Mihrab

The Prophet’s mosque in Medina had no mihrab in his lifetime. Thomas Patrick Hughes, whose Dictionary of Islam appeared in 1885, records that a black stone against its northern wall, facing Jerusalem, showed the congregation which way to pray, and was moved to the southern wall when the qibla changed to Mecca. When the first mihrab was made is told two ways. Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta credits it to Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, when the Prophet’s mosque was rebuilt, work it dates to between 88 and 91 AH; Hughes dates the mihrab as it now exists to the days of al-Walid. IslamQA places the mihrab later, in the second century of Islam. Tile mihrabs survive from Seljuq Anatolia and Ilkhanid Iran. The Bey Hakim mihrab, of turquoise, brown and manganese tile mosaic, dates from about the mid-13th century; it was reassembled in Berlin from fragments, and other pieces of it are in Paris, London and Istanbul. A lustre-tile mihrab nearly 12 feet (3.7 m) tall, dated 663 AH (1265 CE), is in the Shangri La collection in Honolulu. It is one of six surviving lustre mihrabs from Ilkhanid Iran, and it stood on the qibla wall of the tomb of a descendant of a Shi‘ite imam at Veramin, in Iran.