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Chapter 5 is therefore devoted to a philological reconstruction of the Umayyad structure of the mosque. First, the great mosque of Damascus constituted a break from previous mosque architecture. The chapter recounts the main events occurring in and around the mosque over the centuries - especially interesting are the contestation of Damascus between the Fatimids and the Seljuks, and George's careful reconstruction of the fires and earthquakes that affected the mosque structure. [Extracted from the article]

Investigating the first/seventh-century mosques is essential for an understanding of the history and development of the mosque type and, more generally, the evolution of the Muslim community. This is difficult, however, owing to the problematic nature, sometimes total absence, of archaeological evidence: some of these earliest mosques were made of ephemeral materials, and most repeatedly altered or utterly superseded by more spacious ones to accommodate the continually escalating numbers of congregants. Archaeological evidence for those built before 40/660 is not yet available. That being so, the study, analysis, and reconstruction of such crucial, albeit missing, structures must depend heavily on Arabic literary sources, whose disputed reliability represents yet another challenge. Focusing mainly on the cases of the mosques at Madina, Baṣra and Kūfa, this article attempts to analyse such sources, with the aim of identifying the extent to which they can be used to build a picture of the historical mosques—especially where archaeological evidence is scanty, awkward to interpret, or totally lacking—in which we can have some confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Deobandi approach to congregation and management of mosques in colonial north India. Topics include the approaches and methodologies supporting the study of orthodox Islamic practice and thought in the country, political and social ordering under Muslim sovereigns and Islamic legal systems, and the restrictions to the rights of mosque management to expand the mosque due to limiting neighbourhood religious practice to the neighbourhood.

In the absence of reliable archaeological evidence, the question of how the Prophet’s mosque was made represents a real challenge. Its origin remains moot despite many attempts to settle the question. While the structure built by the Prophet in Madina, soon after the Hijra, is believed by many to have been the prototype of the mosque, the currently dominant theory that it was only a ‘house’ has cast doubt on that belief. The building was traditionally known as the ‘Mosque of the Prophet’ until Caetani, followed by Creswell et al., theorized that it could not have been a place of worship in the time of the Prophet, mainly because of the nature of the non-sacred activities it is reported to have accommodated and also because of the non-specific use of ‘masjid’ in the Qurʾān. This paper evaluates the Caetani–Creswell theory and the responses to it by Western and Muslim scholars. It explains why the whole question needs to be revisited, what conceiving the building as a ‘house’ or a ‘mosque’ means in terms of a number of undecided issues such as the immediate origin of the mosque and the kind of impulses that shaped its design. The paper goes on to examine, mainly from Qurʾān and ḥadīth, which of the two designations, ‘house’ or ‘mosque’, should be accepted and why. In particular, it investigates whether early Islam, within the framework of the Qurʾān and the teachings and practices of the Prophet, could have provided the necessary prompts for the making of the mosque and the shaping of its essential functional and architectural elements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]