The Great Mosque of Samarra.

I think this is a beautiful Mosque.




I was reading in a book that scholars are still in the dark as to why they chose a spiral shape, if it had any special meaning...

Why don't you learn the history behind the mosque, perhaps you'd rethink that.

Hkot, that sneering response is uncalled for. If you have some information on the mosque then share it, otherwise you add nothing to the conversation at all.

I found a link hee i-cias.com... to the history, totally inocous.

Although it doesn't spin my dial its still a great work of building.

www.geocities.com...
This spiral minaret, where the muezzin once called the faithful to prayer, is the only surviving feature of the Great Mosque at Samarra�, Iraq. At the time of its construction (848-852), the Great Mosque at Samarra� was the largest Islamic mosque in the world.

Not quite sure why everyone's spelling it with two "r's", but it's a remarkable building and a zillion site on "Samara mosque" or something similar.
Best bet on shape -influence of Mesopotamian patterns, ziggurat onwards, and it's a relatively easy way to build big things. ( just like pyramids and ziggurat and kiddies' sand-castles)

"Why don't you learn the history behind the mosque, perhaps you'd rethink that."
Well lets see I am entitled to my opinion and my opinion is that it is a beautiful building.


Would you like to elaborate or would you like to tell me the reason for your hate of Islam, such blind hate is the reason why the biological notion of ethnicity has led to Nazi racist ideology and even to the recent drive toward "ethnic cleanising" in former Yugoslavia. or do you believe it hasnt?



[Edited on 4-5-2003 by Lysergic]

Built around 848-849, the Great Mosque at Samara is the most memorable architectural image in Iraq. The Great Mosque was the Abbasid capital in central Iraq. It is one of the largest mosque taking up 240 x 160 m, and was built with baked bricks. The most famous feature is the spiral minaret, also called the al - Malwiyya. The minaret rises up 52 meters and may have been influenced by the earlier Mesopotamian ziggurats.

This mosque was built by al-Mu'tasim when he moved to Samarra at a time when it could no longer take in the large numbers of people, al-Mutawakel built another great mosque in (234 BC-849 AD) and enlarged its area to become the biggest mosque in the world. Its area was 38,000 square meters. It was designed to hold eighty thousand worshipers. Its brick walls surround a rectangular area about 240 meter in length, 158 meters in width and 10 meters in height. It has 23 doors, five of which are in the northern corner and eight in the eastern and western corners with two doors open in the niche wall.

The spiral Malwiya Minaret is about 25 meters far from the mosque's northern wall. It lies exactly on its middle axis. It stands on a quadrangular basis of 32 meters for each side. Above it there is a spiral building with stairs of 2,3 meters in width and starts from the middle of the eastern side of the basis and turns anti-clock-wise completing by this five rounds that end in a small cylindrical room of a 6-meter radius. Its is decorated with 8 arcs from the outside. Each arc is erected on two small brick posts. One of these posts forms a door where the ascent ends and leads to a small ladder that ends on the top of the minaret.

BBC History: The Lost Palaces of Iraq

Major Monuments in the Muslim World

Islamic Golden Age

Architecture in Medieval Islamic Empires

Lysergic you put words in my mouth.

Not once did I express any hate of "Islam".

I merely am pointing to the "history" of the mosque that might have made you rethink your feelings. The mosque wasn't so much a symbol of beauty as they were a symbol of domination.

Why don't you learn the history behind the mosque, perhaps you'd rethink that."
Well lets see I am entitled to my opinion and my opinion is that it is a beautiful building.

It could've been a temple built for kool-aid transporters and I would've said the exact same thing.

I find the architecture to be beautiful, then you had to go and say that, you ASSume I knew nothing about it. As if you are the only person to have any knowledge of anything, I think you have some sort of personality complex. Leaning towards an inferiority complex, but hey thats just me, thinking outloud.