The Great Mosque of Djenné (Arabic: الجامع الكبير في جينيه, romanized: al-Jāmiʻ al-Kabīr fī Jinih) is a large brick or adobe building in the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style.

[1] The earliest document mentioning the mosque is Abd al-Sadi's Tarikh al-Sudan which gives the early history, presumably from the oral tradition as it existed in the mid-seventeenth century.

"[4] Ten years before René Caillié's visit, the Fulani leader Seku Amadu had launched his jihad and conquered the town.

[8] In his 1897 book, Tombouctou la Mystérieuse (Timbuktu the mysterious), Dubois provides a plan and a drawing as to how he imagined the mosque looked before being abandoned.

[1] From photographs taken at the time,[1] it appears the position of at least some of the outer walls follows those of the original mosque but it is unclear as to whether the columns supporting the roof kept to the previous arrangement.

He believed that the French colonial administration were responsible for the design and wrote that it looked like a cross between a hedgehog and a church organ.

[13] French ethnologist Michel Leiris, in his account of travelling through Mali in 1931, states that the new mosque is indeed the work of Europeans.

[17] Early in the French colonial period, a pond located on the eastern side of the mosque was filled with earth to create the open area that is now used for the weekly market.

While the Great Mosque has been equipped with a loudspeaker system, the citizens of Djenné have resisted modernization in favor of the building's historical integrity.

The walls of the building are decorated with bundles of rodier palm (Borassus aethiopum) sticks, called toron, that project about 60 cm (2.0 ft) from the surface.

[23] The eastern wall is about a meter (3 ft) in thickness and is strengthened on the exterior by eighteen pilaster like buttresses, each of which is topped by a pinnacle.

[24] This design creates a forest of ninety massive rectangular pillars that span the interior prayer hall and severely reduce the field of view.

The small, irregularly-positioned windows on the north and south walls allow little natural light to reach the interior of the hall.

A narrow opening in the ceiling of the central mihrab connects with a small room situated above roof level in the tower.

Rather than a single central niche, the mihrab tower originally had a pair of large recesses echoing the form of the entrance arches in the north wall.

[29] The entire community of Djenné takes an active role in the mosque's maintenance via a unique annual festival.

The imitation, the Missiri mosque, was built in cement and painted in red ochre to resemble the colour of the original.

It was intended to serve as a mosque for the Tirailleurs sénégalais, the West African colonial troops in the French Army who were posted to the region during the winter.

The original mosque presided over one of the most important Islamic learning centers in Africa during the Middle Ages, with thousands of students coming to study the Quran in Djenné's madrassas.

The historic areas of Djenné, including the Great Mosque, were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1988.

In the mosque the mob ripped out the ventilation fans that had been presented by the US Embassy at the time of the Iraq War and then went on a rampage through the town.

[35][36] This formed part of the Zamani Project that aims to document cultural heritage sites in 3D to create a record for future generations.