05/05/2025
Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque 🕌
Construction
In 1992, the then Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said Al Said, directed that his country should have a Grand Mosque. In 1993, a competition for the design of the proposed mosque took place. The building contract was awarded to Carillion Alawi LLC. Construction commenced in December 1994, after a site was chosen at Bausher, and it took six years and seven months to build the mosque.
The mosque is made of different type of stones, with doors, windows and embellishments made of wood and glass. Around 300,000 tons of Indian sandstone was imported for the building. Five minarets have been built around the premises of the mosque: the main minaret (90 metres (300 ft)) in height, and the four flanking minarets (45.5 metres (149 ft)) are the mosque’s chief visual features from the exterior. In the interior, the main musalla is the focus of both prayer and tourism. The prayer hall is square in shape and 74.4 by 74.4 metres (244 by 244 feet) has a central dome rising to a height of 50 metres (160 ft) above the floor.[5] The dome is embellished spectacularly from the inside and it is a major tourist attraction in itself. The main musalla can hold over 6500 worshippers, while the women's musalla can accommodate 750 worshipers. The outer paved ground can hold 8000 worshipers and there is additional space available in the interior courtyard and the passageways, making a total capacity of up to 20,000 worshipers.
The mosque is built on a site occupying 416,000 m2 (4,480,000 sq ft),[5] and the complex extends to cover an area of 40,000 m2 (430,000 sq ft). The newly built Grand Mosque was inaugurated by Sultan of Oman on May 4, 2001 to celebrate 30 years of his reign.
