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53-518: The mosque was first built in 1230 and fully reconstructed for the second time in 1373. The minaret is 38 metres (125 ft) high and free-standing, built on a square stone base, with eight fluted sections and has 90 steps to the top. The first building (1230) was built around 1225-7, during the reign of the Seljuk sultan Ala ad-Din Kay Qubadh I (1220–1237). The original mosque was destroyed in

106-726: A ṣawma῾a ("monk's cell", due to its small size). An example of these platforms is documented during the reconstruction of the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in 673 by Mu'awiya 's local governor, Maslama ibn Mukhallad al-Ansari , who was given orders by the caliph to add one to each of the mosque's four corners, similar to the Great Mosque of Damascus which had a ṣawma῾a above each of the Roman-era towers at its four corners. Historical sources also mention such features in mosques in other parts of North Africa . In another example, under

159-424: A combination of those materials. They serve as an architectural feature, distinguished from commercial manufactured skylights by their custom design, providing unique views to the outdoors. Roof lanterns for residential homes are usually constructed using a combination of triangular and trapezoidal segments, fitted within a UPVC or aluminium frame. Traditional architectural styles characterise most roof lanterns in

212-413: A different design than the others. This configuration was particularly characteristic of Cairo . The minaret of the al-Maridani Mosque (circa 1340) is the first one to have an entirely octagonal shaft and the first one to end with a narrow lantern structure consisting of eight slender columns topped by a bulbous stone finial . This style later became the basic standard form of Cairene minarets, while

265-456: A dome-like roof raised by sets of four straight beams placed above each other, "arranged in diminishing squares", and rotated with each set. Normally such a "lantern" is enclosed and provides no light at all. The term roof top lantern is sometimes used to describe the lamps on roofs of taxis in Japan, designed to reflect the cultural heritage of Japanese paper lanterns . The glazed lantern

318-552: A major study on the question in 1926 which then became the standard scholarly theory on the origin of minarets for roughly fifty years. Creswell attributed the origin of minaret towers to the influence of Syrian church towers and regarded the spiral or helicoidal minarets of the Abbasid period as deriving from local ziggurat precedents, but rejected the possible influence of the Pharos Lighthouse. He also established that

371-430: A monumental appearance. The first known minarets built as towers appeared under Abbasid rule. Four towers were added to the Great Mosque of Mecca during its Abbasid reconstruction in the late 8th century. In the 9th century single minaret towers were built in or near the middle of the wall opposite the qibla wall of mosques. These towers were built across the empire in a height to width ratio of around 3:1. One of

424-532: A square shaft and are arranged in two tiers: the main shaft, which makes up most of its height, and a much smaller secondary tower above this which is in turn topped by a finial of copper or brass spheres. Some minarets in the Maghreb have octagonal shafts, though this is more characteristic of certain regions or periods; e.g. the minarets of the Great Mosque of Chefchaouen , the Great Mosque of Ouazzane ,

477-543: Is a daylighting architectural element. Architectural lanterns are part of a larger roof and provide natural light into the space or room below. In contemporary use it is an architectural skylight structure. A lantern roof will generally mean just the roof of a lantern structure in the West, but has a special meaning in Indian architecture (mostly Buddhist, and stretching into Central Asia and eastern China), where it means

530-501: Is a type of tower typically built into or adjacent to mosques . Minarets are generally used to project the Muslim call to prayer ( adhan ) from a muezzin , but they also served as landmarks and symbols of Islam's presence. They can have a variety of forms, from thick, squat towers to soaring, pencil-thin spires. Two Arabic words are used to denote the minaret tower: manāra and manār . The English word "minaret" originates from

583-487: Is not clear what function these towers served. They do not appear to have been used for the call to prayer and may have been intended instead as visual symbols of the mosque's status. Historical sources also reference an earlier manāra , built of stone, being added to the mosque of Basra in 665 by the Umayyad provincial governor, but it is not entirely clear if it was a tower or what form it had, though it must have had

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636-490: Is readily available, and often changes from region to region. In the construction of the tall and slender Ottoman minarets, molten iron was poured into pre-cut cavities inside the stones, which then solidified and helped to bind the stones together. This made the structures more resistant to earthquakes and powerful winds. The earliest mosques lacked minarets, and the call to prayer was often performed from smaller tower structures. The early Muslim community of Medina gave

689-412: The adhān is called from the musallah (prayer hall) via microphone to a speaker system on the minaret. Additionally, minarets historically served a visual symbolic purpose. In the early 9th century, the first minarets were placed opposite the qibla wall. Oftentimes, this placement was not beneficial in reaching the community for the call to prayer. They served as a reminder that

742-711: The Fatimids , generally refrained from building them during these early centuries. The earliest evidence of minarets being used for hosting the call to prayer dates to the 10th century and it was only towards the 11th century that minaret towers became a near-universal feature of mosques. Next to the Huaishengsi Mosque in Guangzhou is the Tower of Light, also known as the Guangta minaret (1350). The mosque and

795-796: The Kasbah Mosque of Tangier , and the Great Mosque of Asilah in Morocco or the Ottoman-era minarets of Tunisia such as the Youssef Dey Mosque and the Hammouda Pacha Mosque . Inside the main shaft a staircase, and in other cases a ramp, ascends to the top of the minaret. The minaret at the Great Mosque of Kairouan , built in 836 under Aghlabid rule, is the oldest minaret in North Africa and one of

848-690: The Minaret of Jam , in a remote area of present-day Afghanistan , was built c.  1175 by the Ghurids and features elaborate brick decoration and inscriptions. The Qutb Minar in Delhi , the most monumental minaret in India , was built in 1199 and was designed on the same model as the Minaret of Jam. In later periods, however, minarets in this region became generally less monumental in comparison with

901-631: The Umayyad Emirate of al-Andalus , emir Hisham I ordered the addition of a ṣawma'a to the Great Mosque of Cordoba in 793. A possible exception to the absence of tower minarets is documented in Caliph al-Walid 's renovation of the Prophet's Mosque in Medina in the early 8th century, during which he built a tower, referred to as a manāra , at each of the mosque's four corners. However, it

954-504: The makhbara -style summit disappeared. Later minarets in the Burji Mamluk period (late 14th to early 16th centuries) typically had an octagonal shaft for the first tier, a round shaft on the second, and a lantern structure with finial on the third level. The stone-carved decoration of the minaret also became very extensive and varied from minaret to minaret. Minarets with completely square or rectangular shafts reappeared at

1007-631: The oldest minarets still standing is that of the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia , built in 836 and well-preserved today. Other minarets that date from the same period, but less precisely dated, include the minaret of the Friday Mosque of Siraf , now the oldest minaret in Iran, and the minaret opposite the qibla wall at the Great Mosque of Damascus (known as the "Minaret of the Bride"), now

1060-602: The 14th century and a new mosque was built in 1373 by the Hamidids on the foundation of a Byzantine church. With its six domes, it is one of the oldest examples of multi-dome construction in Anatolia . Today the building houses the Antalya Ethnographic Museum and contains clothing, kitchen utensils, embroidery, tapestries and looms, socks, sacks, kilims , ornaments, and nomadic tents. It was opened to

1113-638: The 15th century. It is categorized by the use of multiple minarets. Examples of this style include the monuments of Mughal architecture in the Indian subcontinent , such as the minarets on the roof of the south gate in Akbar's Tomb at Sikandra (1613), the minarets on the Tomb of Jahangir (1628-1638), and the four minarets surrounding the mausoleum of the Taj Mahal . Elsewhere in India, some cities and towns along

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1166-475: The 18th and 19th centuries, skylights became even more popular in metal construction with the advent of sheet-metal shops during the Victorian era . Virtually every urban row house of the late-19th and early-20th centuries relied upon a metal-framed skylight to illuminate its enclosed stairwell. More elaborate dwellings of the era showed a fondness for the roof lantern, in which the humble ceiling-window design of

1219-478: The Abbasid period and remains the most massive historic minaret in the world, involving over 6000 cubic meters of brick masonry. The Abu Dulaf Mosque, built near Samarra and finished in 861, has a smaller minaret of similar shape. In the later Abbasid period (11th to 13th centuries), after the Seljuk period, minarets were typically cylindrical brick towers whose square or polygonal bases were integrated into

1272-448: The Great Mosque of Cordoba in 951–952, which became the model for later minarets in the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Jonathan Bloom has suggested that Abd ar-Rahman III's construction of the minaret – along with his sponsoring of other minarets around the same time in Fez – was partly intended as a visual symbol of his self-declared authority as caliph and may have also been aimed at defying

1325-602: The Seljuk Empire, built paired portal minarets from brick that had Iranian origins. In general, mosques in Anatolia had only one minaret and received decorative emphasis while most of the mosque remained plain. Seljuk minarets were built of stone or brick, usually resting on a stone base, and typically had a cylindrical or polygonal shaft that is less slender than later Ottoman minarets. They were sometimes embellished with decorative brickwork or glazed ceramic decoration up

1378-484: The call to prayer from the doorway or roof of the house of Muhammad , which doubled as a place for prayer, and this continued to be the practice in mosques during the period of the four Rashidun Caliphs (632–661). The origin of the minaret is unclear. Many 19th-century and early 20th-century scholars traced the origin of minarets to the Umayyad Caliphate period (661–750) and believed that they imitated

1431-868: The church steeples found in Syria in those times. Others suggested that these towers were inspired by the ziggurats of Babylonian and Assyrian shrines in Mesopotamia . Some scholars, such as A. J. Butler and Hermann Thiersch, agreed that the Syrian minarets were derived from church towers but also argued that the minarets of Egypt were inspired by the form of the Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria (which survived up until medieval times). K. A. C. Creswell , an orientalist and important early-20th-century scholar of Islamic architecture , contributed

1484-450: The coast have small mosques with simple staircase minarets. The oldest minarets in Iraq date from the Abbasid period. The Great Mosque of Samarra (848–852) is accompanied by one of the earliest preserved minarets, a 50-metre-high (160 ft) cylindrical brick tower with a spiral staircase wrapped around it, standing outside the walls of the mosque. It is the tallest of the early minarets of

1537-530: The current tower was reconstructed later in 1296. Under the Fatimids (10th-12th centuries), new mosques generally lacked minarets. One unusual exception is the Mosque of al-Hakim , built between 990 and 1010, which has two minarets at its corners. The two towers have slightly different shapes: both have square bases but one has a cylindrical shaft above this and the other an octagonal shaft. This multi-tier design

1590-493: The details of minarets borrowed from Fatimid designs. Most distinctively, the summits of minarets had a lantern structure topped by a pointed ribbed dome, whose appearance was compared to a mabkhara , or incense burner. This design continued under the early Bahri Mamluks (13th to early 14th century), but soon began to evolve into the shapes distinctive to Mamluk architecture . They became very ornate and usually consisted of three tiers separated by balconies, with each tier having

1643-478: The earliest mosques had no minarets and he suggested that the first purpose-built minarets were built for the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in Fustat in 673. In 1989 Jonathan Bloom published a new study which argued that the first true minaret towers did not appear until the 9th century, under Abbasid rule, and that their initial purpose was not related to the call to prayer. References on Islamic architecture since

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1696-526: The early Abbasid minarets were not built to host the call to prayer, but were instead adopted as symbols of Islam that were suited to important congregational mosques . Their association with the muezzin and the call to prayer only developed later. As the first minaret towers were built by the Abbasids and had a symbolic value associated with them, some of the Islamic regimes opposed to the Abbasids, such as

1749-409: The early Islamic period: manār could also mean a "sign" or "mark" (to show one where to go) and both manār and manāra could mean " lighthouse ". The formal function of a minaret is to provide a vantage point from which the muezzin can issue the call to prayer, or adhan . The call to prayer is issued five times each day: dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night. In most modern mosques,

1802-581: The former, via the Turkish version ( minare ). The Arabic word manāra (plural: manārāt ) originally meant a "lamp stand", a cognate of Hebrew menorah . It is assumed to be a derivation of an older reconstructed form, manwara . The other word, manār (plural: manā'ir or manāyir ), means "a place of light". Both words derive from the Arabic root n-w-r , which has a meaning related to "light". Both words also had other meanings attested during

1855-481: The late 20th century often agree with Bloom's view that the mosques of the Umayyad Caliphate did not have minarets in the form of towers. Instead of towers, some Umayyad mosques were built with platforms or shelters above their roofs that were accessed by a staircase and from which the muezzins could issue the call to prayer. These structures were referred to as a mi'dhana ("place of the adhān" ) or as

1908-457: The level of their balconies. Ottoman architecture followed earlier Seljuk models and continued the Iranian tradition of cylindrical tapering minaret forms with a square base. Classical Ottoman minarets are described as "pencil-shaped" due to their slenderness and sharply-pointed summits, often topped with a crescent moon symbol. The presence of more than one minaret, and of larger minarets,

1961-414: The minaret merge aspects of Islamic and Chinese architecture . Its circular shaft and the double staircase arrangement inside it resembles the minarets of Iranian and Central Asian architecture, such as the Minaret of Jam. The style of minarets has varied throughout the history of Egypt . The minaret of the 9th-century Ibn Tulun Mosque imitated the spiral minarets of contemporary Abbasid Samarra, though

2014-593: The mosques for which they were built. The tradition of building pairs of minarets probably began in the 12th century, but it became especially prominent under the Ilkhanids (13th-14th centuries), who built twin minarets flanking important iwans such as the mosque's entrance. The rise of the Timurid Empire , which heavily patronized art and architecture, led to what is now called the "international Timurid" style which spread from Central Asia during and after

2067-547: The most common style in the eastern Islamic world (in Iran, Central Asia , and South Asia ). During the Seljuk period minarets were tall and highly decorated with geometric and calligraphic design. They were built prolifically, even at smaller mosques or mosque complexes. The Kalyan Minaret in Bukhara remains the most well known of the Seljuk minarets for its use of brick patterned decoration. The tallest minaret of this era,

2120-712: The oldest minaret in the region of Syria (though its upper section was probably rebuilt multiple times). In Samarra , the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate in present-day Iraq , the Great Mosque of Samarra was built in the years 848–852 and featured a massive helicoidal minaret behind its northern wall. Its design was repeated in the nearby Abu Dulaf Mosque (861). The earlier theory which proposed that these helicoidal minarets were inspired by ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats has been challenged and rejected by some later scholars including Richard Ettinghausen , Oleg Grabar , and Jonathan Bloom. Bloom also argues that

2173-409: The oldest minarets in the world. It has the shape of a massive tower with a square base, three levels of decreasing widths, and a total height of 31.5 meters. The first two levels are from the original 9th-century construction but the third level was reconstructed at a later period. Another important minaret for the architectural history of the region is the minaret built by Abd ar-Rahman III for

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2226-425: The public in 1974. 36°53′11″N 30°42′16″E  /  36.88639°N 30.70444°E  / 36.88639; 30.70444 Minaret A minaret ( / ˌ m ɪ n ə ˈ r ɛ t , ˈ m ɪ n ə ˌ r ɛ t / ; Arabic : منارة , romanized :  manāra , or Arabic: مِئْذَنة , romanized:  miʾḏana ; Turkish : minare ; Persian : گل‌دسته , romanized :  goldaste )

2279-472: The region was Islamic and helped to distinguish mosques from the surrounding architecture. They also acted as symbols of the political and religious authority of the Muslim rulers who built them. The region's socio-cultural context has influenced the shape, size, and form of minarets. Different regions and periods developed different styles of minarets. Typically, the tower's shaft has a cylindrical, cuboid (square), or octagonal shape. Stairs or ramps inside

2332-796: The rival Fatimid Caliphs to the east who did not endorse the construction of minarets at the time. Other important historic minarets in the region are the Almohad -era minarets of the Kutubiyya Mosque and the Kasbah Mosque in Marrakesh , the Hassan Tower in Rabat , and the Giralda in Seville , all from the 12th and early 13th centuries. The Seljuks of Rum , a successor state of

2385-429: The skylight is elaborated into a miniature glass-paneled conservatory -style roof cupola or tower. Modern lanterns benefit from advances in glazing and sealing techniques, plus the development of high performance insulated glass and sealants, which reduce energy loss and provide water-tightness in the same manner as conventional skylights. Typically, roof lanterns are constructed using wood, UPVC or aluminium, or

2438-604: The structure of the mosque itself. Their main cylindrical shafts were tapered and culminated in muqarnas cornices supporting a balcony, above which is another small cylindrical turret topped by a dome. Two examples of this style are the Mosque of al-Khaffafin and the Mosque of Qumriyya. Minarets in the Maghreb (region encompassing present-day Algeria , Libya , Mauritania , Morocco , Tunisia , and Western Sahara ) and historical al-Andalus (present-day Gibraltar , Portugal , Spain , and Southern France ) traditionally have

2491-411: The tower climb to the top in a counterclockwise fashion. Some minarets have two or three narrow staircases fitted inside one another in order to allow multiple individuals to safely descend and ascend simultaneously. At the top of the stairs, a balcony encircles the upper sections of the tower and from here the muezzin may give the call to prayer. Some minaret traditions featured multiple balconies along

2544-540: The tower's shaft. The summit often finishes in a lantern -like structure and/or a small dome, conical roof, or curving stone cap, which is in turn topped by a decorative metal finial . Different architectural traditions also placed minarets at different positions relative to the mosque. The number of minarets by mosques was also not fixed: originally only one minaret accompanied a mosque, but some later traditions constructed more, especially for larger or more prestigious mosques. Minarets are built out of any material that

2597-623: The very end of the Mamluk period during the reign of Sultan al-Ghuri (r. 1501–1516). During al-Ghuri's reign, the lantern summits were also doubled – as with the minaret of the Mosque of Qanibay Qara or al-Ghuri's minaret at the al-Azhar Mosque – or even quadrupled – as with the original minaret of al-Ghuri's madrasa . Starting with the Seljuk period (11th and 12th centuries), minarets in Iran had cylindrical shafts with square or octagonal bases that taper towards their summit. These minarets became

2650-788: Was developed during the Middle Ages, one notable medieval example being that atop the 14th-century Octagon Tower at Ely Cathedral in England. Roof lanterns of masonry and glass were used in Renaissance architecture , such as in principal cathedrals . In 16th-century France and Italy , they began usage in orangeries , an early form of a conservatory structure with tall windows and a glazed roof section for wintering citrus trees and other plants in non- temperate climates . Post-Renaissance roof lanterns were made of timber and glass and were often prone to leaking. Initially wood-framed in

2703-454: Was only found in the minarets of the great mosques at Mecca and Medina at that time, suggesting a possible link to those designs. Shortly after their construction, the lower sections of the minarets were encased in massive square bastions, for reasons that are not clearly known, and the tops were rebuilt in 1303 by a Mamluk sultan. Under the Ayyubids (late 12th to mid-13th centuries),

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2756-769: Was only surpassed by the minarets of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1574), which are 70.89 meters tall and are the tallest minarets in Ottoman architecture. Later Ottoman minarets also became plainer and more uniform in design. The trend of multiple minarets culminated in the six minarets of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque) in Istanbul . Roof lantern A roof lantern

2809-568: Was reserved for mosques commissioned by the Ottoman sultans themselves. Taller minarets often also had multiple balconies (known as şerefe in Turkish) along their shafts instead of one. The Üç Şerefeli Mosque in Edirne , finished in 1447, was the first sultanic mosque to have multiple minarets with multiple balconies. Of its four minarets, the northwestern minaret was the tallest Ottoman minaret up to that time, rising to 67 metres. Its height

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