Cairo

Islamic geometry in Cairo.

Cairo holds both ends of the tradition: some of its oldest geometry and some of its densest. The pierced screens of Ibn Tulun were cut in the 870s, when the craft was young; six centuries later the Mamluks buried the city in star-cut stone and inlaid wood. Between them lies most of the story.

FIG. 1 - A star lattice read as a screen, drawn live: the linework alone on a dark ground, the way light passes through a pierced grille.

The screens of Ibn Tulun

The Mosque of Ibn Tulun, built between 876 and 879, is one of the oldest mosques anywhere to survive largely intact, and its window screens are its quiet marvel. Each is a panel of pierced stucco, a lattice of stars and polygons cut so the openings, not the stone, carry the pattern. Several windows hold different star nets. To have geometric screen design this assured this early, generations before the tradition's height, is the reason Ibn Tulun matters to anyone tracing where the craft began.

A screen is a pattern made of light. The studio draws it the way the stone reads it, the linework alone with the fields left open, so the figure above is the grille and the dark is the room beyond.

The Mamluk century

From the mid thirteenth century to 1517 the Mamluk sultans made Cairo the densest geometric city in the world. Their monuments, the Sultan Hassan complex of the 1350s foremost among them, carry marble dados of star-and-cross, mosaic panels and inlaid wooden minbars whose stars run to high point-counts and interlace over and under. Where Ibn Tulun is spare, the Mamluks are maximal, the same underlying method pushed to the edge of what stone and wood can hold.

FIG. 2 - A woven khatam seal in a Mamluk register, the eight-point star interlacing over and under by the parity rule.

Derived, not generated

Whether spare or dense, Cairene geometry is constructed, and the studio keeps it that way: the screen from its star net, the Mamluk seal from the same net woven by a single parity rule. Derived, not generated, from the ninth century to the fifteenth in one city.

CAIRO, IN ONE SENTENCE - the Egyptian tradition from the pierced-stucco screens of Ibn Tulun in the 870s to the star-cut stone and inlaid minbars of the Mamluks, some of the oldest and some of the densest Islamic geometry.

Read on

The seal that weaves itself: how Islamic interlace works How a single symmetry rule settles every over-and-under crossing of the Mamluk seal, and is proved never to contradict itself.

Draw a Cairo screen yourself.

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Common questions

What is Cairene Islamic geometry?

It is the Egyptian strand of the tradition, spanning some of the oldest and some of the richest work. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun, from the 870s, carries pierced-stucco window screens that are among the earliest surviving geometric grilles anywhere. From the thirteenth century the Mamluk sultans covered Cairo in stone dados, marble mosaic and inlaid wooden minbars of dense star geometry, a distinct and highly worked register.

What are the Ibn Tulun screens?

They are the window grilles of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, built between 876 and 879. Each is a panel of pierced stucco, a lattice of stars and polygons cut so that light passes through the geometry, and several carry different star patterns. They are prized because they are so early: geometric screen design already assured, two centuries before the great flowering of the craft.

Where can I see Islamic geometry in Cairo?

In the Mosque of Ibn Tulun for the early screens; in the Mamluk monuments of the old city, above all the Sultan Hassan complex of the 1350s, for stone dados and a famous inlaid minbar; and in the Museum of Islamic Art for woodwork and metalwork. Cairo is one of the best places in the world to read the whole arc of the tradition in one city.