Multifoil arch

[14]: 513–514  Multifoil arches also appear early on as decorative niches in the Qasr al-'Ashiq in Samarra, present-day Iraq, and in the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, Egypt, both of which were built under Abbasid (and Tulunid) rule in the 9th century.

[16]: 87–89  Another scholar, Ignacio Arce, notes that Ettinghausen and Grabar did not take into account the earlier occurrences at the Qasr al-Hallabat mosque, where polylobed arches are used as structural elements.

[18]: 72 The typical multifoil arches that appear in later buildings of Al-Andalus and North Africa also have precedents in Fatimid architecture in Ifriqiya and Egypt, for example at Bab Zuweila (dated to 1091).

Georges Marçais argued that both the Great Mosque of Cordoba and Fatimid architecture in Ifriqiya were probably the most relevant precedents which led to the adoption and development of multifoil arches in the western regions of the Islamic world.

[24] This use of a trefoil arch, typically inside a triangular pediment on the façade of temples, was a characteristic feature of Hindu architecture in Kashmir and the western Himalayan region during this time.

[1][46]: 272  In the Christian territories of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain), the earliest examples are from the early 12th century and found in the Collegiate Church of San Isidoro in Léon and the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

[47]: 105–107 [46]: 272  In Toledo, after its conquest by Castile in 1085, the new churches and synagogues which were built in the 12th century and after were designed in a Mudéjar style that frequently incorporated polylobed arches as part of its visual repertoire.

[46]: 273  The Cathedral of Toledo, whose construction began in the 13th century, was built primarily in a Gothic style but also incorporates polylobed arches (most notably in the triforium of the ambulatory), suggesting that this motif had by then become thoroughly assimilated to local Christian architecture.