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 minaret takes the shape of its region
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.
The earliest mosques had no minaret; the call was given from a roof. Towers appear in the eighth and ninth centuries, and from the start they are as much landmarks as functional platforms. The square, three-stage minaret of Kairouan, its storeys diminishing upward, set a pattern followed across North Africa and Spain, culminating in the great Almohad towers of Marrakesh, Rabat and Seville. In Iran the minaret became a slender brick cylinder with a balcony on corbels; the Ottomans reduced it to a fluted pencil with a lead cone, and multiplied it to mark imperial foundations.
Related rules
Build the congregational mosque as an enclosed courtyard (sahn) with a covered prayer hall (haram) on its qibla side and shaded porticoes (riwaq) on the others.
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.
Set the iwan arch in a tall rectangular screen that rises above the roofline, framed by bands of inscription and flanked by minarets.
Build two domes, one above the other: an inner shell proportioned to the room below and an outer shell raised on a tall drum and proportioned to the city outside.
outer crown ≫ inner crown; the gap may be a third of the total height
Let the exterior show the structure: pile semidomes, exedrae, corner domes and weight towers round the central dome so that the masses rise in steps to the crown.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The minaret takes the shape of its region”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/minaret-types. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.