The World’s Tallest Minaret
A minaret - from the Arabic word manârah – is “a tall slender tower attached to a mosque, having one or more projecting balconies from which a muezzin summons the people to prayer”. Otherwise called a mi’dhana, it’s a distinctive feature of Islamic architecture.
The world’s tallest minaret is the one of the Hassan II mosque located in Casablanca – Morocco, which is the second largest mosque in the world, after al-masjid al-haraam in Mecca. That minaret is more than 200 meters high.
More than 30.000 persons worked for more than 50 million hours building this one of the largest mosques in the world.
Work started on Hassan II mosque on July 12, 1986, and the building was inaugurated on August 30, 1993, after 7 years of work. Despite the fact that it was first designed by the French architect Michel Pinseau, the mosque gathered thousands of Moroccan artisans who worked on making it originally Moroccan. The mosque is not only a technological challenge, it’s also a wonderful mixture of traditions; it includes today many modern touches, such as a heated floor, electric doors, a sliding roof, and lasers which shine at night from the top of the minaret toward Mecca. The late king Hassan II insisted on having the sliding roof in order to have the three major compounds of life linked in this mosque: water, land and air.
Built by the Atlantic, a big part of the surface of the mosque actually lies over water. Part of the floor is glass, so worshippers can kneel directly over water.
Workers used a lot of material such as granite, plaster, marble, wood.., that were all taken from around Morocco.
This mosque is one of the rare mosques in Morocco that are open for visits to non-Moroccans.
It can receive 100.000 worshippers, 80.000 in the courtyard, and 20.000 in the prayer room.