Jami' al-Nuri al-Kabir (Mosul)
Mosul, Iraq
The Mosque of Nur al-Din in Mosul is one of the city's three great mosques and is also known as al-Jami' al-Nuri al-Kabir (The Great Nuri Mosque). Located in the heart of the old city, construction on the mosque began in ca. 1170/566 AH under Nur al-Din Mahmud ibn Zangi (r. 1146-1174/541-569 AH) and included both a prayer hall and a madrasa. The mosque is perhaps most famous for its gently leaning brick minaret, known as "al-Hadba," which is situated on the north side of the complex. The mosque was irrevocably altered during 1942 as part of a renovation project orchestrated by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities. These restoration works consisted of destroying the old mosque and rebuilding it with old and new material according to a new plan. All that remains from the original complex are the minaret, two mihrabs, an inscribed marble slab, and some stucco decoration. 

The present-day mosque consists of a rectangular prayer hall with a dome covering the central bay before the mihrab. Adjoining this prayer hall to the north is a large open courtyard with an ablutions fountain. The western part of the courtyard is paved while the eastern part contains greenery. 

The original form and decoration of the mosque and its sequence of construction is a matter of some debate. Yasser Tabbaa has argued that the mosque originally took the form of a rectangular, shallow prayer hall, seven bays wide and one and a half deep, with a dome above the central bay in front of the mihrab, not unlike the structure that still existed in the early twentieth century before the 1944 demolition.1 The prayer hall would have opened on its north side onto a large open space, perhaps surrounded by a wall. The size of this space was most likely larger than the present courtyard or that of the early twentieth century mosque.Ernst Herzfeld, who conducted the only scholarly study of the mosque prior to its demolition, argued for a deeper prayer hall with bays that alternated between smaller and larger rectangles, some vaulted and some domed. His argument for the depth of the prayer hall was tentative, however, and largely based on the remains of columns in the courtyard north of the structure that existed in 1910.

The original mosque had three main mihrabs, whose history the Mosulite art historian Sa'id Daywahji has clarified as follows.4 At the time of the Mosque's demolition in 1944, the central mihrab under the dome of the prayer hall was a simple construction with a muqarnas hood. It was inscribed with the year 1281 AH (1864-1865 CE) and covered several earlier mihrabs. Two other older and more ornate mihrabs were found in the mosque. The first of these was transferred from the Umayyad Mosque in Mosul and bears the date of 543 AH (1148-1149). It was made of marble and had vegetal arabesques covering the niche and hood, framed by Arabic inscriptions. This mihrab was originally placed in a wing of the prayer hall reserved for Shafi'ites, but after the reconstruction of the mosque in 1944 it was transferred to the center of the qibla wall under the dome, replacing the 1864 mihrab mentioned above. The third important mihrab is a handsome stone piece whose decoration dates it to the period of Nur al-Din Mahmud. In the early twentieth century, it had been moved into the courtyard of the mosque in an area that was used for prayer during the summer. Its original location within the mosque is not known. After reconstruction, this mihrab was transferred to Baghdad.

As far as chronology, it is clear that the mosque underwent several phases of building before its 1940s reconstruction. The most obvious piece of evidence for this are the existence of two types of columns in the prayer hall. Yasser Tabbaa summarizes the argument in his 2002 article on the mosque.5 Herzfeld believed that the two column types represented an initial phase that pre-dated Nur al-Din followed by a renovation by Nur al-Din. This argument was based on the fact that the mosque's stone mihrab bore the date 1148 and that the decoration on one group of columns was comparable.6 The validity of this statement was contested as early as 1949 by Daywahji, who pointed to the fact that the mosque's mihrab, which Herzfeld assumed was original to the mosque, was most probably transferred from the Umayyad Mosque of Mosul (the city's original Great Mosque), to Nur al-Din's Mosque at the time of construction, eliminating the necessity for backdating the column group and construction of the mosque to 1148.7 Tabbaa suggests that the installation of the mihrab and its corresponding columns dates to the period of Nur al-Din while the later columns were added as a form of reinforcement at a later date, harvested from local Christian sites that may have fell into disuse.8

It was reported that the mosque and minaret were destroyed on June 21, 2017 in an explosion.9

Notes:

  1. Tabbaa, "The Mosque of Nūr al-Dīn," 346-7.
  2. Daywahji, Jawami' al-Mawsil, 27-28.
  3. Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 226.
  4. Daywahji, Jawami' al-Mawsil, 31-38.
  5. Tabbaa, "The Mosque of Nūr al-Dīn," 343-348.
  6. Sarre and Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise, 224.
  7. Tabbaa, "The Mosque of Nūr al-Dīn," 345.
  8. Tabbaa, "The Mosque of Nūr al-Dīn," 346.
  9. "Grand al-Nuri Mosque in Iraq's Mosul 'Blown Up' by ISIL." Aljazeera. 22 June, 2017. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/iconic-grand-al-nuri-mosque-iraq-mosul-blown-170621193402284.html

Sources:

Daywahji, Sa'id. Jawāmi‘ al-Mawṣil fī mukhtalif al-‘uṣūr. Baghdad: Maṭba‘at Shafīq, 1382 [=1963].

Janabi, Tariq Jawad. Studies in Medieval Iraqi Architecture, 207-211. Baghdad, Ministry of culture and Information, State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage, 1982.

Sarre Friedrich and Ernst Herzfeld. Archäologische Reise im Euphrat- und Tigris-Gebiet, 2:216-234. 4 vols. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1911-1920.

Tabbaa, Yasser. “The Mosque of Nūr al-Dīn in Mosul 1170-1172.” Annales Islamogiques 36 (2002): 339-360. 

Location
Mosul, Iraq
Images & Videos
Documents
Associated Names
Site Contains
Events
1170-1172/566-567 AH (constructed)
ca. 1942 (reconstructed)
Style Periods
1127-1222
Variant Names
الجامع النوري الكبير
Original
al-Jami' al-Nuri al-Kabir
Alternate transliteration
Building Usages
religious
religious
Materials/Techniques