Page 162 - UAE Truncal States

The Islamic Basis of Society
with different materials depending on the wealth of the founder or of
the community who built it. There were very simple palm-frond
mosques2” which could hardly be distinguished from the neighbour­
ing barasti compounds, because they could not exceed the other
buildings in height and they had no minarets. The only immediately
distinguishing feature externally was the qiblah, the niche orien­
tated towards Mecca. Often, however, the mosque was the only brick
building among the houses of a village or of a tribal quarter in a town,
and near the coast this would usually be a structure of coral stones
bound together with mud. This construction allowed the mosque to
have two or three open arches in the long wall opposite the qiblah. A
few low-level windows in the shorter walls, and on either side of the
qiblah, allowed enough air to enter the building, which might well be
filled to capacity at prayer times. A rectangular courtyard in front of
the mosque and facilities for ablution completed such a typical small
mosque.
Often there was no minaret, although some mosques had a small
elevated platform a little higher than the roof on one side of the
building. The more elaborate mosques had one minaret; the arches
and the gallery, for the mu'addin who calls for prayer, would have
some decorative plasterwork or carved wood. The interior of the
mosques was very simple; the floor was usually covered with rush-
mats or, rarely, with woven rugs.
The number of mosques in use in theTrucial States during the first
two decades of this century can only be estimated, because written
records were not even kept for the waqf which existed for the
maintenance of a mosque. There seems to have been a great increase
in the number of new mosques being founded during the height of
the pearling industry, and the majority of those mosques which were
still in good repair and use during the 1950s and early 1960s had
been built within living memory of the people who still prayed there
then.30
As already mentioned, each mosque was provided for by the waqf
attached to it. There was no need anywhere on the Trucial Coast for a
special person or organisation to administer all the waqf property of
one town, as the communities were small enough for it to be common
knowledge who built and endowed a mosque, and what it cost to
maintain it. Either the founder of the mosque or a member of his
family or the imam who was attached to the mosque supervised the
collection of the income and the use of it.

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