Orient the prayer hall so that its principal wall, the qibla wall, stands square to the direction of Mecca, and mark the middle of that wall with a niche, the mihrab.
qibla wall ⟂ direction of the Kaaba; mihrab on the axis
The four-iwan court
Place an iwan (a vaulted hall walled on three sides and open on the fourth) at the middle of each side of the courtyard, the one on the qibla side leading to a domed chamber before the mihrab.
The iwan is an ancient Iranian form (the great vaulted hall of the Sasanian palace at Ctesiphon is the most famous), and the arrangement of four iwans around a court was used for houses, palaces and caravanserais before it was adopted for mosques and madrasas in Seljuk Iran. At the Friday Mosque of Isfahan the older hypostyle mosque was remodelled in the early twelfth century with four iwans and a great domed chamber, built for the vizier Nizam al-Mulk in 1086–87, behind the qibla iwan.
The plan gives the courtyard two cross axes and a clear climax. It spread with Persian influence to Central Asia, India and, in madrasas, to Egypt and Anatolia.
Related rules
Build the tower for the call to prayer in the form of the regional tradition: square and stepped in the Maghreb and Spain, cylindrical and tapering in Iran and Central Asia, needle-like and polygonal in the Ottoman lands.
Lay out the garden as a walled square divided into four by raised walks with water channels on the two axes, and divide each quarter again.
1 → 4 → 16 beds; water on the axes
Where people disagree about the width of a public road, make it seven cubits, and let no one build out into it; lanes that serve only the houses on them may be narrower.
public road ≥ 7 cubits (≈ 3.5 m)
Build as you will on your own land, provided you do your neighbour no harm: open no window, door or roof terrace that looks into his house or court, and do not set your door opposite his across a lane.
Treat a dead-end lane as the joint property of the houses that open on it: no one may open a new door into it, build over it or narrow it without the consent of all of them, and they may close its mouth with a gate.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The four-iwan court”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/four-iwan-plan. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.