The Great Mosque of Samarra

The Great Mosque of Samarra

The Great Mosque of Samarra is located outside the city of Samarra, Iraq, about 120 km north of Baghdad. It was built in the 9th century, by relatively unknown architects and commissioned by the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil. Al-Mutawakkil moved his palace along with his work and supportive forces to Samarra in order to avoid conflict in Baghdad and remained there for the next 56 years. Following his life, a long series of caliphs ruled over the empire from Samarra. During caliph Al-Mutawakkil’s reign, he focused much of his efforts to constructing many great buildings, including the Great Mosque of Samarra, the largest mosque of its time.The Great Mosque sprawled over an area of 17 hectares; the building itself covered 38,000 square meters. It stood proudly for nearly 400 years before it was destroyed by the armies of the Mongol ruler Hulagu Khan in the year 1278. Today, all that is left of this incredible structure is the outside perimeter wall and the spiraling minaret.

The Archnet Digital Library describes the Al-Mutaqakkil Mosque and Minaret al-Malwiya at Samarra in the following manner:"While the outer wall still stands, little remains of the interior of the mosque today. This sizable rectangular structure measured approximately 38,000 square meters and was encompassed by an outer baked brick wall supported by a total of forty-four semi-circular towers including four corner ones. In its time, it was the world's largest mosque. One could enter the mosque through one of sixteen gates. It has been posited that featured over each entrance were several small arched windows. Between each tower, a frieze of sunken square niches with beveled frames runs the upper course of the entire structure. The outer wall included twenty-eight windows with twenty-four of them being on the southern face, one for each of the aisles in the inner sanctuary with the exception of the one with the mihrab. The roof of the mosque was supported by twenty-four rows of nine piers in the sanctuary, three rows of nine piers again in the rival to the north, and each side having twenty-two rows of four piers. A rectangular mihrab with two marble columns on each side could be found positioned in the southern wall of the mosque.”

The most prominent feature of the mosque is its fifty-two-meter spiraling minaret that seems to soar off the desert landscape. The spiraling form is derived from a path that wraps the tower as it ascends the fifty-two-meter distance to the top, where the call to pray was given five times each day, every day, until the mosque destroyed by the Mongols. Allegedly, the caliph Al-Mutawakkil would frequently ride his white, desert donkey up to the height of the tower.

Despairingly, the minaret was partially destroyed in April 2005, when insurgents bombed the tower occupied by US troops. The US military term their occupation on the tower as a lookout, or outpost, however, other sources claim it was a sniper’s post. The British claim that the attacked was directed not towards the U.S. but was carried out by insurgents to ignite Sunni-Shiite violence, thereby destabilizing the country even further. Interestingly, the Iraq State Board of Antiquities ordered the US to vacate the minaret one month prior to the attack. Read more about the attack here. 

Works Cited:"BBC NEWS | the Middle East | Ancient Minaret Damaged in Iraq." BBC News. BBC, 01 Apr. 2005. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.
Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Print."Archnet." Archnet. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2016.