Mausoleum Moulay Ismail

Moulay Ismail ruled Morocco from 1672 to 1727 and made Meknes his capital, surrounding it with high walls pierced by great gates¹. UNESCO describes the city as the first great work of the Alawite dynasty¹. His palace complex, the Kasbah, grouped the Dar Kebira, built in 1672-1680, with three other palaces inside two rings of walls⁴. The mausoleum stands south of the palace, near the tomb of Sidi Abd al-Rahman al-Majdub, a 16th-century poet and mystic². Cressier and Touri write that it was built as a mosque in 1703 and remodelled when it received the sultan’s tomb³.

Moulay Ismail, who reigned until 1727, lies in the square main chamber at the centre of the complex². Discover Islamic Art notes that his successors restored the building and that a mihrab opening onto the courtyard and burial rooms was made for prayer; the royal complex also draws visitors for its rich decoration². It lies within the Historic City of Meknes, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1996¹. When Cressier and Touri visited in February 2018 a restoration of the whole monument was under way, and they criticised the matt white wash just applied to two of its reused marble capitals³.

Discover Islamic Art divides the complex into three parts: an entrance hall with annexes, a series of three large trapezoidal courtyards, and the funerary rooms with their own courtyard². It sees a Hispano-Maghrebi layout in which the spaces follow one another in a row, like three rooms of the Rauda in the Alhambra of Granada, decorated with zellij and carved stucco². The entrance hall is a square of 9.88 m, tiled to 1.60 m below a band of carved plaster without inscriptions, with a fountain overflowing into an octagonal basin². The walls of the first courtyard rise to 9 m; the third has facing porticoes on its east and west sides, a deep round pool, a mihrab in the east portico and a minaret in its south-west corner².

Much of the marble is reused³. Cressier and Touri identified Saadian white marble capitals of two types: two in the arcade between the funerary hall and a side room, probably a library, and ten in the portico of the patio in front of the hall³. Two capitals in that portico, set symmetrically facing the mihrab, were imported from Italy, where Moulay Ismail obtained ready-cut marble columns and capitals³. The same authors recall that most capitals of the Saadian Badi palace in Marrakesh were taken to Meknes when the sultan stripped it of its decoration for his own palaces³.

The funerary rooms open off a square patio surrounded by porticoes 1.87 m deep, carried on groups of three marble columns, with a marble basin at its centre². The capitals vary; Discover Islamic Art classes as Hispano-Maghrebi those with a cylindrical lower part bearing a double row of leaves under a heavy block engraved with palms and palmettes². Beyond the patio lie three rooms: an oblong antechamber hung with bronze chandeliers, the square main room with the tomb of Moulay Ismail, and an oblong room with book cabinets². The columns of the patio are 2.36-2.40 m high³.