Mosque Alhaj Asmayl Sha Aldwaymt

Tucked into the hills of al Quwaysimah in the southern part of Jordan's capital Amman, Masjid al Hajj Ismail Isha al Dawayma bears the name of a benefactor whose family roots trace to the Palestinian village of al Dawayma near Hebron. When the village was emptied during the Nakba of 1948, its people dispersed across Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank, carrying with them the memory of their olive groves and ancestral homes. Amman itself grew enormously in the decades that followed, hosting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees whose piety, industry, and civic spirit helped shape the modern Hashemite capital.
Founding a mosque in the name of al Hajj Ismail, drawing the epithet from his Palestinian village of al Dawayma, is both a private charity and a public act of remembrance, preserving in every call to prayer the name of a home that the builder could never forget. The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, taught that the believer is like a brick in a wall, each one strengthening the other, and displaced families across Jordan have lived that teaching by building mosques, schools, and hospitals for the benefit of their new neighbours and the generations to come. Amman's mosques are thus among the most ethically diverse in the Arab world, built by Palestinians, Circassians, Chechens, Iraqis, and native Jordanians.
The building is a classic late twentieth century Jordanian urban mosque. Pale cream limestone, a dome finished in the soft cream of local stone, a square minaret with ornamental balconies, and tall arched windows form the exterior. Inside, the prayer hall is covered with red and gold Turkish style carpets, the qiblah wall carries carved plaster decoration, and a wooden minbar stands beside a mihrab framed by calligraphy of the two testimonies. A women's gallery opens behind carved wooden screens on the upper level. Ramadan brings tarawih gatherings and iftars of mansaf, rice, and Palestinian musakhan. Accurate daily prayer times for Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha appear on this page for every worshipper of al Quwaysimah and every traveller crossing Amman.