The Badinjk Mosque, Aleppo

A mosque outside the walls, in the quarter it named and on the lane inside that quarter it also named. The plan is odd and it sticks: through the door you do not reach a courtyard but a corridor that turns a right angle, and the minaret stands directly over that corridor.

When it was built

In the middle of the 11th century of the Hijri calendar, that is the middle of the 17th century. Yaqub ibn Yaghmur endowed it; his name is cut into the lintel stone over the door of the prayer hall. Dhikr gatherings were held here later on: Shaykh Said ibn Abd al-Wahid al-Nabhani, who died in 1250 of the Hijri calendar, that is 1834, led them in the Qadiri manner and came to be known as al-Badinjki after the mosque.

Getting there

In one of the quarters east of Bab al-Nayrab. The lane carries the name of the mosque, so once you are in the quarter, asking is enough.

From the door to the court

The entrance is on the west front. To its right, on the south side, there is a public fountain, but it no longer runs. The door lets you into a corridor bent into an L, roofed first by a cross vault and then by a longer barrel vault. The minaret sits on top of it: octagonal, stone, and old in its lower shaft. The gallery, the canopy and the eight columns carrying them are modern reinforced concrete.

What was in the court

The court was square, ten and a half metres to a side. A basin stood in the middle of it, fed by the overflow of the Qastal Ali Bey. In front of the east wall there was a well; the well has been closed, but the wrought-iron bracket that carried the bucket pulley still hangs where it was.

What to see in the prayer hall

The eastern half of the hall is the original part: square in plan, bounded on four sides by pointed arches and covered by a dome with no drum. The square turns into a circle first through inverted pyramidal triangles and then through diamond forms. In the middle of the south wall there is a hollowed stone mihrab, and the large pointed arch above it is worked in muqarnas, its field filled with interlaced foliage.

Where the founder lies

Yaqub ibn Yaghmur is buried in a room west of the prayer hall. For a long time the roof of that room had fallen in, and the grave was seen through an opening cut from the hall. When the hall was widened westward in 1358 of the Hijri calendar, that is 1939, the tomb room was taken inside; the grave is now part of the prayer hall.

Don’t miss

The iron pulley bracket of the well. The well is shut and has no use left, but nobody took the wrought-iron piece down; it is the one solid thing surviving from the years when the court ran on water.

How it stands now

The porticoes in front of the prayer hall were built in 1358 of the Hijri calendar, that is 1939, and the mosque was repaired in 2009, when the west front was re-clad in yellow stone. The page carries no coordinates: only one independent source places the building, no second one turned up, and a wrong pin is worse than none.