Islamic Architecture Terms for Travellers

Why the words change as you travel

Most of these terms are Arabic in origin, but they reached each region through a different language and got local spellings on the way. Turkish signage writes medrese, turbe and sadirvan where Arabic writes madrasa, turba and a plain word for fountain; Persian and Central Asian usage adds iwan, pishtaq and chahar bagh; South Asian usage brings jali, chhatri and bagh. Transliteration is unstandardised, so the same building may appear as Suleymaniye, Sulaymaniyya or Soliman's mosque within one street.

A second complication is that terms are not always exact synonyms. A Sufi lodge is a khanqah in much of the eastern Islamic world, a tekke in Ottoman lands, a zawiya in the Maghreb and a dargah in South Asia when it grew around a tomb, and each carries slightly different institutional baggage. Treat the words below as reliable signposts rather than interchangeable labels.

Inside the prayer hall

The prayer hall is oriented toward the qibla, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, and almost everything inside follows from that. The qibla wall holds the mihrab, a niche marking the direction, which is usually the most heavily decorated element in the building and the first place to look for the date and patron of a restoration.

Beside it stands the minbar, a stepped pulpit used for the Friday sermon, often a masterpiece of carved wood or stone. In older Ottoman mosques you will also see a raised platform on columns, the muezzin's gallery, and in some early mosques a screened enclosure near the mihrab called a maqsura. The hall itself may be hypostyle, meaning a flat or timber roof carried on a forest of columns, as at Cordoba and Kairouan, or domed, as in the Ottoman tradition.

• Mihrab: the niche marking the qibla direction
• Minbar: the stepped pulpit beside the mihrab
• Hypostyle: a many-columned hall; the alternative to a domed one
• Manara, minare, minaret: the tower for the call to prayer

Courtyards, water and the approach

Almost every large mosque is entered through a courtyard, the sahn, ringed by an arcade or riwaq. In Ottoman complexes the courtyard usually centres on a sadirvan, a covered ablution fountain that is often the prettiest small structure on the site. In Maghrebi and Andalusi buildings the same function is served by a plain basin or a row of taps along a wall, and the courtyard may be planted with orange trees.

Water appears well beyond the courtyard. A sabil is a public drinking fountain endowed as a charitable act, common in Cairo and often paired with a Quran school above it. A hammam is a bathhouse, frequently part of the same endowment. In Persian and Mughal garden design, the chahar bagh is a four-part garden divided by water channels, the plan behind everything from Isfahan's avenues to the setting of the Taj Mahal.

Surfaces, vaults and ornament

Muqarnas is the honeycomb or stalactite vaulting that fills domes, niches and cornices with tiers of small cells. It is structural in some traditions and purely applied in others, and it is the single most recognisable feature of Islamic architecture worldwide. Arabesque describes the flowing vegetal scrollwork that covers surfaces, while girih refers to the interlocking geometric strapwork of stars and polygons, especially in Persian and Anatolian work.

Tilework has strong regional accents. Zellij is the hand-cut mosaic tile of Morocco and al-Andalus, laid in tight geometric patterns and usually running only as far up the wall as a person can reach. Iznik tiles, made in Ottoman Turkey, are painted panels famous for their cobalt blue and a distinctive tomato red. Persian and Central Asian buildings favour large fields of turquoise and lapis tile across whole facades and domes. Carved stucco, calligraphic bands in angular kufic or cursive thuluth script, pierced stone jali screens in South Asia and projecting wooden mashrabiya windows all belong to the same repertoire.

• Muqarnas: tiered honeycomb vaulting, called mocarabe in Spain
• Zellij: cut-tile mosaic of Morocco and al-Andalus
• Girih: geometric strapwork; arabesque: vegetal scrollwork
• Jali and mashrabiya: pierced stone and turned-wood screens

The buildings around the mosque

Great mosques rarely stand alone. A madrasa, spelled medrese in Turkish, is a teaching college, usually built around a courtyard with student cells; in Central Asia and Iran they often face each other across a square. A khanqah, tekke or zawiya is a Sufi lodge. A turbe or kumbet is a domed mausoleum, and a shrine visited by pilgrims may be signposted as a maqam, mazar or dargah depending on the region.

Commercial and civic buildings follow the same endowment logic. A caravanserai, called a han in Turkish and a funduq in the Maghreb, is a fortified inn around a courtyard. A bedesten is a covered market hall of stone. A bimaristan is a historic hospital, several of which survive in Cairo, Damascus and Anatolia. The Ottomans bundled all of this into a kulliye, a single foundation combining mosque, school, kitchen, bath and tomb, which is why complexes such as the Suleymaniye occupy a whole hilltop.

Regional signatures at a glance

With the vocabulary in place, most buildings announce their tradition within a few seconds. Ottoman: a single dominating dome supported by half-domes, thin pencil minarets with conical caps, a courtyard with a sadirvan, and a turbe in the garden. Maghrebi and Andalusi: square minarets, horseshoe arches, painted or coffered timber ceilings, zellij dadoes and courtyards planted with trees.

Persian and Timurid: a monumental pishtaq, or rectangular portal frame, opening into a vaulted iwan, often four of them arranged around a courtyard, with double-shell domes and vast expanses of turquoise tile. Mughal and wider South Asian: red sandstone and white marble, bulbous domes, kiosk-like chhatris on the roofline, jali screens and formal garden settings. Sahelian West Africa: sun-dried mud brick over timber frames, with the projecting wooden toron beams that serve as permanent scaffolding for annual replastering.

• Ottoman: central dome, pencil minarets, kulliye, sadirvan, turbe
• Maghrebi and Andalusi: square minarets, horseshoe arches, zellij
• Persian and Timurid: iwan, pishtaq, turquoise tile, four-iwan courtyards
• Sahelian: mud brick with projecting toron beams

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