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The Great Mosque of Cordoba

© Alia F. Hasan

Although its exterior has gone through many transformations, the interior of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in Spain is probably one of the best known in Islamic architecture. Today from a distance, this structure is almost unrecognizable as an Islamic monument but to view its hypostyle interior with the multicolored patterned stone archways is to take oneself back to the golden age of Muslim Spain.

The Current Mosque

These days the mosque is an awkward assortment of architectural styles, with its many phases of Islamic expansion combined with a later Gothic transformation. It measures in plan about 190 by 140 meters total with a significant portion taken up by the courtyard at one end surrounded by the portico ( arcade). At the other end is the hall of seventeen naves and sixteen arcades oriented to what was falsely assumed to be the direction of Mecca. During the Gothic transformation a Gothic cathedral was placed in the middle of this hall and large Gothic buttresses placed on the outside wall.

The Four Islamic Phases

The mosque was first built in 784-6 CE supposedly on the site of a former Church. The original hall was as small as nine naves and twelve bays arranged perpendicularly to the qibla wall (the wall facing Mecca). During the reign of Abd-al Rahman II (833-52), the hall was lengthened by eight bays and possibly widened by two naves. The second expansion came during the reign of al-Hakam II (961-76) who more than doubled the original size by adding twelve bays. He also added a dome over the central nave and an intricately decorated mihrab to the qibla wall as well as three more domes there. According to Oleg Grabar in The Art and Architecture of Islam, 650-1250 it was also at this time that "the area in front of the mihrab was separated from the rest of the mosque, constituting a maqsura" (p129). A maqsura is a decorated screen which encloses the mihrab area and was normally intended as a protection for the caliph, who would pray in this area, from assassination attempts. In 987 during the reign of caliph Hisham, al-Mansur who was the minister of the caliph had the hall widened along one side by eight naves. This was an attempt to reconcile the early concept of a traditional ratio of width to length with the many expansions, but doing so offset the symmetry of the hall. The last Islamic phase constitutes the various but less significant additions by several Ummayad princes during the ninth and tenth centuries.

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