Minbar
A minbar (Arabic: منبر; sometimes romanized as mimber) is a pulpit in a mosque where the imam (leader of prayers) stands to deliver sermons (خطبة, khutbah).
[3][4] In some mosques, there is an elevated platform – dikka in Arabic or müezzin mahfil in Turkish – opposite the minbar where the assistant of the imam, the muezzin, stands during prayer.
During the Umayyad period, the minbar was used by the caliphs or their representative governors to make important public announcements and to deliver the Friday sermon (khutba).
More importantly, it was the setting for the weekly Friday sermon which, notably, usually mentioned the name of the current Muslim ruler over the community and included other public announcements of a religious or political nature.
[3][6] As a result, later Muslim rulers sometimes invested considerable expense in commissioning richly-decorated minbars for the main mosques of their major cities.
[8][3] Woodwork was the primary medium for the construction of minbars in much of the Middle East and North Africa up until the Ottoman period.
Many workshops created minbars that were assembled from hundreds of pieces held together using an interlocking technique and wooden pegs, but without glue or metal nails.
[9] The oldest surviving example is the Minbar of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, commissioned in 1091 under the Fatimids, originally for a shrine in Ascalon.
Its balustrades were made of turned wood assembled into a grille with more geometric designs, framed by Arabic inscriptions.
[3] The Great Mosque of Cordoba (in present-day Spain) hosted a famous minbar fabricated circa 975 on the orders of al-Hakam II.
[6]: 47, 51–52 The next oldest Maghrebi minbar to survive is that of the Great Mosque of Nedroma, dated to around 1086, but only some fragments of its original structure remain.
[3] In Iran, Mesopotomia, and Anatolia, some wooden minbars preserved from the 11th and 12th centuries are carved with vegetal beveled-style motifs.
[16] From the subsequent Timurid period, the most important example is the minbar of the Mosque of Gowhar Shad in Mashhad, fabricated between 1336 and 1446.
Only fragments of it have been preserved (kept at the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo), but they attest to some of the highest-quality stonework from the Mamluk period.
[19][20] The stone minbar of the Mosque of Sultan Hasan in Cairo (circa 1360) is relatively plain, though it has unusually ornate bronze doors.
[3] An exceptional early minbar is that of the Ahmed Pasha Mosque in Amasya, which has extensive finely-carved floral decoration.
[3] Minbars were highly variable in style and size on the Indian subcontinent, but stone was the favoured material throughout the region.
One of the most elegant examples of the canopied type is the minbar in the Friday Mosque of Mandu in the Malwa region, dated to 1454, which has a dome in the local style upheld by curving brackets.
[1] In both the Gujarat and Malwa regions, the first step of the minbar is often preceded by a small square platform whose original purpose is unclear.
In the Mughal Empire, some minbars also had a simple design form with three steps, but they sometimes had flourishes such as a highly-polished or inlaid marble finish (especially under Shah Jahan) or a pierced stone balustrade.
