The Mihrab Within The Mosque

A mihrab is the niche set into the qibla wall of a mosque, the wall that faces toward the Kaaba in Mecca and toward which every worshipper turns in prayer. Typically semicircular or polygonal in plan and capped with a half dome or a shell-shaped hood, the niche is usually the most richly decorated surface in the building, carrying calligraphic bands of Quranic verse, glazed tilework, carved stucco or marble inlay depending on region and period. Its function is orientation rather than enclosure: the mihrab holds nothing and admits no one, and its recess exists only to catch the eye and the voice.

The imam stands at or just in front of the mihrab to lead the five daily prayers, and its concave form is often credited with helping project his recitation of the Quran back across the rows of the congregation, though scholars caution that the acoustic benefit is secondary to the symbolic one. Every mosque has exactly one mihrab on its qibla wall, however large the building; a second niche elsewhere in the plan, when one appears, marks a different function such as a subsidiary prayer space rather than a second direction of prayer. The mihrab's centrality to mosque design means it is usually the first element built and the last to be altered, so its style often preserves the clearest evidence of a mosque's original decorative program even where later renovation has changed the rest of the building around it.