What Makes A Mosque, Part 3: The Great Mud Mosque of Djenne
Unlike the classic blue-tiled mosques of the Middle East, the mosques of West Africa are made from mud brick. That doesn’t mean they are simple mud huts. They are complicated and beautiful buildings that combine traditional West African building techniques with the ritual requirements of Islamic worship to make uniquely West African religious spaces.
The most famous West African mosque is the Great Mosque of Djenne, in central Mali. A mosque has occupied the site since 1240, when the city’s twenty-seventh ruler, Koy Kumboro, converted to Islam. In order to show his devotion to his new faith, he demolished his palace, and built a mosque in its place. The new mosque was built over a frame of palm timbers using cylindrical sun-dried bricks, about the size and shape of a can of soda pop, and then plastered with a layer of mud. According to Mali legend, the local djinn* helped build it by carrying clay from the desert in baskets on their heads.
Koy Kunboro’s mosque dominated the market plaza at the center of Djenne for almost six hundred years. In the early nineteenth century, fundamentalist leader Seku Amadou declared jihad against Djenne in the name of restoring Islam to its true nature. After he captured the city, he abandoned the mosque to the weather. Islamic law forbids the destruction of a mosque, but mud buildings are fragile. Without regular maintenance, the Great Mosque crumbled into ruins.
In 1907, masons skilled in the traditional techniques of mud construction rebuilt the mosque under French rule. Like Notre Dame in Paris, the re-built Great Mosque combines monumentality with verticality. The mosque stands on a raised square plinth and dominates the city’s main market square. The major facade, which faces the market, consists of three stepped minarets divided by a series of sharply defined vertical columns. This facade is not the entrance. It is the qibla, which points the way to Mecca.
The oldest sections of the mosque are made from cylindrical bricks; the bricks in the newer sections are rectangular. The building bristles with projecting fan palm timbers, set horizontally into the walls as expansion joints to reduce cracking caused by extreme changes in humidity and temperature.
The timbers also provide permanent scaffolding for the ongoing maintenance required by mud construction. Djenne is taking no chances on losing the Great Mosque to the weather again. Re-plastering the walls after the inevitable damage caused by the rainy season is now a joyous, messy and important element of the local Ramadan festival.
*You may know them as genies.
What Makes a Mosque, Pt. 2: Suleyman the Magnificent Builds A Mosque
Commissioning a mosque was both an act of piety and a political statement in the Ottoman empire. Surrounded by building complexes that provided social services ranging from a public fountain to a caravanserai, mosques anchored new neighborhoods in old cities. Who commissioned what was carefully linked to social status. Small officials commissioned small mosques. Grand viziers commissioned grand mosques. And when the greatest Ottoman emperor and the greatest Ottoman architect teamed up to build a new imperial mosque in Istanbul, you got something, well, magnificent.
In 1550, Suleyman the Magnificent had ruled the Ottoman empire for thirty years. He had defended Islam against Christians to the west and Shiite heretics to the east. He had expanded his empire’s boundaries from Budapest to Basra. He had built mosques everywhere his armies went. Now he was ready to build the big one in Istanbul itself.
Sinan was the acknowledged master of Ottoman architecture. Originally an officer and engineer in the Ottoman army, Sinan had caught the emperor’s eye with his talent for building temporary bridges for an army on the march. Under Suleyman’s patronage, he moved from bridges to buildings when he became Chief Architect of the Ottoman court in 1537. By 1550, Sinan was famous for his treatment of foundations and domes.
Together, Suleyman and Sinan built a mosque that was an Ottoman answer to Hagia Sophia. When the Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453, Mehmet the Conqueror physically appropriated the Byzantine cathedral for use as the imperial mosque. Sinan’s act of appropriation was more subtle.
Interior of Hagia Sopia: more brightly lit than it is in real life. Trust me on this.
Built a thousand years before the Suleymaniye Mosque, Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece. Its massive elliptical dome seems to float above the nave of the church because it rests on a ring of windows that separate it from the structure. Glittering mosaics dissolve the interior space of the building into shadowy mystery.
Sinan used the same structural scheme as the Hagia Sophia to create a totally different affect in the Suleymaniye Mosque. In a sixteenth century version of form follows function, the structure that holds the dome in place is clearly visible. Instead of disguising the tension between the curves of the dome and the straight horizontal lines of the building below, Sinan accentuates it. The result? The dome of heaven soars above the human world of prayer.
Interior of the Suleymaniye Mosque
What Makes a Mosque? Part One
The Bibi Khanum Mosque in Samarkand
Glazed tiles, soaring minarets and a central dome don’t make a mosque, any more than a steeple makes a church.
In the early days of Islam, when Muslims numbered in the dozens, Mohammed’s followers prayed together in the open courtyard outside his house in Medina. Once the numbers of the faithful grew a little larger, the Prophet stood on a portable set of steps so he could be seen and heard when he preached. Mohammed’s brother-in-law issued the call to prayer from the flat roof of the house: no minaret needed.
Over the centuries, elements of the little house in Medina developed into a set of architectural components that most Muslims, in most places, at most times, agreed made a mosque. A large open space where the community could gather for the Friday prayer. A qibla wall that pointed out the direction of Mecca, usually marked with a decorated niche (mihrab). A source of water for the ritual ablutions that every Muslim must perform before the five daily prayers. Even that portable set of steps lived on in the elaborate stairs that in many mosques lead up to the pulpit (minbar) from which the community’s religious leader preaches after the Friday prayer. Minaret optional.
There may be a consensus about what a mosque must include, but there has never been a consensus about what a mosque looks like. Muslims around the world have used local materials and local ideas about sacred spaces to create a wide variety of building forms. Mosques have been modeled on Byzantine churches, Hindu temples, and the little brown church in the dell. They’ve included hospitals, libraries, fountains, schools, soup kitchens, and the medieval equivalent of a truck stop. They’ve been built from marble, bamboo, clapboard, and mud. The one thing all of them have in common is the qibla wall shows worshippers which way to turn toward Mecca.
In the next few posts, I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite mosques and the people who built them. You may be surprised.