Mosque

The mosque's architectural history begins with the courtyard house Muhammad built in Medina after 622 CE, a plan of an open yard ringed by covered shelter that set the template later called the hypostyle mosque, a forest of columns supporting a flat or gently pitched roof with no fixed limit on how far the hall could be enlarged. Early conquest era mosques such as the Great Mosque of Damascus and the Great Mosque of Cordoba worked within this plan, absorbing columns and materials from earlier Roman and Visigothic buildings on the same sites.

Regional traditions then diverged sharply. Ottoman architects, working in the shadow of the domed Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, developed centrally planned domed mosques whose greatest exponent, the court architect Mimar Sinan, built the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne around a single vast dome carried on an octagonal system of piers. Persian and Central Asian mosques instead organized space around the four iwan courtyard, a form borrowed from pre-Islamic Sasanian palace architecture.

In West Africa, mosques such as the Great Mosque of Djenne translated the same essential program, courtyard, prayer hall, mihrab and minaret, into sculpted mudbrick reinforced with projecting wooden beams used as permanent scaffolding for annual replastering. Southeast Asian mosques took yet another route, adopting the tiered, pitched roof of local temple architecture rather than the Middle Eastern dome. Across all these regional forms, only the qibla wall's orientation and the presence of a mihrab and minbar remained constant.

A mosque exists first to organize the five daily prayers and, above all, the Friday congregational prayer, jumu'ah, at which attendance is a communal obligation for adult Muslim men and the sermon delivered from the minbar addresses the whole community rather than any single worshipper. Prayer inside a mosque is led by an imam, a role that requires no formal ordination in Sunni practice, only recognized knowledge and standing, and the congregation lines up in rows parallel to the qibla wall, following the imam's movements through the prayer's cycle of standing, bowing and prostration. Worshippers remove their shoes before entering and perform the ritual ablution, wudu, beforehand, usually at a fountain in the mosque's courtyard or an attached facility.

Historically the mosque was rarely only a prayer hall. The great mosques of classical Islam doubled as centers of learning, with attached madrasas teaching law, theology and the Quranic sciences, and as venues for community deliberation, legal judgment and even, in the mosque's earliest Medinan form, the seat of governance itself. Most mosques set aside a separate area for women, sometimes a rear section of the same hall and sometimes a screened gallery, though the exact arrangement is a matter of custom rather than uniform legal requirement. The call to prayer, the adhan, sounded five times daily from the minaret, remains the mosque's most public signal, audible to the surrounding neighborhood regardless of who is inside.