The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque
The first time I saw Sheikh Zayed’s Grand Mosque at night, I thought it looked like something out of Aladdin. I am sure there is a more cultured reference somewhere, but all I had was this rather lame Disney allusion, for which I apologize.
I thought of one of those humongous castles where Princess Jasmine lives with her father in the fictional city of Agrabah. That, I suppose, is the point: apart from the Taj Mahal, which people tend to associate more with India than with the Islamic tradition, there are few pop-culture references for the kind of architectural grandeur embodied by Sheikh Zayed’s Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. It is so monumental that it is matched in splendour only by fictional buildings.
The effect is not merely one of scale. At night, the mosque seems almost weightless: white marble, pools of light, and a courtyard so polished that the building appears to float above its own reflection.
Completed in 2007, it accommodates more than 40,000 worshippers, at least twice as many as the beautiful Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat. It features 82 domes, more than 1,000 columns and the world’s largest hand-knotted carpet, measuring approximately 5,627 square metres. The exterior is made of pristine white Macedonian Sivec marble, and the courtyard, a floral design by British artist Kevin Dean, is one of my favourite design elements. Considered the largest example of marble mosaic in the world, it is decorated with semi-precious stones. Perhaps the most Agrabaesque design choice is the exterior lighting system, designed by Speirs + Major, which changes dynamically according to the phases of the moon: it glows brighter with cooler light as the moon wanes and becomes softer during the full moon.
Since I started living in the Middle East, I often hear myself saying that Arabs think very big. Here is one more example.
Gear notes:
All pictures were taken with the Nikon Z8 and the NIKKOR Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S.
