assume that Durzān’s building projects, the mosque and the qasr in particular, took longer than 9 months from inception to completion. This would mean that at the very least the initial plans for such buildings were made at a time when al-Mu‘izz was dead but not ‘officially’ so and al-‘Azīz was ruler, but only in pectore of the high dignitaries around him. Again, Ibn Killis emerges as the best placed person to oversee and manage the affairs of the court throughout this power vacuum, which would include building plans promoted by the royals. Was the initiating of new highly visible buildings by attributing them to Durzān part of a court policy to keep a ‘business-as-usual’ public profile in this interim period? Did the muhtasib al-Fārisī –through Durzān- try to take advantage of this vacuum for self-promotion? Was Durzān advised to quickly invest in brick and mortar her inheritance, acquired upon al-Mu‘izz’s death, to protect it from the dangerous exposures of her time: taxes, confiscation and devaluation of the dīnār? Finally, were the Fātimids, by promoting Durzān as builder, introducing a novelty in dynastic PR in the western Mediterranean Islamic world while trying to be on a par with their ‘Abbāsid rivals where the tradition of royal female architectural patronage was already long established and well known? It is perhaps no coincidence that, in the immediate aftermath of Ibn Killis’ death, with the institution of the vizirate falling into total turmoil, very limited royal female architectural patronage is recorded to have taken place. Sitt al-Mulk (d. 414/1023), the spinster half-sister of the imam-caliph al-Hākim, who affirmed herself as the court ‘prima donna’, is credited with the building of public baths and gardens. A cistern is attributed to the mother of the imam-caliph al-Zāhir (d. 427/1036).21 This will be the state of affairs until the full ‘resurgence’ of the institution of the Fātimid vizirate under the Armenian general Badr al-Jamālī (d. 487/1094). The arrival at the Fātimid court of Badr al-Jamālī during the reign of the imam-caliph al-Mustansir (d. 487/1094) marked the beginning of a major shift in the imam-caliph-vizier power relationship, with the power of the caliph becoming only nominal and the effective rule resting in the hands of the vizier. This role reversal meant, among other things, that the vizier no longer had an interest in allocating power to an already existing queen mother. Instead, he saw her as a potentially dangerous figure that needed to be sidelined. The fraught relationship between Badr al-Jamālī and Rasad, mother of the imam-caliph al-Mustansir, is testimony to this and projected on the landscape: Badr al-Jamālī was the big builder of his time while no architectural activity is ascribed to Rasad with certainty.22
21 Indicated as ‘Sayyda Rasad, mother of al-Zāhir’, this could be in fact al-Zāhir’s wife, since his mother is more typically known as Ruqayya. Bloom, J. M., “The Mosque”, p. 17. 22 On Rasad see Cortese, D., and Calderini, S., op. cit., pp. 110-114.
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