Abstract

The mosque seizes a crucial importance in the built environment of Muslim culture. The mosque’s urban-architectural and socio-political magnitudes derive from conveying not only religious significations, but also nonreligious ones. Thus, the mosque enjoys a positive coherence emerging from positively merging the mundane with the sacred. However, this overlapping generates negative impacts, as the mosque’s mundane dimension has undertaken a sacred veil, which has consequently hampered the development of the objective mosque. This paper tries to deconstruct this sacred-profane articulation. For this reason the Prophet-Mosque in Medina, the prototype model of all mosques, will be historically and architecturally rethought. Thanks to adhering to socio-semiotics, the Prophet-Mosque will be analyzed as a sign to discover its expression and content; that is, by unveiling not only its signifying material objects and morphological elements, but also its signified codified and non-codified conveyed ideologies. The aim is to reinterpret the Prophet-Medina-Mosque and develop a concept for a mosque which effectively interacts with the needs and conditions of Muslims and their surrounding societies. It is to propose the notion of the contemporary mosque.