Fatimid Great Palaces
In 970, Jawhar was responsible for planning, founding, and constructing a new city to serve as the residence and center of power for the Fatimid caliphs.
Jawhar organized the city so that the caliphal palace complex was at its center, in addition to the main mosque, al-Azhar, to the southeast.
[2] Information about the layout and appearance of these palaces comes from a few written reports, and especially from the chronicles of the Arab historian Maqrizi and of the Persian traveler Nasir Khusraw.
[4][2] It was begun under al-Mu'izz and finished under al-Aziz, although work of various kinds continued for decades, even under al-Hakim and under the vizier al-Ma'mun al-Bata'ihi in the 12th century.
[6] Members of the Isma'ili religious establishment (scholars and clerics) were also housed in or around the palace, which had its own muezzin and thus did not rely on the call to prayer of the al-Azhar Mosque.
Visitors who wrote about the palaces reported marble pavements of different colors, central fountains, gold fixtures and ornamentation, and animals on display to impress guests.
[4] The Golden Hall acted as a throne room where the caliph held his daily audiences and where official receptions and some religious festivals took place.
This was the venue were the Isma'ili clerics and missionaries (da'is) would hold sermons for the palace residents, as well as some of the most important religious festivals.
[4] Attached to the southern end of the eastern palace was a mausoleum known as Turbat al-Za'faraan ("The Saffron Tomb"), which served as the burial site of the caliphs.
[7][9] Jaharkas reportedly disposed of the bones of the Fatimid royal family by throwing them into the rubbish hills east of the city.
[4] Also adjacent to the caliphs' mausoleum was the later 12th-century shrine which allegedly housed the head of al-Husayn, the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib who was slain at the Battle of Karbala in 680 and is revered as a martyr by the Shi'a.
[9][4] Since the Fatimids claimed descent through al-Husayn's mother, Fatima, the creation of this shrine was an important symbolic and religious act.
[4] Caliph al-Hakim (between 996 and 1021) or al-Amir (in 1116)[4] added next to the southern end of the Western Palace an academy known as the Dar al-'ilm (roughly "House of Knowledge/Science").
)[2] The mother of al-'Aziz also built a large palace within al-Qarafa, the vast necropolis and cemetery of the main city of Fustat to the south.
This ended Cairo's status as an exclusive palace-city and started a process by which the city became an economic center inhabited by ordinary Egyptians and frequented by foreign travelers.
The Bayn al-Qasrayn square itself, however, steadily disappeared and became essentially another stretch of the Qasaba street, as construction on either side filled up the previously open space.
[9] Some artifacts and architectural fragments from the Fatimid Great Palaces are now on display in Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art, including wooden panels and beams found in the Maristan complex of Qalawun and in the Madrasa of al-Nasir Muhammad.
