the place he climbed for the call, which the TDV encyclopedia treats as the first form of the minaret ⁵.
• The corner towers of the old temple enclosure at Damascus. Yeomans reports Creswell's view that Maslama's corner minarets were probably modelled on them; they formed the outer walls of the Great Mosque at Damascus ³.
• Watch, signal and lighthouse towers. The encyclopedia records differing views that trace the minaret to the signal towers of Central Asia and Iran, the watch and bell towers of Syria, the lighthouses of the Mediterranean or the victory monuments of India ⁴. These are views on where the form came from, not a line the sources draw to Maslama.

• The minarets of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus (705–714). When the churches of Syria became mosques their bell towers became minarets, and square minarets appeared under the Umayyads; the lower parts of the mosque's two southern minarets belonged to the Church of St John ¹⁰.
• The minaret of the Great Mosque of Qayrawan (105 AH / 724 CE), three storeys and 31.5 metres high, the oldest in the Maghrib ¹⁰.
• The minaret of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, square in its first storey, round in its second and octagonal in a third added later; it influenced the arts of Spain and the Maghrib ¹⁰.
• The classical Ottoman minarets. The minaret reached its most mature form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ⁵.

The call to prayer gained a fixed, built place above the mosque, where before it had been given from a pillar or a nearby roof ⁵. In Fustat the call now began at the congregational mosque, and every mosque in the city answered it at the same moment ⁸.

The minaret became the most characteristic feature of the mosque, and it is found on madrasas, tombs and Sufi lodges too ¹¹. It spread through Syria, the Maghrib, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, Anatolia and India in square, round and octagonal forms ¹². Creswell, as Yeomans reports, calls Maslama's minarets the first recorded reference to building minarets ³.

The sources read do not disagree about Maslama's priority:

• Ibn Abd al-Hakam, in Futuh Misr, dates Maslama's order to build minarets to the year 53 ².
• Al-Maqrizi says he gave the mosque minarets "and there were none before that" ¹.
• Ibn Hajar quotes Ibn al-Sakan: he was "the first to set the building of minarets on the people of Egypt" ⁶.
• Creswell, as Yeomans reports, treats it as the first recorded reference to building minarets ³, and the TDV encyclopedia says Maslama was the first to add a minaret to a mosque ⁵.

Bilal's ustuwana and the high places before it were places for the call, not towers built for it ⁵. Maslama's part was to order the building; the sources do not name the builders.

A minaret today is a tower that rises from a base, through a shaft, to one or more balconies where the muezzin walks round to call, and ends in a conical cap with a finial ¹³. The tallest known minaret in the Islamic world is that of the Emir Abdelkader Mosque in Algeria, built in 1971, at 107 metres ¹⁰.

Maslama's own minarets do not survive. Abd al-Aziz ibn Marwan pulled down the mosque and rebuilt it in the year 77, and Qurra ibn Sharik pulled it down entirely and built it anew under the caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik, around the year 90 ¹⁴.

The mosque itself still stands. The picture on this page shows its wall and one of its later minarets in 2011; it is not Maslama's minaret ¹⁵.

The sources read give Maslama's minarets no place in literature or art beyond the story of his retreat in the minaret and Shurahbil's call ¹. Anything a source confirms will be added.

About fourteen hundred years ago, the muezzin climbed a pillar or a roof so that people could hear the call to prayer.

Then Maslama ibn Mukhallad, the governor of Egypt, built small towers at the corners of the Mosque of Amr in Fustat for the muezzin to climb. Every minaret you see today comes from those towers ³.

• Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr wa-l-Maghrib, ed. Abd al-Mun'im Amir, pp. 178–179 ("The enlargement of the congregational mosque"). ⁷
• Al-Maqrizi, al-Mawa'iz wa-l-i'tibar bi-dhikr al-khitat wa-l-athar, 1998 edition, scan pp. 1996–1997. ⁹
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Isaba fi tamyiz al-sahaba, al-Maktaba al-Asriyya, p. 1413 (Maslama ibn Mukhallad, no. 8248). ⁶
• Richard Yeomans, The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo, p. 20. ³
• Filiz Gündüz, "MİNARE", TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, online edition. ⁵
• Wikimedia Commons, photograph of the wall and minaret of the Mosque of Amr, 2011. ¹⁵