مسجد جينيه الكبير في مالي.. صرح من الطين

Already in the Middle Ages the village mosques in Mali and adjoining
regions were being built of mud. With the introduction of new methods of
construction and materials such as cement, the survival of this
traditional building style came under threat.
With "Mud Mosques" Sebastian Schutyser brings us in touch with the often
under-appreciated building style of the mud mosques of the inland delta
of the Niger, which moreover break the monotony of the Sahel in such an
impressive way.

Saba Mosque, Saba, Mali Diafarabe Mosque, Diafarabe, Mali Toguel-Amirou Mosque, Toguel-Amirou, Mali

As a photography student, traveling by bicycle for several months in 1996 and 1997 through the inlands of Mali, I was working on a series of portraits. On my way, the beauty of small adobe mosques in remote villages astonished me as they revealed themselves as the living tissue of an age-old architecture. Back in Europe, I found that this vernacular architecture is largely un-documented. Although the highlights of this 'Sudanese' style are cherished by cultural actors such as UNESCO as well as by international book editors and documentary makers, no one seems to bother about unnamed village mosques. Not even tourists, who simply step over them en route to 'discovering' Djenné and Timbuktu. So I decided to make an extensive photographic survey of the mosques of the Niger Inner Delta. This area harbors a multitude of village mosques -- there are close to 2300 villages -- in a wide variety of styles. Historically, this area played a significant role in the early period of Islam's expansion into West Africa, adding another layer to this photographic survey. West African mud mosques satisfy all the standard expectations of mosque architecture -- with the qibla marked buy its mihrab, minarets, interior spaces delineated by transverse naves and aisles of columns -- while at the same time abstracting these forms that were canonized in the regions of the post-Byzantine, early Islamic Empire.