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Minaret at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. A minaret (/ ˌ m ɪ n ə ˈ r ɛ t, ˈ m ɪ n ə ˌ r ɛ t /; [1] Arabic: منارة, romanized: manāra, or Arabic: مِئْذَنة, romanized: miʾḏana; Turkish: minare; Persian: گلدسته, romanized: goldaste) is a type of tower typically built into or adjacent to mosques.
[13] [11] The minaret is also known as Mahkamah Minaret since the minaret is located near the Madrasa al-Tankiziyya which served as a law court during the times of Ottomans. [14] This minaret, possibly replacing an earlier Umayyad minaret, is built in the traditional Syrian square tower type and is made entirely out of stone. [15]
This article lists some but by no means all of the oldest known minaret towers in the world. The oldest minaret still surviving is that of the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It was constructed in 836 AD [ 3 ] and is considered as the prototype for all the square shaped minarets built in the Western Muslim World.
The minaret remained unrestored, although attempts were made in 1981 by an Italian firm to stabilise it. The bombing of Mosul during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s broke underground pipes and caused leaks under the minaret that further undermined it. The lean later worsened by another 40 centimetres (16 in).
The minaret, designed by Bako, was built on an earlier existing structure called Kalyan by the Qarakhanid ruler Mohammad Arslan Khan in 1127 to summon Muslims to prayer five times a day. An earlier tower was collapsed before starting this structure which was called Kalyan, meaning welfare, indicating a Buddhist or zoroasterian past.
For three centuries, the al-Siraji Mosque, with its minaret fashioned from weathered bricks and its pinnacle inlaid with blue ceramic tiles, was a distinctive feature of the city of Basra in ...
The minaret's spiral shape inspired Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Philip Johnson's design for the 1976 Chapel of Thanksgiving at Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas, in the United States. [26] [27] [28] The minarets of a prominent Emirati mosque, that of Sheikh Khalifa in Al Ain, have been also been inspired by this minaret. [29]
'Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth') was a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk in the ancient city of Babylon. It now exists only in ruins, located about 90 kilometres (56 mi) south of Baghdad, Iraq. Many scholars have identified Etemenanki as the ziggurat for the biblical account of the Tower of Babel. [1] [2]