The art of the letter and of the building

For a piece of writing or a building, ask what it was used for, who used it and what the surrounding belief or power asked of it. Then place it on a map and a timeline.

Read one building closely. In the record of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, Yeomans describes a stone minaret in four storeys: a square base with an external staircase winding anti-clockwise up to a cylindrical tower, topped by two octagonal shafts and a small ribbed dome ^2 3. Its roots lie in the spiral minarets of Samarra and Abu Dulaf in Iraq ³. Ibn Duqmaq, al-Maqrizi and al-Ya'qubi relate that Ibn Tulun twisted a piece of paper round his finger and ordered his architects to build the minaret in that shape ³. A second story belongs to the same place: Lajin took sanctuary in the abandoned mosque in 1296 after the assassination of Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil and vowed to restore it if he survived to take the throne; he became sultan the following year and kept his vow ³. Ask which of these accounts a stone could confirm, and which only a chronicler could.

Where did the Arabic script come from? The record of Islamic calligraphy reports from the Encyclopaedia of Islam that its origin is unsettled, and that ancient accounts credit legendary persons with the invention ⁴. The opinion that long prevailed derives the script from the Nabataeans of Petra, but specialists in Nabataean deny any resemblance in cursive forms and point to a gap of centuries ⁴. They look instead to scripts of the Christian Arab kingdoms of Lower Mesopotamia around al-Hira, none of which survive, and observe that early Arabic follows the same principles as Syriac ⁴. The record sets the views side by side and decides between them nowhere.

One story says a Coptic builder designed the Mosque of Ibn Tulun. The record gives its source: al-Balawi, a tenth-century historian, tells that the Copt who built the Aqueduct of Basatin also designed the mosque; Ibn Tulun imprisoned him over a fault in the aqueduct, then freed him when he sought a way to build a mosque without columns, and the Copt proposed brick piers ^5 6. Yeomans finds the story very unlikely: in his view Copts took part in the building and gave technical advice, but the design was a Samarran import carried out by many Iraqi builders, and brick piers are a feature of Samarran architecture, not a Coptic influence ^6 2.

The evidence is uneven. For calligraphy, the Encyclopaedia of Islam article calls Arabic palaeography a young discipline with no complete manual, and says that the dating of the ornamental kufic Qur'ans remains fragile and calls for judgement to be suspended until the manuscripts are grouped by families ^7 8 9. For architecture, Yeomans relies on the Arabic sources as modern scholarship transmits them and sets out where scholars disagree on the dating of parts of a building ^10 3 11: Creswell, after the stonework was revealed in 1920, held the minaret to be entirely Lajin's, while Swelim holds that its base was probably built in the Ayyubid period ^3 11.

Behrens-Abouseif argued that a total reconstruction of the minaret would have carried a commemorative inscription ¹¹, while Creswell changed his own view when the stonework was revealed ³. Which kind of evidence would you trust most for dating the tower, a chronicler's story, the stone itself or the absence of an inscription, and what is the strongest objection to your choice?

• Mosque of Ibn Tulun: the minaret and the debate on its date, the stucco, and the stories told about its builder.
• Islamic calligraphy: the scripts from the first century AH to the Ottoman lands, with the encyclopaedia's own warnings about dating.
• The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo: Yeomans's survey of the city's buildings and decorative arts, and the way he sets scholars' disagreements side by side.