Islamic architecture - count ..

In the main wadis, houses are generally built with tall sloping walls of mud-plastered mud-brick on foundations of stone boUlc3ers; their beams and lintels are of local or imported wood, often shaped and sawn.

Shibam. The central square in front of the Friday mosque (right), surrounded by tower houses.

The houses in Wadi Hadramawt are generally more than two storeys high, the main reason probably being the continuous tribal warfare and the threat of raids that formed the normal background of life from time immemorial. A second factor was the need to build on rocky slopes or outcrops due partly to insecurity and partly to the desire to keep the valuable agricultural land free of buildings; a sloping site made it difficult to erect a large spreading plan, and easier to build upwards. Once the basic concept of a building form like the tower house had become .the established pattern in such a conservative society, it tended to persist even when some of the original factors which produced it had ceased to be important. Thus throughout the wadi, even today, most new houses are still being built in this traditional form.

The houses

Houses on the north-east corner of the old city of Shibam, towering over the surrounding date-palm plantations.

had many planning features in common. There was usually only one outside door, opening into a central passage flanked by almost windowless storerooms or stalls for animals oats and sheep were often kept on the floor above); this passage ended in a staircase leading upwards. In the tall houses of the wadi The first habitable rooms were usually on the third floor; these were reserved for the business and social activities of the men, and for receiving strangers. The private rooms, lived in throughout the day by women and children, began above. At this level there commenced a series of roof terraces opening from the larger rooms, so that the floor area of a house was gradually reduced as it neared the top. Although they all had these features in common, the character and design of houses varied slightly throughout Hadramawt; they have also changed in small ways within the last few hundred years.

At the western end of the wadi, as far as Qatn, and up Wadis Amd, al-Ain and Daw'an, houses were generally mud-coloured, with whitewash decoration around windows and doors, and white filigreed parapets and finials against the sky. The window- frames and shutters were usually painted red. Internally, the passages were plastered with light-brown mud and straw, although the interiors of rich houses were painted white. The floors and sometimes the walls were ribbed with designs of waving lines scraped into the wet plaster when it was first laid. Plaster dados were decorated with basket patterns. The pillars in the larger rooms were often made of small trunks, otherwise of shaped square timber, and the ceiling beams were split trunks of date palms. (Sometimes the fibrous date-palm wood was covered over with mud-straw plaster, and in this case it was often painted.) Above the beams were laid woven palm-frond mats, coloured rust-red, black or white, and the same colours were used on the layer of mud over the palm trunks; these colours harmonized beautifully with the brown wood and light-yellow straw mud of the walls.

A large reception-room, a majlis, was usually entered through a door in the centre of its shorter side. Until the last century these doors were very low, not more than 1.2 m high.

Shibam. Elevations of typical houses. (Drawing by J. Gire, taken form measurements by C.Darles.)

The frame was heavily carved, and the surface of the door was ornamented with iron nails with large flat heads 5 cm across, shining with burnished lead. On either side of the door stood great wooden chests, in which the sleeping mats and pillows were stored during the day. These heavy, carved chests, sometimes studded with brass or tinned iron ornaments, were frequently the only furniture in the room. The windows were small and close to the ground; they had carved lattice-work screens, and the wooden framework and shutters were also decorated. Small rectangular openings above the windows gave light when the lower shutters were closed, without producing glare. The floor was covered with plain mats of plaited palm fronds over which rich people placed camel-hair rugs striped in rust-brown, white and black. Against the walls there were hard cushions on which one could lean when sitting. Coffee or food was served on large brass trays, around which the people clustered.

In the upstairs women's quarters the rooms were mostly small, and sometimes painted in brighter colours. Pots and trays hung on the walls.

The kitchens were large and airy. The cooking hearth had a separate flue, usually in a corner. Generally there was a washroom adjoining or opening off the kitchen.

Large houses were sometimes subdivided into small apartments (one or two to each floor), each with a single fair-sized room, a lobby and a washroom.

If a Saiyid erected a mosque next to his house, as was the practice of many who returned wealthy from overseas, an internal passage would usually connect the house to the interior of the whitewashed mosque, and to its roof; in the heat of summer, the sunset and evening prayers were always performed on the roof, and learned old men used to sit there in the evenings teaching the recitation of the Koran to a circle of boys and young men.

Shibam. Carved decoration of a lattice window grille. (Drawing by J.Gire.)

The age of the houses can be judged with any accuracy only from the decorated, and sometimes dated, woodwork. The Saiyids estimate that the oldest doors are about 300 years old.

Forts above the wadi were traditionally built of mud-brick like the houses, with small circular turrets at the corners. One such fort at Heinan is recognizable in descriptions by two Portuguese captives in 1590 (960), and there is no reason why forts of this type could not be of much greater antiquity.

Moving farther east, the buildings of the walled city of Shibam vary from those described above mainly in their towering height. They are discussed in detail on pages 71 et seq.

Some 20 km to the east of Shibam, the buildings of the old Kathiri territory were noticeably different. The whitewashed houses were slightly smaller, without courtyards, opening on to wide streets and with windows on all four sides. The more modern houses had walled entrance enclosures, with vegetation planted at the sides. All the large cities had garden suburbs among the palm groves; these grew up in the second quarter of the twentieth (fourteenth) century. Here the wealthy Saiyids, returned from overseas, built modern villas, influenced by Indian and European colonial styles, and each with its swimming pool and its garden of cultivated flowering trees and shrubs. Many of these large new town houses were reputedly designed by one man, the distinguished Saiyid ' Alawi ibn Bubakr ibn Alawi al- Kaf '. They were often divided into two parts, one for men and the other for women, each with its own entrance, kitchen, storerooms and granaries on the ground floor, and with its reception-rooms and wash-rooms on the first floor. There were more private rooms above that, and on the roof there were terrace rooms. The villas had similar arrangements, but were seldom more than two storeys high. The central terrace rooms, which could catch the breeze on all four sides, were the favoured living and relaxing rooms in the hot summer months.

The old houses of Tarim and of towns farther east had a unique distinguishing feature: the lower wall outside, up to. Height of 5 or 8 m, had horizontal corrugations introduced into the mud-plaster, which resulted in a curiously sophisticated appearance. The entrance doors were generally emphasized by a rectangular white frame, which extended upwards to almost twice the height of the door to incorporate a large blind arch, containing a small pointed opening. Above the latticed windows there were frequently similar blind arches, in ogee or scallop~ shapes, forming heads to the rectangular openings. A broad flight of mud steps led up to the entrance of each house.

The most splendid palace building, and indeed the largest building in the wadi, was the palace of the former Sultan in Sai'un. Like the palaces of Shibam, it was formerly plastered with warm brown earth and straw, and two white bands the width of the windows encircled its huge tapering bulk. A further thinner white line, on the parapet and roof terraces, and topped with pinnacles, finished the building against the blue sky. In the corners were domed round turrets. The palace rose from walled terraces, surrounded by guardhouses and noble gateways. A short distance away was the slightly smaller-but still grand and impressive-palace of the Sultan of Tarim.

Shibam. Five tower houses facing onto a small city square on the northern side of the city.

Internally, the old houses had corridors running right through the centre on every level. At the north end, where it was coolest, there would be a couple of skin bags hanging up containing drinking water, with a niche for cups in the wall near by. Below, a runnel in the floor took the water dripping from the skins to the outside. The upper floors which caught the wind were used in summer, the lower floors, which were better insulated, in winter. The reception-rooms had two, four, six or nine pillars; there were rows of three or four windows on two or more sides. There was no such thing as a bedroom; any of the rooms might be used for sleeping, by either men or women. During the daytime the bedding was kept in wall cupboards, the room being sparsely furnished with striped rugs and cushions around the walls. Wall niches contained brass and silver cups and samovars, and on the walls hung circular brass and woven basket trays for serving food and drink.

Bathrooms were generally spacious and had burnished white plastered walls and floors, niches and pegs for hanging clothing and large earthenware water jars standing on the ground.

People washed themselves by using a water scoop with a handle, the water running out through a hole in the wall under the window. The bathrooms contained a lavatory with foot-rests and a neat wooden cover. There were at least two bathrooms of this type on every floor of a large Sai'un or Tarim house; in addition there would be a small plunge-bath of masonry, about three metres square, usually near the room for private prayer, so that it could also be used for ablutions.

The newer buildings of the Saiyids who had returned from Singapore and Java were very ornate, with neo-baroque and neo- classical decoration executed in mud-plaster, but so well finished by Hadrami craftsmen in burnished whitewash, pastel colours and gold that it was indistinguishable from more expensive stones and stuccoes. These buildings were furnished with all the luxuries that could be brought in from the great colonial metropolises, laboriously transported on camelback across the mountainous plateau from the Indian Ocean. They included floridly carved chairs, tables, mirrors and beds. The heavy carved teak entrance doors and window-frames of these new houses were also imported from Malaya or Indonesia.

BACK

Back To Index

NEXT