Identifier: inmorocco00wharuoft (find matches)
Title: In Morocco
Year: 1920 (1920s)
Authors: Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937
Subjects: Morocco -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York Scribner
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Marra-kech with hasty monuments of which hardly atrace survives. But there, in a nettle-grown cornerof a ruinous quarter, lay hidden till yesterday theChapel of the Tombs: the last emanation of purebeauty of a mysterious, incomplete, forever retro-gressive and yet forever forward-straining people.The Merinid tombs of Fez have fallen; but thoseof their destroyers linger on in precarious grace,like a flower on the edge of a precipice. IV Moroccan architecture, then, is easily divided intofour groups: the fortress, the mosque, the collegiatebuilding and the private house. The kernel of the mosque is always the mihrah,or niche facing toward the Kasbah of Mecca, wherethe imam* stands to say the prayer. This arrange-ment, which enabled as many as possible of thefaithful to kneel facing the mihrah^ results in aground-plan necessarily consisting of long aislesparallel with the wall of the mihrah^ to which more *The deacon or elder of the Moslem religion, which has no order ofpriests. ( 270 1
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Fez—the praying-chapel in the Medersa el Attarine NOTE ON MOROCCAN ARCHITECTURE and more aisles are added as the number of wor-shippers grows. ^Miere there was not space toincrease these lateral aisles they were lengthenedat each end. This tjT)icaI plan is modified in theMoroccan mosques by a wider transverse space,corresponding with the nave of a Christian church,and extending across the mosque from the prayingniche to the principal door. To the right of themihrah is the minhar, the carved pulpit (usually ofcedar-wood incrusted with mother-of-pearl andebony) from which the Koran is read. In someAlgerian and Egyptian mosques (and at Cordova,for instance) the mihrah is enclosed in a sort ofscreen called the maksoura; but in Morocco thismodification of the simpler plan was apparentlynot adopted. The interior construction of the mosque was nodoubt usually affected by the nearness of Romanor Byzantine ruins. M. Saladin points out thatthere seem to be few instances of the use of columnsm

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