armîn, the town from which Hasan derived his patrionymic

armîn,
the town from which Hasan derived his patrionymic, is a small place about fifty
kilometers southwest of Aleppo; it was not necessarily his birthplace, but only
the place his family stemmed from.


Figure
14. Sarmîn, Great Mosque, minaret.

There
is no further physical evidence of any Aleppan architect until 1150, except for
Fahd al-Sarmînî, who in 505/1112 signed the mihrab in the Ornamented Style that
was added to the arcade before the prayer hall at the Maqâm Ibrâhîm at
Salahîn.14 He was presumably a relative of Hasan, perhaps a brother or son.

Herzfeld
reported the patrionymic Sarmînî in the signature of Qâhir b. `Alî b. Qânit,
who worked in Ma`arat al-Nu`mân, Damascus, and Busrâ, in the employ of al-Malik
al-Mansûr Muhammad, the ruler of Hamâh, at the end of the twelfth century and
the beginning of the thirteenth, but I have not been able to confirm this. If
true, it seems as likely as not that he was from the same North Syrian family
of architects.

Sa`îd
al-Muqaddasî, “the Jerusalemite,” who signed the Madrasah al-Shu`aybîyah, is
the only architect employed in Aleppo by Nûr al-Dîn whose name is known. Again,
Jerusalem was not necessarily Sa`îd's home town, though some Muslim architects
must have left Jerusalem at the time of the Crusader occupation of the city in
1099. While the grandfather of the geographer al-Muqaddasî (b. 336/946) was an
architect, there is too much of a gap between the tenth century and 1150 to
connect Sa`îd with this family. His style shows him to have absorbed thoroughly
the Ornamented Style of Aleppo.