Minaret
Minarets are generally used to project the Muslim call to prayer (adhan) from a muezzin, but they also served as landmarks and symbols of Islam's presence.
[5]: 46 [6]: 132 The Arabic word manāra (plural: manārāt) originally meant a "lamp stand", a cognate of Hebrew menorah.
[5]: 46–47 The formal function of a minaret is to provide a vantage point from which the muezzin can issue the call to prayer, or adhan.
[3] The call to prayer is issued five times each day: dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night.
[7] In most modern mosques, the adhān is called from the musallah (prayer hall) via microphone to a speaker system on the minaret.
Some minarets have two or three narrow staircases fitted inside one another in order to allow multiple individuals to safely descend and ascend simultaneously.
[12][3] At the top of the stairs, a balcony encircles the upper sections of the tower and from here the muezzin may give the call to prayer.
[3] The summit often finishes in a lantern-like structure and/or a small dome, conical roof, or curving stone cap, which is in turn topped by a decorative metal finial.
[18] Many 19th-century and early 20th-century scholars traced the origin of minarets to the Umayyad Caliphate period (661–750) and believed that they imitated the church steeples found in Syria in those times.
[5]: 12 In 1989 Jonathan Bloom published a new study which argued that the first true minaret towers did not appear until the 9th century, under Abbasid rule, and that their initial purpose was not related to the call to prayer.
[10][5] References on Islamic architecture since the late 20th century often agree with Bloom's view that the mosques of the Umayyad Caliphate did not have minarets in the form of towers.
[21][22][23][3] Instead of towers, some Umayyad mosques were built with platforms or shelters above their roofs that were accessed by a staircase and from which the muezzins could issue the call to prayer.
[28]: 21 [5]: 49–50 Historical sources also reference an earlier manāra, built of stone, being added to the mosque of Basra in 665 by the Umayyad provincial governor,[24] but it is not entirely clear if it was a tower or what form it had, though it must have had a monumental appearance.
[5]: 79 One of the oldest minarets still standing is that of the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, built in 836 and well-preserved today.
[5]: 76 The earlier theory which proposed that these helicoidal minarets were inspired by ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats has been challenged and rejected by some later scholars including Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar, and Jonathan Bloom.
[28]: 30 [30] Bloom also argues that the early Abbasid minarets were not built to host the call to prayer, but were instead adopted as symbols of Islam that were suited to important congregational mosques.
Shortly after their construction, the lower sections of the minarets were encased in massive square bastions, for reasons that are not clearly known, and the tops were rebuilt in 1303 by a Mamluk sultan.
Most distinctively, the summits of minarets had a lantern structure topped by a pointed ribbed dome, whose appearance was compared to a mabkhara, or incense burner.
[36]: 77–80 [35]: 30 [37] The minaret of the al-Maridani Mosque (circa 1340) is the first one to have an entirely octagonal shaft and the first one to end with a narrow lantern structure consisting of eight slender columns topped by a bulbous stone finial.
Minarets with completely square or rectangular shafts reappeared at the very end of the Mamluk period during the reign of Sultan al-Ghuri (r. 1501–1516).
Starting with the Seljuk period (11th and 12th centuries), minarets in Iran had cylindrical shafts with square or octagonal bases that taper towards their summit.
[43]: 312 Minarets in the Maghreb (region encompassing present-day Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, and Western Sahara) and historical al-Andalus (present-day Gibraltar, Portugal, Spain, and Southern France) traditionally have a square shaft and are arranged in two tiers: the main shaft, which makes up most of its height, and a much smaller secondary tower above this which is in turn topped by a finial of copper or brass spheres.
[3][8] It has the shape of a massive tower with a square base, three levels of decreasing widths, and a total height of 31.5 meters.
[48]: 372 Ottoman architecture followed earlier Seljuk models and continued the Iranian tradition of cylindrical tapering minaret forms with a square base.
[3][24] Classical Ottoman minarets are described as "pencil-shaped" due to their slenderness and sharply-pointed summits, often topped with a crescent moon symbol.
