The mosque is located within the 15,058-hectare (37,210-acre) Samarra Archaeological City UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 2007.

[4] Al-Mutawakkil and his hired workers as well as other people from the area constructed this mosque using baked brick octagon piers that included four marble columns in the corners.

The marble columns were imported, which draws on the fact that Al-Mutawakkil hired artists and architects from all over the Abbasid empire to help him construct the Great Mosque.

[5] In a list of his building projects which appears in several different versions, the new Congregational Mosque and up to twenty palaces are mentioned, totalling between 258 and 294 million dirhams.

[7] At the time of construction, another major feature of Samarra was the inlets of the great Nahrawan canal.

The Great Mosque was built right outside this main area and became a staple for the people of Samarra as well as visitors and foreigners.

[9] The Iraqi State Organization of Antiquities have been working closely with historians and architects in a restoration process starting in 1956.

This fountain was believed to be carved from one large stone (called a kasat al-fir'awn or, the Pharaoh's Cup) and carried to this area by elephants.

For the most part the interior is plain and the focus was a strong foundation set by a continuous brick slab holding together these pillars.

It is visible from a considerable distance in the area around Samarra and therefore may have been designed as a strong visual statement of the presence of Islam in the Tigris Valley.

[21] This design, completed under al-Mutawakkil, was unlike other minarets created in this time or anything else seen in the Islamic world because of its base's shape.

[23] These earlier theories which proposed that these helicoidal minarets were inspired by ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats has been challenged and rejected by some modern scholars including Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar, and Jonathan Bloom.

[24][25] 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.