The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque
Arabs think big, one type of bystander would say when looking at the grandeur of some of the buildings in the gulf. The other kind of bystander would talk about petrodollars and how “artificial” some of these cities appear to be. I have always suspected that this latter type of thinking is the byproduct of some kind of subconscious post-colonial envy: God forbid that brown people use their own natural resources to build wondrous things. It was quite alright to use these very same resources to build the marvels that now adorn so many European cities, I suppose.
Be that as it may, the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat is the definition of Grand. The biggest of them all are in Mecca and Medina, of course, but this one was conceived as a sort of encyclopaedia of Islamic styles. You will find Safavid-inspired mosaics, traditional Omani timbered ceilings and Zellige tilework from North Africa, all in the same building, as a deliberate effort to highlight the fact that islam is not a monolith but a diverse worldview adopted across the globe.
The construction materials are also very special. Instead of concrete or plaster, it was built using 300,000 tonnes of Indian Sandstone. This gives the building a certain tactile earthy texture and an ochre tone that has somewhat of a pinkish tint.
It is hard to believe it’s already 25 years old but it turns out that it was commissioned in 1992 and finished in 2001 to mark the 30th year of Sultan Qaboos’ reign. We are talking five minarets, a Persian carpet that covers 4,343 square meters (it took 600 Iranian weavers four years to complete it, and it was the largest in the world until the one in Sheikh Zayed’s Grand Mosque took over) and an 8.5 tonne Swarovski crystal chandelier by the German firm Faustig that houses over 600,000 crystals.
Perhaps most importantly, it was the first mosque in the region that incorporated an Information Center and a library designed to foster cross-cultural dialogue. It was thought as a sacred place to foster understanding across cultural and religious borders.
So yup, Arabs have the budget, but it’s also safe to say that they think very big.
The full Muscat album is here.
