The mosque: form, space and meaning

Dome of the Eagle (Qubbat Al-Nisr) Umayyad Mosque, Damascus

interior of the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus

The creation of the architectural form of the mosque was the creation of a new space, adapted to the needs of the community and the faith, out of previously existing architectural elements or parts such as, for instance, pillars and arches, according to T. Burckhardt (1). 

A hierarchy of sacred spaces organized around the altar, the focal point, and the longitudinal path and movement towards the altar are two characteristics of the Christian church form; characteristics that are accentuated and highlighted by the organization of the various architectural components of the church and their particular effects.  By contrast, T. Burckhardt observes, the interior space of the mosque has no focal point; the mosque does not possess an internal sacred center, for the general center, both territorial and symbolic, of the faith is located in Mecca.

The orientation of the mosque is rather external, indicating the universal sacred center, a specific terrestrial or geographic center that organizes and structures in a complete way the life of the whole community of the faithful in time and space, in its inner and outer aspects. The mosque relates therefore to a religious and earthly space, in the unity of these two dimensions, as one component in a greater ensemble, associated or linked via the sacred center to all other mosques in the larger territory of Islam. 

Associated and therefore equivalent, in the same way as the non-hierarchical, non-directional interior of the mosque itself is not made of strict transitions and formal tensions, but conveys an experience of time, we can state (modifying Burckhardt's characterization) absorbed by space. 

An articulated and yet homogeneous space is mirrored in a uniform, homogeneous time: a time suspended in the actuality of the “now” or, in Burckhardt’s formula: the interior the mosque offers an experience of space "reabsorbed into the ubiquity of the present moment”.

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

(1) Burckhardt, Titus,  Art of Islam - Language and Meaning, 2009 ( first published 1976)