Jameh Mosque of Isfahan: Seljuk Domes and the Four-Iwan Plan

The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, the Friday or congregational mosque of the city, is one of the oldest and most important mosques in Iran. Its structure grew over more than a thousand years, but its fame rests on two brick domes built under the Seljuk Turks in 1086–1089 and on a courtyard with four great vaulted halls, the four-iwan plan that became a model for later mosques. UNESCO describes it as a prototype for mosque design across Central Asia.

Early history

Isfahan was an important city long before Islam. A congregational mosque existed by the later eighth century, and in the ninth century, under the Abbasids, it was replaced by a large hypostyle mosque, meaning a hall of many columns around a courtyard. Excavations and study of the brickwork have traced this early plan beneath the later building.

In the tenth century the Buyid dynasty, who ruled western Iran, enlarged the mosque and added further arcades. Isfahan’s importance rose further when the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah made it his principal capital in the 1070s.

The Seljuk domes

The vizier Nizam al-Mulk, the most powerful official of the Seljuk state, ordered a great domed chamber to be built in front of the mihrab, the niche that shows the direction of prayer towards Mecca. Inscriptions date it to the reign of Malik-Shah, and it was built around 1086–1087. With a span of about 15 metres, it was among the largest domes of its time in the Islamic world.

The dome rests on a square chamber. The transition from square to circle is made by squinches, arches set across the corners, which create an octagon and then a sixteen-sided zone below the dome. Built of fine brick with little decoration besides inscriptions, the chamber shows the structural confidence of Seljuk builders.

In 1088–1089 Taj al-Mulk, Nizam al-Mulk’s rival at court, built a smaller dome chamber on the north side of the mosque, outside the old prayer hall. Known as the Gonbad-e Khaki, or brown dome, it is about 10 metres across. Architectural historians admire it for the harmony of its proportions, and some have suggested a link with the mathematical interests of Malik-Shah’s court, where Omar Khayyam worked, though there is no direct evidence of his involvement.

The four-iwan courtyard

Early in the twelfth century, probably after a fire in 1121–1122 that damaged parts of the mosque, the courtyard was rebuilt with four iwans, one in the middle of each side. An iwan is a vaulted hall closed on three sides and open on the fourth, a form with roots in pre-Islamic Iranian palaces.

The Isfahan mosque is one of the earliest dated examples of the four-iwan arrangement in a mosque. The plan spread widely and was used in mosques, madrasas and caravanserais from Anatolia to Central Asia, and later in Iran’s great Safavid mosques.

Reading the building

Visitors today usually enter through the bazaar and step into the great courtyard, about 60 by 70 metres. Each side has an iwan, and the south iwan, the largest, leads to Nizam al-Mulk’s dome chamber and the main mihrab. The rest of the site is filled with hundreds of small domed bays, built in different centuries, each with its own brick pattern.

These small vaults are one of the mosque’s great attractions for historians. Because so many patterns survive side by side, the building works as a catalogue of Iranian brick vaulting from the Seljuk period onwards. Oleg Grabar, whose study of the mosque remains standard, emphasised that it was never planned as a whole but grew by repeated rebuilding and addition.

The two Seljuk domes also carry a political story. Nizam al-Mulk and Taj al-Mulk were bitter rivals at Malik-Shah’s court, and each recorded his name in inscriptions on his own dome. Within a few years of the domes’ completion, Nizam al-Mulk was assassinated in 1092, and Taj al-Mulk was killed by the vizier’s followers in 1093.

Later additions

The building continued to change. In 1310 the Mongol Ilkhanid ruler Oljeitu added a prayer niche of carved stucco in a side hall, one of the masterpieces of its kind. Under the Timurids and the Safavids, glazed tile mosaic and coloured tiles were added to the iwans and courtyard facades, giving them the blue surfaces visitors see today.

The mosque grew to cover more than 20,000 square metres, merging with the surrounding bazaar and streets. It suffered damage in an air raid during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and has since been restored.

Timeline

• 8th century: First congregational mosque on the site.
• 9th century: Abbasid hypostyle mosque built.
• 10th century: Buyid enlargements.
• 1086–1087: South dome chamber built for Nizam al-Mulk.
• 1088–1089: North dome built by Taj al-Mulk.
• c. 1121–1122: Fire damages the mosque; four-iwan courtyard follows.
• 1310: Stucco mihrab of Oljeitu added.
• 2012: Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Why it matters

The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan is a history of Iranian architecture in a single building. Its Seljuk domes and four-iwan court set standards followed for centuries, while later layers record the city’s changing rulers up to the age when Isfahan’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square was built.