The Basic  Elements of The Mosque:

The minarets:

Minarets (Arabic manara (lighthouse) منارة, but more usually مئذنة) are distinctive architectural features of Islamicmosques. Minarets are generally tall spires with onion-shaped crowns, usually either free standing or much taller than any surrounding support structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret

Minaret Types

    

      There were no Minarets in the Prophet’s Mosque during the periods of the Prophet (Pbuh) and his four Caliphs. K. A. C. Creswell, the leading British scholar of Muslim
architecture, readily be considered the doyen of the first generation of professional scholars of Islamic architecture, has observed that "in the time of Muhammad no such thing as a minaret was known." He dates the first minarets found at Damascus, from 673 A.D., 41 years after the death of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). It should be noted that the call to prayer can be carried in the streets or from the roof of the Mosque (Masjid, meaning "the place of prostration"), and that Mosques in villages and outlying places rarely had Minarets.

    Scholars narrated that there was a column in the house of Abdullah ibn Omar where the Athan was called from the top of this column. This column was existing till 10th century Hijri (Hijri - Islamic Calendar started in 622 AD - Hijrah means "journey"). Hence, the scholars recommend it so that the Athan (Athan) can be heard from as far as possible.

In 703 (91Hijri), Omar ibn Abdulazziz built four minarets on the four corners of the Prophet’s Mosque for this very reason - each Minaret was about 9 meter high (30 feet) and with a base of 16 meters (52 feet) - The Muazzin (person calling for prayer) was able to call for prayer from a top of the Minarat.

In more recent times, the Athan is called out in the Musallah (prayer hall), via audio and video systems, and in turn the role of the Minaret became largely for traditional and decorative purposes. The world's tallest Minaret today stands at 210 meters (630 feet) high and can be seen in the magnificent "Hassan II" Mosque in Casablanca, Morocco – the Mosque was built for the 60th birthday of former Moroccan king Hassan II, is the largest religious monument in the world after Mecca - it has space for 25,000 worshippers inside and another 80,000 outside.

The 210-meter high Minaret is visible day and night for miles around - it's design closely resembles that of Kutubiya Mosque Minaret, built in 1195, and stands at 77 meters (230 feet) high in Marrakech, Morocco.

Firuzkuh the capital of the Ghurids Empire, later destroyed by the Mongols,contained a great mosque from whichall that remains is the Tower of Jam,dated 1194, discovered in 1957. The Tower is the most striking of the group of some seventy towers erected in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia between the 11th and the 13th centuries. It served as a victory memorial as well as a Minaret standing at 60 meter (200 feet) high from the base of a remote mountain valley in central Afghanistan.

A brick structure with an octagonal shaft laid out in panels connected by interlacing ribbons of inscriptions. The lower shaft contains all of the "Surat Maryam" of the Quran using the Kufic style script, made entirely out of carefully cut and assembled brick encircling the entire structure, as well as the name and titles of the Ghurids ruler "Ghaiyath Al-Din Muhammad 1163-1203" are executed in blue glazed ceramic. Today the Minarets are distinctive architectural features of any Mosque, they are generally tall, graceful spires, with rod-shaped or concave crown affixed to the roof of the Minaret, usually either free standing or much taller than any surrounding support structure - it's almost hard to find new developed Mosque today that won’t include a Minaret.

 

Kaleidoscopic Technique

Many triply periodic minimal surfaces can best be understood and constructed in terms of fundamental regions bounded by mirror symmetry planes. According to H. S. M. Coxeter there are exactly seven types of such regions of finite size. Many triply periodic minimal surfaces have embedded straight .

Squinches Technique

Mughals Architecture introduced many new features like arches, domes and Squinches and also evolved some new trends and techniques of decoration. Islamic art is an art of line and Islamic artisans can produce beautiful culmination of lines to bring out masterpieces in two-dimensional forms, which were totally lacking in Pre Islamic art.

(http://www.islamicarchitecture.org/architecture/minaret-types.html)

 

 

 


The Mihrab:

A mihrab (Arabic: ألمحراب pl. محاريب) is a niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the qibla, that is, the direction of Kaaba that Muslims should face when praying. The wall in which a mihrab appears is thus the "qibla wall."

Mihrabs should not be confused with the minbar, which is the pulpit from which an Imam (leader of prayer) addresses the congregation.

The word mihrab originally had a non-religious meaning and simply denoted a special room in a house, a throne room in a palace for example. The Fath al-Bari (p. 458), on the authority of others, suggests the mihrab is "the most honorable location of kings" and "the master of locations, the front and the most honorable." The Mosques in Islam (p. 213), in addition to Arabic sources, cites Theodor Nöldeke and others as having considered a mihrab to have originally signified a throne room.

  

The term was subsequently used by the Prophet Muhammad to denote his own private prayer room. The room additionally provided access to the adjacent mosque, and the Prophet would enter the mosque through this room. This original meaning of mihrab - i.e. as a special room in the house - continues to be preserved in some forms of Judaism where mihrabs are rooms used for private worship.

During the reign of the Uthman Ibn Affan (r. 644-656), the Caliph ordered a sign to be posted on the wall of the mosque at Medina so that pilgrims could easily identify the direction in which to address their prayers (i.e. that of Mecca). The sign was however just a sign, and the wall remained flat. Subsequently, during the reign of Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik (Al-Walid I, r. 705-715), the mosque of the Prophet - the Masjid al Nabawi - was renovated and the governor (wāli) of Medina, Umar Ibn Abdul Aziz, ordered that a niche be made to designate the qibla wall (which identifies the direction of Mecca), and it was in this niche that Uthman's sign was placed.

Eventually, the niche came to be universally understood to identify the qibla wall, and so came to be adopted as a feature in other mosques. A sign was no longer necessary

Today, Mihrabs vary in size, are usually ornately decorated and often designed to give the impression of an arched doorway or a passage to Mecca.

In exceptional cases, the mihrab does not follow the qibla direction. One example is the Mezquita of Córdoba, Spain that points South instead of Southeast. Among the proposed explanations, there is the localization of the ancient Roman cardo street besides the old temple the Mezquita was built upon.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihrab)

 


 


The Minbar:

The pulpit from which the sermon (khutbah) is delivered. In its simplest form the minbar is a platform with three steps; often it is constructed as a domed box at the top of a staircase and is reached through a doorway that can be closed.