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 quarter and its mosque
Divide the city into neighbourhoods (mahalle), each gathered round its own small mosque, whose imam answers for its people; keep the workshops and markets in the market quarter, apart from the houses.
The Ottoman city was an assembly of quarters rather than a single plan. A mahalle was a community of a few hundred households, usually of one religion, named after its mosque (or church or synagogue), and the imam was its link with the authorities, registering births and deaths, apportioning taxes, answering for its conduct. The small mescid of a quarter was often of timber with a tiled roof and one minaret; the market (çarşı) with its shops, workshops and hans lay elsewhere, round the great mosques and the covered bazaar.
Evliya Çelebi counts the quarters, mosques and houses of Istanbul in the seventeenth century with obvious exaggeration, but his picture of the city as a mosaic of neighbourhoods round the foundations of the sultans is confirmed by the registers.
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.
Give an ordinary mosque one minaret with one balcony; reserve several minarets, and several balconies (şerefe) on each, for the foundations of the sultan and his family.
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 quarter and its mosque”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/mahalle-mescid. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.