This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Religious Bodies gathers three state linked administrators of Islamic affairs, ranging in scope from two specific mosques to an entire national religious bureaucracy.
The General Authority for the Care and Management of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet's Mosque administers the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina under the ultimate authority of the Saudi king, who holds the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Its remit includes the physical care of the Kaaba and the Black Stone set into its eastern corner, one of the most continuously venerated objects in any living religious tradition, and access to it is restricted to Muslims under Saudi law, unlike most institutions in this atlas.
The Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, tracing to a 1943 Soviet-era spiritual directorate and reorganised as an independent national body after 1991 independence, oversees the Hazrat Imam complex in Tashkent, whose library keeps the Samarkand Kufic Quran, one of the oldest surviving Quran manuscripts, on public display after an earlier period in Russian custody.
Egypt's Ministry of Awqaf works at a different scale again. Rather than one site or one manuscript, it administers waqf, Islamic religious endowments, across the whole country, licenses and regulates the content of Friday sermons, and coordinates Egypt's mosques, schools and charitable works with state policy, making it one of the most consequential government custodians of institutional Islam in the Arab world.