Twenty kilometres from Samarra, on the edge of the small town of Ad-Dawr, stood the single most consequential brick dome in Islamic architecture. Built around 1085 for the Uqaylid chamberlain Abu Jafar Muhammad and signed by its architect, Abu Shakir ibn Abi al-Faraj, the Imam Dur Mausoleum carried the earliest securely dated muqarnas dome anywhere. Muqarnas — the honeycomb of small niches that would become the defining ornament of Islamic building from Morocco to Samarkand — had appeared before as surface decoration; here it was made structural, stacked in three rotating octagonal tiers so that the whole shell corbels itself into a conical spiral. The chamber below is plain square brick with banded decoration, which only sharpens the contrast. For nine hundred years it survived Mongols, Ottomans and three modern wars. In October 2014 it was detonated.
The Imam Dur Mausoleum was destroyed by explosives placed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on 23 October 2014, during the group's occupation of Salah ad-Din Governorate. It was one of a series of shrines and tombs in northern Iraq demolished in the same campaign, including the Mausoleum of Imam Awn al-Din in Mosul in July 2014. The building is gone; the photograph used here was taken in 2005 and is one of very few free-licensed images of it. Nothing has been rebuilt on the site.
Wikidata Q112788382 · Commons: File:Muhammad Al-Durri Shrine.jpg · Photo: Mustafa Wahhudi · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0