minaret

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra was built in 852 and is one of the oldest preserved minarets.
The minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech , built by the Almohads around 1180, is based on the ancient lighthouse of Pharos , according to al-Marrākuschī .
The minarets of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul , built around 1615, show the classic Ottoman style: Round shaft below (Turkish gövde ), balcony ( şerefe ), upper shaft ( petek ), pointed cone roof ( külah ) and crowning ( alem ).
The Hiran Minar (around 1600) in the Mughal residence city of Fatehpur Sikri is not tied to a mosque; it probably served as an observation or hunting tower.

A minaret (rarely minar , Arabic منارة manāra , originally: "lighthouse", orمئذنة / miʾḏana ) is an elevated stand or tower for the caller to prayer ( muezzin ) at or near a mosque ; from here Muslims are called to prayer five times a day. Even secular towers of the Islamic world have the Minar are referred to, such as the chorus Minar or Hashtsal Minar in or near Delhi and the Hiran Minar in Fatehpur Sikri .

etymology

Minaret is a borrowing from the French word minaret , which is derived from the feminine manāra  /منارةto manār  /منارcomes from Arabic and originally "lighthouse", literally "place of light" or "place of fire" ( nār  /نَار / 'Fire'), meant and denoted any elevated place from which one could give signs with fire or smoke. The Hebrew word menorah is formed from the same Semitic stem and denotes a seven-armed candlestick that was destroyed in antiquity and has become one of the most important symbols of Judaism .

history

The first minaret was probably built in Syria , other historians consider the minaret of the mosque of Qairawān in Tunisia to be the oldest. It has been in use since the ruling Umayyad family (661–750). In some of the oldest mosques such as the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus , minarets originally served as torch-lit watchtowers - hence the word origin from Arabic only  /نور / 'Light'. Today, however, a minaret largely serves as an architectural decorative or representational element that is traditionally rooted in tradition, since the calls to prayer ( Adhān  /أذان) in most modern mosques are called out from the prayer room using loudspeakers.

architecture

For reasons of building symmetry and aesthetics as well as the status of the client, the number of minarets is sometimes increased to two, four or six; the al-Haram mosque in Mecca even has nine minarets. Most mosques only have a single minaret attached to the mosque. Formally, one differentiates between minarets with round, square and polygonal (mostly octagonal) ground plan, which in Ottoman architecture were often given needle-shaped points. Their floors are often structured by surrounding balconies; the decorative outer structure is done by colored glazed bricks, brick mosaics or calligraphic characters (see the minaret of Jām or Qutub Minar ). Optical protrusions and recesses are created by niches and cornices. Minarets often have a small, openwork top, which is often referred to in the specialist literature as a lantern ; in Indo-Islamic architecture these essays are called chhatris .

At around 72 meters, the Qutub Minar , built around 1300 in the south of the Indian city of Delhi , was for a long time the tallest building in the Islamic world. The currently highest minaret in the world at 210 meters is located in Casablanca as part of the Hassan II Mosque . The tallest brick minaret, Qutub Minar, stands in Delhi. The Giralda in Seville , built by the Almohads at the end of the 12th century, is considered the most beautiful minaret in southern Europe . The tallest minaret in the world at 265 meters is due to be completed in Algiers in summer 2016.

meaning

The minaret is not only the symbol of a mosque, it also served as a watchtower . As a signal tower, minarets served as orientation for caravans . The White Minaret in the north Indian city of Qadian is a symbol of the Ahmadiyya .

On certain Islamic holidays in Turkey, minarets are decorated with lights and banners ( mahya ).

special cases

Special cases are the decorative minarets assigned to some Central Asian and Indian tombs of the Mughal period and mostly meant to be decorative or representative: Gur-Emir-Mausoleum ( Samarkand ), Akbar-Mausoleum ( Sikandra ) and Itmad-ud-Daulah Mausoleum ( Agra ). The four framing minarets of the Taj Mahal (Agra) and the Bibi-Ka-Maqbara ( Aurangabad ) should also be mentioned in this context, but the overall complex of the last two buildings includes a mosque without its own minarets - even if it is only placed on the periphery . Another special case are the four minaret-like towers on the Charminar gate in Hyderabad, built in 1591 and mainly used for representative purposes .

In the Qajar Iran called the muezzin of Guldastas , wooden pavilion at the Ivan -Dächern the Hofmoscheen, instead of minarets in prayer.

Building ban on minarets

The Swiss minaret dispute culminated in a referendum held in 2009 , the result of which led to a construction ban on minarets in Switzerland. Islam-critical and Islamophobic parties in other European countries welcome the result of the Swiss vote and are working towards a corresponding building ban in their countries: the AfD in Germany, the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, the Front National in France and the Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark . In Germany there are 206 minarets (as of 2009), in Austria and Switzerland there are 4 minarets each (as of 2014).

literature

  • Jonathan Bloom: Minaret - Symbol of Islam . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1989.
  • KAC Creswell : The Evolution of the Minaret, with special reference to Egypt. In: The Burlington Magazine, XLVIII, 1926, pp. 134-140, 252-258, 290-298.
  • Robert Hillenbrand , J. Burton-Page, GSP Freeman-Grenville: Manāra, Manār. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Volume 6. Brill, Leiden 1987, pp. 361b-370b.
  • Robert Hillenbrand: Islamic Architecture. Form, function and meaning. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1994, Chapter: The Minaret , pp. 129-172.
  • Wolfram Kleiss: Minaret. In: Encyclopædia Iranica

Web links

Commons : Minaret  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Minaret  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quotation of the chronicler al-Marrākuschī ( The history of the Almohades, preceded by a sketch of the history of Spain from the time of the conquest till the reign of Yúsof ibn-Téshúfin, and of the history of the Almoravides. Edition Dozy p. 193): “When the Almohad Sultan Abu Yusuf Jakub al-Mansur founded the city ... he built a large mosque with a very high minaret in the shape of Pharos of Alexandria. One could climb in it without stairs (i.e. on ramps) so that the pack animals could go up to the highest point with clay, bricks, plaster and all the necessary material. ”(Quoted from Hermann Thiersch : Pharos: Antike, Islam und Occident; a contribution on the history of architecture . Leipzig, Berlin 1909, p. 131 ); on the dependence of the early, especially Egyptian, minarets on the model of Pharos see: Robert Hillenbrand: Manāra, Manār. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Volume 6. Brill, Leiden 1987, pp. 361-368, here: p. 367; Lorenz Korn: The mosque. Architecture and religious life. CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63332-4 , p. 42.
  2. ↑ Brockhaus Encyclopedia in twenty volumes, 1971, p. 577
  3. ↑ For the etymology see Lorenz Korn: Die Moschee. Architecture and religious life. CH Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63332-4 , p. 42; Robert Hillenbrand, J. Burton-Page, GSP Freeman-Grenville: Manāra, Manār. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Volume 6. Brill, Leiden 1987, p. 362b; for the meaning see Joseph Sadan, Jonathon Fraenkel: Manār, Manāra. In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Volume 6. Brill, Leiden 1987, pp. 358b-360a, esp. 585b, also for use in European languages.
  4. ↑ Linda Kay Davidson: Pilgrimage. ABC-CLIO, 2002, ISBN 978-1-57607-004-8 , p. 302. Restricted preview in the Google book search
  5. ^ John Hoag: Islamic Architecture. Belser, Stuttgart 1976, p. 111, ISBN 978-3-7630-1704-1 ; Markus Hattstein, Peter Delius (Ed.): Islam. Art and architecture. Könemann, Cologne 2000, p. 337.
  6. ↑ rp-online: Highest minaret in the world - Germans build giant mosques ( Memento of the original from December 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; July 17, 2008. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rp-online.de
  7. ↑ Structurae: Mosque of Algiers - photos + information
  8. ↑ AJ Wensinck, JH Kramers: Concise Dictionary of Islam ; EJ Brill, Leiden, 1941; P. 413f.
  9. ↑ Muslims and leftists oppose von Storch. Time online, April 17, 2016
  10. ↑ Danish, Dutch Populist Parties Want Referendums On Minaret Ban. Radion Free Europe, September 30, 2009
  11. ↑ Statistics portal
  12. ^ Islam in Salzburg and Austria: facts and figures. , salzburg24.at on November 14, 2014 (accessed on May 2, 2016).
  13. ↑ Five years later: the ban on minarets is not absolute. In: Aargauer Zeitung , November 29, 2014 (accessed on May 2, 2016).