Sayyida Nafisa Mosque

Notes

Beyond its function, the building, with its formal subtly and modesty, doesn’t stand out. Only a simple classical minaret is visible from the streets.

?The architect was commissioned to design this mosque right after his graduation. His intent was to design simple and rational modern architecture. Madfai’s approach to the mosque design aimed at deconstructing all the components and elements of the Islamic architecture and taking them back to their abstract initial geometrical form. Formally, this was translated into a prayer hall, rectangular in plan, sheltered with an assembly of three attached barreled vaults, arranged in descending size. Inside, the user perceives a pure white space, stripped of any ornamentation or calligrapher art, with the structure apparent. The beams along the arches’ intersections are supported with a series of circular pistachio-painted columns. Sand bricks with black groove lines are used to clad the entirety of the exterior facades.

When inaugurated, the building received an intense critical campaign led by conservative Islamic figures. They refused the mosque’s simplicity and banned any prayer to occur in there, partly in repulsion to the westernization of their practices. As a result, the architect adapted the design especially in the mosque’s minaret. Originally, the minaret had a simplified shape, stripped of the usual pulpit, where the sheikh does the call for prayer, and replaced it with microphones as a sign of modernization. After the changes in the design, the minaret took a more classical form with ornamentation followed by the addition of colors and some calligraphical representations in the interior.

Sources

Khaled al-Sultany, Study on Representations of Architectural modernity in Iraq, Amman: Adib Books, 2021, p. 184-187.

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