The mosque's architectural history begins with the courtyard house Muhammad built in Medina after 622 CE, a plan of an open yard ringed by covered shelter that set the template later called the hypostyle mosque, a forest of columns supporting a flat or gently pitched roof with no fixed limit on how far the hall could be enlarged. Early conquest era mosques such as the Great Mosque of Damascus and the Great Mosque of Cordoba worked within this plan, absorbing columns and materials from earlier Roman and Visigothic buildings on the same sites.
Regional traditions then diverged sharply. Ottoman architects, working in the shadow of the domed Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, developed centrally planned domed mosques whose greatest exponent, the court architect Mimar Sinan, built the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne around a single vast dome carried on an octagonal system of piers. Persian and Central Asian mosques instead organized space around the four iwan courtyard, a form borrowed from pre-Islamic Sasanian palace architecture.
In West Africa, mosques such as the Great Mosque of Djenne translated the same essential program, courtyard, prayer hall, mihrab and minaret, into sculpted mudbrick reinforced with projecting wooden beams used as permanent scaffolding for annual replastering. Southeast Asian mosques took yet another route, adopting the tiered, pitched roof of local temple architecture rather than the Middle Eastern dome. Across all these regional forms, only the qibla wall's orientation and the presence of a mihrab and minbar remained constant.