Islamic architecture
Sahel and West Africa

In West Africa, Muslim merchants played a vital role in the western Sahel region since the 9th century through trans-Saharan trade networks. While the Islamic architecture of this region shares a certain style, a wide variety of materials and local styles are evident across this wide geographic range. In the more arid western Sahara and northern Sahel regions, stone predominates as a building material and is often associated with Berber cultures. In the southern Sahel and savannah regions mud-brick and rammed earth are the main material and is now associated with the most monumental examples of West African Islamic architecture. In some places, like Timbuktu and Oualata, both building materials are used together, with stone constructions either covered or bound with a mud plaster.

The earliest mosques discovered in sub-Saharan Africa are at Kumbi Saleh (in present-day southern Mauritania), the former capital of the Ghana Empire. Here, a mosque has been discovered which consisted of a courtyard, a prayer hall, and a square minaret, built in dry stone covered in red mud used as plaster. On both the exterior and interior of the mosque, this plaster was painted with floral, geometric, and epigraphic motifs. A similar stone mosque from the same period has been found at Awdaghust. Both mosques are dated generally between the 9th and 14th centuries. At Kumbi Saleh, locals lived in domed-shaped dwellings in the king's section of the city, surrounded by a great enclosure. Traders lived in stone houses in a section which possessed 12 mosques (as described by Al-Bakri), one centered on Friday prayer.

As Islamization progressed across the region, more variations developed in mosque architecture, including the adoption of traditional local forms not previously associated with Islamic architecture. Under Songhai influence, minarets took on a more pyramidal appearance and became stepped or tiered on three levels, as exemplified by the tower of the mosque–tomb of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad in Gao (present-day Mali). In Timbuktu, the Sankoré Mosque (established in the 14th-15th centuries and rebuilt in the 16th century, with later additions), had a tapering minaret and a prayer hall with rows of arches. The presence of tapering minarets may also reflect cultural contacts with M'zab region to the north, while decoration found at Timbuktu may reflect contacts with Berber communities in what is now Mauritania.

In the earthen (mud) architecture of the region, scholar Andrew Petersen distinguishes two main styles: a "western" style that may have its roots in Djenné (present-day Mali), and an "eastern" style associated with Hausa architecture that may have its roots in Kano (present-day Nigeria). The eastern or Hausa style is generally more plain on the exterior of buildings, but is characterized by diverse interior decoration and the much greater use of wood. Mosques often have prayer halls with pillars supporting flat or slightly domed roofs of wood and mud. An exceptional example is the 19th-century Great Mosque of Zaria (present-day Nigeria), which has parabolic arches and a roof of shallow domes. The western or "Sudan" style is characterized by more elaborate and decorated exterior façades whose compositions emphasize verticality. They have tapering buttresses with cone-shaped summits, mosques have a large tower over the mihrab, and wooden stakes (toron) are often embedded in the walls – used for scaffolding but possibly also for some symbolic purpose.

More hybrid styles also arose further south and on the edge of Islamized areas. In the Fouta Djallon region, in the Guinea Highlands, mosques were built with a traditional rectangular or square layout, but then covered by a huge conical thatched roof which protects from the rain. This type of roof was an existing feature of the traditional circular huts inhabited by the locals, re-adapted to cover new rectangular mosques when the mostly Muslim Fula people settled the region in the 18th century. A good example is the Friday mosque of Dinguiraye in Guinea, built in 1850 (with later restorations). Many others are attested in the same region overlapping with southern Senegal, western Mali, and Burkina Faso.

During the French colonial occupation of the Sahel, French engineers and architects had a role in popularizing a "Neo-Sudanese" style based on local traditional architecture but emphasizing symmetry and monumentality. The Great Mosque of Djenné, which was previously established in the 14th century but demolished in the early 19th century, was rebuilt in 1906–1907 under the direction of Ismaila Traoré and with guidance from French engineers. Now the largest earthen building in sub-Saharan Africa, it served as a model for the new style and for other mosques in the region, including the Grand Mosque of Mopti built by the French administration in 1935. Other 20th-century and more recent mosques in West Africa have tended to replicate a more generic style similar to that of modern Egypt.
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