Umm al Qura mosque

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Umm-al-Qura Mosque (2003)

The Umm-al-Qura Mosque ( Arabic جامع أم القرى, DMG Ǧāmiʿ Umm al-Qurā ) is a Sunni mosque in the al-Ghazaliyya district in western Baghdad . It is the largest mosque in the city and the headquarters of Baghdad's mosque administration. The name means mother of all cities - a synonym for the Islamic pilgrimage city of Mecca .

history

Umm-al-Qura Mosque (April 2004)

The mosque was built on the occasion of the "victory" of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the Second Gulf War . Its original name was Umm al-Ma'arik (" mother of all battles "). This is the name Hussein gave to the Second Gulf War. The foundation stone was laid on April 28, 1998, Hussein's 65th birthday; it was completed on April 28, 2001. A basin in the shape of the Arab world is laid out around the mosque . After Saddam Hussein's rule, the mosque was renamed.

A New York Times report published in December 2002 suggested that the outer four minarets each represented the barrel of an AK-47 and the inner four each represented a Scud missile. However, this reading was criticized by architecture critic Deyan Sudjic as war propaganda that helped legitimize the USA's entry into the war.

On August 28, 2011, a suicide bomber disguised as a beggar broke into the mosque and killed at least 28 people, including children and a member of parliament.

additional

The mosque also housed the so-called blood Koran , which was supposedly written with his blood during Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. After Hussein's death this Koran was withdrawn from circulation, but it could not be destroyed because it is forbidden in Islam to destroy the Koran.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Suicide attack on mosque. sueddeutsche.de , August 29, 2011, accessed on August 29, 2011 .
  2. ↑ Mudhafer Al-Husaini: Today Was a Good Day ... . In: At War: Notes from the Front Lines , nytimes.com , November 28, 2008.
  3. ↑ John F. Burns: Threats and RESPONSES: THE IRAQI LEADER; Hussein's Obsession: An Empire of Mosques ( Memento of March 30, 2019 in the Internet Archive ). nytimes.com, December 15, 2002 (English).
  4. ^ Deyan Sudjic: The Edifice Complex . Penguin Books, London 2005, ISBN 978-0-141-96921-3 ( digitized from Google Books ).
  5. ↑ 28 people die in attack on mosque. welt.de , August 29, 2011, accessed on September 2, 2011 .
  6. ↑ Iraqi leader's Koran 'written in blood'. In: BBC News . September 25, 2000, accessed September 27, 2019 .
  7. ↑ David Blair: Saddam has Koran written in his blood. telegraph.co.uk , December 14, 2002, accessed May 2, 2013 .

Coordinates: 33 ° 20 ′ 15.8 ″  N , 44 ° 17 ′ 45.8 ″  E