Dynastic History | The Mouassine Fountain, Marrakesh — What the Endowment Paid For

Between 1562–63 and 1572–73 the Saadian sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib endowed a whole quarter's worth of public works at once. The waqf carried a mosque, a madrasa, a hammam, a library, a Qur'an school, an ablutions block with latrines, a trough for animals, and this: a street fountain of three basins under a canopy of carved cedar, open to anyone who came with a jar. A house here had no piped water. The endowment income, drawn from property the sultan settled on the foundation, is what kept the basins filled and the mosque staffed, and it is the least glamorous and most durable thing the Saadian court built in Marrakesh.

The ground had been cleared first. In 1557–58 the sultan ordered the city's Jewish community moved to a new mellah laid out beside the kasbah, and the vacated ground in this quarter was built over — Emily Gottreich's study of the mellah's origins is the standard treatment of that decree. The further account, that the mosque itself stands on a former Jewish cemetery, is reported in the literature, but parts of it are not corroborated in the chronicles and it should be read as a report rather than a settled fact.

The mosque is in use and closed to non-Muslims. The fountain is not closed to anyone: it stands on the lane between the souks, its cedar canopy still carrying its 16th-century carving, a few metres from the hammam that belonged to the same endowment.

📸 Cover: the carved cedar canopy over the fountain basins, C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons