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 sultan’s mosque on the hilltop
Set an imperial mosque on the crest of a hill so that its domes and minarets command the skyline, level the site on terraces and vaulted substructures, and step its dependencies down the slope.
The seven hills of Istanbul gave the Ottoman sultans a ready-made hierarchy of sites. Mehmed II’s mosque crowned the fourth hill, Süleyman’s the third, Selim I’s the fifth; seen from the water, the silhouette of the city became a procession of domes and minarets. Sinan chose for the Süleymaniye the edge of the old palace grounds above the Golden Horn and built its platform out over the slope on massive retaining walls and vaults, with the colleges on the downhill side stepping down in terraces.
The memoirs dwell on the difficulty of the foundations, and on the wait while the great piers settled before the dome was raised.
Related rules
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.
Set a mosque’s portal square to the street or square it opens from, but turn the building behind it to face Mecca, and let a vestibule or corridor make the turn between them.
Isfahan: qibla ≈ 225°, i.e. 45° to the Maidan
Found the mosque together with the institutions that serve it and its neighbourhood (colleges, a hospital, a public kitchen, a guest-house, a caravanserai, a bath, a school and the founder’s tomb), endowed as one charitable trust and grouped round the mosque’s outer court.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The sultan’s mosque on the hilltop”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kulliye-hilltop. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.