The Mosque

According to Islamic tradition, the first mosque was built in Medina soon after the Prophet Muhammad and his followers migrated there from Mecca in 622 CE. It was his own house: a square enclosure of mud-brick walls around an open courtyard, with a shelter of palm trunks and palm fronds along one side to shade those who prayed. It served as a place of prayer, a meeting hall, a school and the seat of the young community’s government. That combination of worship and community life has stayed with the mosque ever since.

At first the Muslims of Medina prayed facing Jerusalem. In about 624 CE, the sources say, the direction was changed to the Kaaba in Mecca, a moment recorded in the Qur’an. From then on, the one firm rule of mosque design was orientation: the building had to be laid out so that worshippers in their rows faced the qiblaqibla The direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, which Muslims face in prayer. Glossary. Everything else, from the size of the building to its decoration, was left to local custom and the means of its builders.

The features now associated with mosques appeared step by step. Bilal, the first muezzin, is said to have called the faithful from a rooftop, and towers built for the purpose became common only from the eighth and ninth centuries; the minaret of the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia is among the oldest that survive. The concave mihrabmihrab The niche in a mosque wall that shows the direction of prayer. Glossary niche is usually dated to the rebuilding of the Prophet’s Mosque under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I in the early eighth century. Under the same dynasty the first monumental mosques rose in Damascus and Jerusalem, borrowing columns, mosaics and building skills from the Byzantine and Persian worlds.

Early congregational mosques usually followed a hypostyle plan, a forest of columns supporting a flat roof, as at Córdoba in Spain, where the prayer hall was enlarged several times between the eighth and tenth centuries. Later builders experimented with vaulted halls, great arched porches and domes. By the sixteenth century the Ottoman architect Sinan had perfected the plan used for the drawing on this page: a single vast dome over an open prayer hall, a courtyard with a fountain in front and slender minarets at the corners.

The heart of the mosque’s life is the salatsalat The ritual prayer, said five times a day facing Mecca. Glossary, the ritual prayer offered five times a day: at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset and nightfall. Muslims may pray anywhere that is clean, but prayer in congregation is valued, and the Friday midday prayer is meant to be said together. On Fridays the imam climbs the minbar to give a sermon before leading the prayer. Worshippers stand in straight rows behind him, facing the mihrab, and move together through standing, bowing, prostrating and sitting.

Before praying, worshippers wash in a set sequence, called wudu, at the fountain or washroom. Shoes are left at the door, and the bare prayer hall, with no seats or pews, allows everyone to stand side by side. In Islamic teaching this expresses the equality of believers before God: rich and poor, ruler and labourer share the same rows. There is no clergy in the sense of a priesthood; the imam is a prayer leader, often a trained scholar, but any knowledgeable adult may lead.

The mosque also marks the Islamic year. During Ramadan, the month of fasting, many mosques hold long night prayers and host communal meals to break the fast. The two great festivals, Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan and Eid al-Adha during the season of pilgrimage, bring the largest congregations of the year, often spilling into courtyards and streets. Mosques have long housed schools where children learn to recite the Qur’an, and many still run classes, libraries, charities and advice services for their communities.

Arrangements for women differ more than any other feature. Hadith reports describe women praying in the Prophet’s Mosque behind the men, and today some mosques keep that arrangement, while others provide a gallery, a screened area or a separate room. Some older or smaller mosques have no space for women at all, a matter of active debate within Muslim communities.

Because only the qibla is fixed, the mosque has taken on the character of every region where Islam spread. In Iran and Central Asia, mosques such as the Friday Mosque of Isfahan arranged four great vaulted halls, or iwans, around the courtyard, faced with glazed tiles in blue and turquoise. In Mughal India, mosques like the Jama Masjid in Delhi used red sandstone and white marble, with bulbous domes and vast courtyards for Friday crowds.

In West Africa, the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, rebuilt in 1907 on the plan of an earlier mosque, is often described as the largest mud-brick building in the world; wooden beams project from its walls, and the townspeople replaster it together every year. In China, mosques such as the Great Mosque of Xi’an look like Chinese temples, with tiled roofs, wooden pavilions and a sequence of courtyards. Traditional mosques in Java and elsewhere in Indonesia are roofed with stacked, tiered pyramids instead of domes.

The Ottoman model drawn here remains the most widely recognised. Sinan’s Süleymaniye in Istanbul (1550–1557) and Selimiye in Edirne (completed 1575) balance one great dome on arches and half-domes, flooding the prayer hall with light. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul, finished in 1616 and known as the Blue Mosque for its tiles, is famous for its six minarets. Modern architects continue to reinterpret the mosque, from the concrete Sherefudin White Mosque in Visoko, Bosnia, to the minimal designs of mosques in Europe and North America, all still turned towards Mecca.