Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque

Sultan Qaboos launched an international competition for Oman's state mosque in 1993 and the commission went to Mohamed Makiya, working with Quad Design of London, with construction running from 1995 to 2001. Makiya was then in his eighties and had spent two decades in exile from Iraq; this is the last and largest work of the argument he had begun with the Khulafa Mosque forty years earlier. The prayer hall carries a single dome on a square base, clad throughout in sandstone, and the whole is held inside an arcaded court with five minarets. He drew on Persian and Ottoman precedent but pulled the ornament back towards the restraint that Ibadi practice in Oman expects — a large building that declines to be florid.