A minaret is a tower attached to or standing beside a mosque, tall enough to be seen and heard across the surrounding town, from which the muezzin traditionally gives the adhan, the call summoning the community to each of the five daily prayers. Forms vary widely: square-shafted minarets common in North Africa and Syria trace their profile to late antique watchtowers and church bell towers, tapering cylindrical minarets with conical caps typify Ottoman Turkey, and the helical ramp of the ninth century minaret at the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq has no true parallel elsewhere in Islamic building.
A mosque may carry one minaret or several, and the largest congregational mosques, particularly under Ottoman and later royal patronage, sometimes carry four or six as a mark of status rather than liturgical necessity, since a single muezzin's voice, or today a single loudspeaker, suffices for the call regardless of how many towers stand. Internally most minarets hold a narrow spiral staircase climbing to one or more balconies, and the physical ascent to give the call by voice, once universal, is now largely ceremonial in mosques that rely on amplified recordings, though the tower itself remains the mosque's most visible marker on the skyline and often its tallest element by a wide margin.