Mihrab

A mihrab is the niche set into the qibla wall of a mosque, the wall that faces toward the Kaaba in Mecca and toward which every worshipper turns in prayer. Typically semicircular or polygonal in plan and capped with a half dome or a shell-shaped hood, the niche is usually the most richly decorated surface in the building, carrying calligraphic bands of Quranic verse, glazed tilework, carved stucco or marble inlay depending on region and period. Its function is orientation rather than enclosure: the mihrab holds nothing and admits no one, and its recess exists only to catch the eye and the voice.

The imam stands at or just in front of the mihrab to lead the five daily prayers, and its concave form is often credited with helping project his recitation of the Quran back across the rows of the congregation, though scholars caution that the acoustic benefit is secondary to the symbolic one. Every mosque has exactly one mihrab on its qibla wall, however large the building; a second niche elsewhere in the plan, when one appears, marks a different function such as a subsidiary prayer space rather than a second direction of prayer. The mihrab's centrality to mosque design means it is usually the first element built and the last to be altered, so its style often preserves the clearest evidence of a mosque's original decorative program even where later renovation has changed the rest of the building around it.

The niche form of the mihrab was not part of the earliest mosques. The Prophet's Mosque in Medina and other seventh century foundations marked the qibla with a flat wall or a mark alone, and the earliest securely dated concave mihrab niches appear in Umayyad building of the early eighth century, including the renovated Prophet's Mosque under al-Walid I. From there the form spread quickly across the expanding Islamic world and became a near-universal marker of a functioning mosque, adopted with remarkable consistency of concept even as its decoration diverged sharply by region: Ottoman mihrabs favor Iznik tilework in blue and turquoise geometric and floral patterns, Persian and Central Asian examples build up glazed tile mosaic and muqarnas hoods of extraordinary intricacy, Moorish and North African mihrabs in buildings such as the Great Mosque of Cordoba use interlacing polylobed arches and gold mosaic influenced by Byzantine craftsmen, and mihrabs across the Indian subcontinent combine carved red sandstone or marble with inlay techniques shared with contemporary Hindu and Jain temple carving.

Because the niche has no structural load-bearing role, it became the element architects and patrons were freest to elaborate without engineering constraint, and surviving mihrabs are consequently among the richest single data points historians have for tracing the movement of craftsmen, materials and ornamental vocabulary across the medieval Islamic world.