Malé Friday Mosque

The Malé Friday Mosque, or Hukuru Miskiy, is built of the reef itself. Its walls are blocks of Porites coral, cut while still wet and soft, left to harden in the sun and then fitted together with tongue-and-groove joints so precise that no mortar was needed. Completed in 1658, it is the oldest and most richly decorated mosque in the Maldives and one of the finest coral-stone buildings anywhere, still in daily use more than three and a half centuries later. In 2008 it was placed, together with other coral mosques of the islands, on the Maldives' tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status.

The present building replaced a mosque said to have been founded on the site in 1153 by Sultan Dhovemi, the first Muslim ruler of the Maldives, shortly after his conversion. When that older mosque grew too small, Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar I ordered a new one in 1656; the master carpenters Ali Maavadi Kaleyfaanu and Mahmud Maavadi Kaleyfaanu came from the southern atoll of Huvadhu, and the inscriptions were the work of the chief justice of the day. Local tradition holds that the site was sacred even before Islam, and that the earlier temple faced the setting sun; the mosque is oriented to the west, and worshippers align themselves with Mecca by following carpets laid at an angle across the floor. After returning from the Hajj in 1668, the sultan added a gateway and the round minaret beside the mosque, white and blue, broad at the base and banded with metal, modelled on minarets he had seen in Mecca.

Inside, the stone gives way to wood and lacquer. Two prayer halls are surrounded on three sides by verandas, the ceilings are carved and lacquered in stepped panels, and cut-coral columns support a hipped roof. Doors, beams and wall panels carry Quranic verses and some of the finest examples of traditional Maldivian woodcarving and lacquerwork, including a long carved panel recording the coming of Islam to the islands. The thatched roof of the first building was replaced with metal sheeting in 1904 and with teak and aluminium in the 1960s. Around the mosque lies a walled cemetery of carved coral tombstones: rounded tops mark the graves of women, pointed ones those of men, and gilded inscriptions those of royalty, with small decorated mausoleums for the sultans' families, among them Ibrahim Iskandar I himself. Across the street stands the Medhu Ziyaaraiy, the shrine of Abu al-Barakat Yusuf al-Barbari, remembered as the man who brought Islam to the Maldives.

Getting there

The mosque stands in central Malé, the capital of the Maldives, a small and densely built island in Kaafu Atoll. Velana International Airport (MLE) is on the neighbouring island of Hulhulé, about 2.4 km away; since 2018 the Sinamalé Bridge has linked Hulhulé and Malé by road.