5 mosques that show how Islamic architecture adapts to place

When the Prophet reached Medina in 622 he had a mosque built where his camel knelt, on a yard used for drying dates that he bought from two orphan boys. The walls were of mud brick and the roof of palm trunks and fronds. At first it faced Jerusalem, and the qibla, the direction of prayer, was turned to the Kaaba some months later.^[2]

It was a place of prayer, a school, a council and a shelter for the poor, and some of the destitute Companions known as the People of the Bench slept inside it. Sahih al-Bukhari records that Umar later rebuilt it in the same materials, and that Uthman rebuilt it with carved stone, plaster and a teak roof.^[3] Every later mosque is a copy, in some measure, of this plain courtyard. The green dome over his tomb was added many centuries after his death.

Begun in 785 or 786 by Abd al-Rahman I, who had escaped the Abbasid revolution and founded an Umayyad state in al-Andalus, the mosque was extended over two centuries by his successors, among them Abd al-Rahman II, al-Hakam II and al-Mansur. It is famous for its forest of double arches in red brick and white stone, which lets a very large hall be supported by short columns, many of them taken from older Roman and Visigothic buildings.^[4]

Ismail al Faruqi and Lois Lamya al Faruqi, in The Cultural Atlas of Islam, read the plan as an endless pattern in building. The hall has no single focus: a visitor entering from the courtyard sees only rows of arches and cannot grasp the whole until he has walked its aisles.^[5] The design could be extended without being spoiled, and the later rulers did exactly that, enlarging it in 848 and again in 987 in both length and breadth.^[6]

The mihrab, the niche marking the direction of prayer, was rebuilt under al-Hakam II in the tenth century and is covered in gold mosaic in a Byzantine manner. The mosque shows a ruler borrowing freely from the lands he governed. Some early Muslim voices warned against showy mosques, and Bukhari reports the remark of Ibn Abbas that people would one day adorn them as Jews and Christians had adorned their places of worship.^[3] After the Christian conquest in 1236 the building became a church, and a cathedral was built inside it in the sixteenth century.

Tradition dates the Xi’an mosque to 742, in the Tang period, and the present buildings are mostly from the Ming dynasty, with later repairs. It follows the plan of a Chinese temple: a sequence of courtyards, pavilions and gateways along a single axis, with a tower in the form of a pagoda from which the call to prayer was once given. Arabic inscriptions hang inside a Chinese building.^[7]

The prayer hall faces west towards Mecca, and nothing else needed to change. The community that built it, the Hui, had Chinese as their everyday language and Arabic and Persian for worship, and they put up their house of prayer in the idiom of the city around them. A visitor looking for domes and minarets in the usual sense will not find them. What marks the place as a mosque is the orientation of its hall and the rows of worshippers inside it.

In Mali, the Great Mosque of Djenne is built of sun-dried mud brick, with timber beams projecting from its towers. An earlier mosque on the site had fallen into ruin by the nineteenth century, and the current building dates from 1907. It is often described as the largest mud-brick building in the world.^[8]

Mud walls are worn down by the annual rains, so each year the town plasters the mosque afresh in a community festival. Masons direct the work, and the projecting beams double as permanent scaffolding. The material is local, and so is the labour that keeps the building standing. UNESCO lists the Old Towns of Djenne as a World Heritage site, with the mosque at its centre. The building shows that an unadorned, perishable material can carry a place of worship for generations, provided the congregation keeps tending it.

The “Blue Mosque”, built between 1609 and 1616 by the architect Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, answers Hagia Sophia across the square. Hagia Sophia had been a Byzantine cathedral until the Ottoman conquest of 1453, and the new mosque borrows its great central dome and surrounds it with a cascade of half-domes. Six minarets rise at its corners, and the blue Iznik tiles inside give it its popular name.^[9]

It is the high point of Ottoman style, and it was also a statement of imperial power by a young sultan, Ahmed I. Critics in his own day thought six minarets excessive, since the Sacred Mosque in Mecca had only six at the time, and a story is told that he paid for another to be added there. The design takes a Byzantine form and makes it the centre of a Muslim place of prayer, much as Medina had once taken the plain courtyard.