This paper will discuss the architecture of minarets built during the first centuries of Islam. It has been argued that the earliest minarets were mostly designed for their visual impact and that their function as places for the adhan was a secondary consideration. This paper will argue that the sonic properties of early minarets is a feature entirely neglected by Islamic art historians and is a subject capable of analysis using digital technology. This paper will focus on both the visual and audio qualities of different architectural forms used during the early Islamic period focussing in particular on the examples from Abbasid (ninth century) Iraq.

In a Mosque, the structure from where a call for prayer is performed -generically called minaret- is considered a land marker, a signpost, a symbol of power, a hallmark of empires or of specific religious communities. In this essay, I attempt to investigate how such symbolically charged structures evolve in times of discord; and I take the early medieval minarets of Tunisia as an example. I intend to discuss the presence, absence and evolution through time of the minarets in mosques dating 8th to 11th Century Ifriqiya (Qayrawan, Tunis, Sousse, Mahdiya, Sfax and Jerba). These structures vary in shape, scale, lavishness and position in the mosque. The first goal of this essay is to question these variations and attempt to understand the links between the architectural structure and the context and religious creeds and practices that led to its shaping. The second goal of this essay is to investigate the transformations that occurred to a number of these structures specifically in the 10th and 11th Century (such as in Sfax). The third and main goal of the essay is to explore the eventuality of destructions subjected specifically to Fatimid minarets of Ifriqiya.

The central aisle of the medieval Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez Morocco is decorated with several richly made copper-alloy lamps forged between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries during the Almohad and Merinid dynastic eras. At a closer glance, onlookers entering the mosque will notice that the inner structure of these lamps are medieval Christian bells. The bell was both a practical and symbolic device to summon the faithful to prayer in Christianity, however, was simultaneously considered an inauspicious instrument in medieval Islamic jurisprudential thought and cultural practice. Therefore, the reasons for which the Muslim patrons of these mosque lamps chose to employ Christian bells in symbolic religious art and architecture located in prominent positions within medieval Maghribi mosques, merit further investigation. This paper argues that these Almohad and Merinid bell-lamps and their ornamentation with Christian bells represent an evolving attitude of medieval Muslims towards their understanding of the symbolic meaning and truth claims attached to the ritual of the adhan. Historically, the adhan was introduced in Muslim society as simply an aural device to summon the faithful to gather and pray. Overtime, this daily ritual acquired several additional meanings and functions. Other than simply being considered a pragmatic summoning ritual, this paper argues that when medieval Muslims encountered different religious communities in the lands they conquered, they began to attach triumphalist notions, apotropaic characteristics, and other ideologies to the ritual of the adh?n which corresponded with widely held medieval Near Eastern Christian beliefs regarding the semantron and bell ringing. As a result, the sacred sound of the adhan acquired several “lives” and multi-faceted dimensions in medieval Islamic religious and social thought. The research presented in this paper analyzes key recorded events in early medieval Islamic history which indicate prominent shifts in the ideological evolution of the symbolism and meaning attached to the adhan. In light of these ideological shifts, this paper also discusses how the Christian naqus (semantron and bell) became competitive symbols in the soundscape of conquered cities in the late seventh and eighth centuries. These early factors combined with the geo-political strife between Muslim and Christian societies in medieval Spain, provide an understanding of how and why the Christian bell, an irreverent device in medieval Islamic theology, became used prominently and persistently in the religio-cultural art and architecture of the entire pre-modern Muslim world, and specifically Almohad and Merinid al-Andalus and the Maghrib.