The mosque is a place where Muslims gather five times a day to perform their prayers. Besides being a place of worship, the mosque has been used as a multifunctional space throughout the history of Islam in the Muslim world. The spread of Islam, from Medina in the Arabian Peninsula to various regions, raised the demand for a number of places for worship. Due to different climatic and cultural conditions, local materials and indigenous architecture of different places, numerous styles of mosque architecture were evolved. Wherever Islam reached, the earliest responses to the style of mosques were indigenous. With the passage of time, the mosque architectural forms had been influenced by the changes in socio-cultural and political conditions. In Malaysia, due to British colonial influence and the migration of Muslims from India, many Mughal architectural elements in the design of mosques were incorporated. Proceeding from an analysis of Mughal architectural elements in North India, this paper investigates the influence of Mughal architecture on three Malaysian mosques of the British colonial period.
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Winter 2018
