Muslim Place of Worship

        “Truly the only way acceptable to Allah is Islam.”  (Quran 3:19)

        In 610 CE, Allah ordained the final Prophet He would send to Earth.  This concluding Prophet was Muhammad ibn Abdullah.  Though he was born in the Arabian Peninsula, he was sent to all human races.  He was custom-made to deliver a message from Allah to Arabs and non-Arabs alike.

        The message was the same one, which Allah had sent down to the earliest humans.  It contained an account of the way of life which Allah had customary for people to adhere to whilst they reside here on Earth.  By agreeing to follow this way of life, people would effectively be surrendering themselves to Allah.  The name of this way of life was simply ‘submission’.  In Arabic, this is Islam.

        The message of Islam transmitted in only two ways: in the form of a book, and in the living example of the Prophet.  These two are the foundation for a way of life which is satisfactory to both the mind and the heart.  Islam includes surrendering to Allah in the field of politics, economics, law, etc.

        Islam is based on five pillars:- (1) To bear witness that there is no God except Allah and that Muhammad is his servant and messenger, (2) The performance of Salah [prayer], (3) The giving of Zakat [charity] (4) The ritual of Pilgrimage, (5) and the fasting in the month of Ramadhan.

From the above pillars the second pillar, Salah, if not all the pillars, is mainly associated with the Muslim place of worship i.e. The Mosque as will be discussed later.

        Among the most perceptible aspect of a religion are those sacred places either built as traditional grounds or else selected from nature through connection with the history and mythology of a religion.

        The different names given to sacred places are among those which reveal the fact that sacred places are elementary elements of religion.  Most people know that Hindus and Buddhists have temples, that Sikhs meet at Gurdwaras, Jews at Synagogues, Christians at Churches, and Muslims at Mosques.  But simply listing places of worship simply neglects the fact that they are not the only, and sometimes are not even the prime, sacred places for a religion.  To sketch the detailed picture, these regular sites of summit and worship need to be set within a framework of sites of special historical implication, principally those where some vital revelation was attained by a religious initiator.

        Makkah for example, is a historically momentous place for Muslims, while the Mosques where they worship day by day have a different level of significance regardless of the obvious link that all worship takes place facing Makkah.

        The ritual of local sacred places is linked to the key sacred place or events of a tradition like Makkah.

        In terms of religious studies one of the advantages of central sacred sites is that they lead to a mixing of many cultural diversities amongst devotees.

        Islam argues that all things are potentially sacred, but goes on to say that they entail a suitably sacred thing to materialize their own personality.

        It is also important to know that sacred places are not only prehistoric places.

        Many sacred places share the fact of stressing links with their initiator or other important figures in the history of a religion.  The historian of religion, Mircea Eliade has pointed out the most fascinating fact that many sacred places in different regions are, for example, said to symbolize the centre of the universe.  Such sacred places are ‘meeting points between heaven an Earth’, ‘a point of junction between Earth, heaven and hell, the navel of the Earth, a meeting place for the three cosmic regions’ (1958:- 375).  Eliade went on to show how the structural design and imagery of many sacred places, including temples and churches as well as Mosques, echo something of the central sacred place of a district.

        The longer the region exists in a specific environmental area, the more likely it is to authenticate and create new sacred places in the new province.

        However religions can be exportable and sacred places can be established not simply by overwhelming natural sites, or by primordial revelation, but also by a party of people.

        It is often stated that Islam makes no distinction between ‘religion’ (deen) and ‘world’ (dunya,) it is possibly more precise to say that it aims in all spheres of life.  Pursuing this judgment it is completely possible to dispute that, for Muslims, no place, or building, is particularly more sacred, or holy, than any other.  However In slam is a realistic religion whose practical view of human nature includes a weighty awareness of the significance of representation.  It knows full well that, although in theory the sacred is to be found everywhere, if people lack anything on which they can particularly centre their consciousness of the sacred.  It will be too dispersing, too universal, to complete their religious and mental desires for sustenance.  In practice if all is sacred, nothing will be, so Islam, like other religious customs, does not have its notion of the ‘sacred place’.  However while Islam does specify certain places as ‘sacred’, it never loses sight of its basic confidence that all space is sacred place, and, though worship, structural design and traditional city planning, tries to socialize all space by extending the ‘sacred’ into the ‘secular’.

        However Islam’s concern is that Mosques particularly are not seen as holy spaces separated from natural space but an extension into a man-made surrounding of the space of virgin nature.  

        Likewise because Islam wants to assert the holiness of any halal (permitted) action, the conventional Mosque often opens out into commercial, instructive and even into a leisure space, therefore purifying these performances too.

        Though there are some very precise motives of observing a Mosque as holy, one frequent factor is that, it has been sanctified by use.  Use, or purpose, itself sanctifies.  It can be said that a Mosque is essentially no more sacred than any other structure.  It is not blessed by a special service performed by a special person.  Yet Muslims speak of the Mosque as ‘consecrated space;’ because Mosques are ‘set aside’ for prayer, people do not enter them without performing ablution, and prayer is customarily and repeatedly offered there.

        The birth of Islam in Arabia in the seventh century A.D. shook the modern world.  The third great religion of the book, was based on the preaching of Muhammad (saw).

        With the new religion came new customs and new rituals insisting special buildings.  The construction which Muhammad created in Medinah became the sample of all Mosques.  The Mosque was a sole place of prayer that met the requirements of the - Muslim faithful and became a centre for a special kind of meeting.

        This has now raised my main issue which will be discussed later.

        My aim now is to discuss the main features of a Sunni Mosque, but before I begin I will briefly discuss the two main sects of Muslims.

        There are two main groups of Muslims, one being the Sunni Muslims and secondly the Shia Muslims.

Shites are Muslims who follow the tradition represented by Ali, the husband of the Prophets daughter, Fatima.  For them, the heir to the authority of the caliphate should be a direct descendent of Muhammad.  Shites differ from the orthodox Sunnis in the importance given to the role of the caliph.

Sunni Muslims are followers of the orthodox Islam based on the Sunnah who recognise the four first caliphs of Medina as heads of the Muslim community, followed later by the Umayyads and the Abbasids.

        I will now begin in discussing one of the main issues, the features of a Sunni Mosque.

In its capacity as a house of worship, the Mosque has a standardised assembly of component parts, subject to minor difference depending, for example, on whether a particular building is a small village sanctuary intended largely for individual prayer, a congregational or district Mosque, or the principal Friday Mosque in any city or community.  When women attended the Mosque, they remained isolated from male worshippers, either by screens or occupying a separate part of the building such as gallery.

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Before talking of the features of a specific Mosque I would like to mention that there are three most important Mosques in the world which the Quran has mentioned.  They are the Mosque of Haram in Makkah (Ka’aba), the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina and the Dome of the Rock (Al Aqsa) in Jerusalem.

        The first Mosque in history of Islam was the Mosque of Quba near Medina.  The Prophet during his migration to Medina erected this.

        The specific mosque whose features I have chose to discuss is called Masjid-e-Anisul Islam, which is situated in Blackburn ...

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