Shaish Toa Mosque (check)

Harar, the fortified old city in the eastern Ethiopian highlands whose stone walls enclose more than eighty small mosques and whose UNESCO listing as a world heritage site honours its role as a centre of Islamic learning in the Horn of Africa, holds within its labyrinthine alleys a modest mosque known locally as Shaish Toa, and the bracketed note appended to its modern listing reflects a local caretaker's request that the transliteration of its name be verified against the original Harari source. Harar itself has been called the fourth holy city of Islam by its inhabitants, a claim rooted in the concentration of saintly shrines within its walls and its long history as a centre of Qur'anic scholarship from the tenth century onward. The sixteenth century imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi, known as Ahmad Gragn, led his campaigns from Harar and the Harari dynasty that followed produced generations of scholars, poets and merchants whose works circulated across the Red Sea to Mocha, Aden, Jeddah and Mombasa. Architecturally the Harari mosques are distinctive, combining whitewashed lime plaster walls built from local basalt stone, flat timber roofs covered in compressed clay, modest minarets rising only slightly above the surrounding rooftops and small forecourts paved in river pebbles. Shaish Toa follows this vernacular, its prayer hall carpeted in red and green, its mihrab framed by simple painted calligraphy and its mimbar rising in three carved timber steps. Daily prayers gather neighbours from the surrounding alleys, the Jumu'ah sermon is delivered in Harari and classical Arabic and Ramadan evenings bring iftar of injera, shiro, sambusa, hulbaa, dates and spiced coffee brewed in tall jebena pots. Eid mornings fill the narrow streets with families in embroidered white and red kaftans, children clutching new shoes and elders distributing small birr banknotes. Visitors should dress modestly, leave shoes at the timber threshold and respect the quiet of the walled quarters. Nearby lie the Emir's palace, the vibrant Gidir Magala market, the shrine of Abadir Umar al Rida and the evening hyena feeding ritual at the old walls where local caretakers still offer meat to the wild animals each dusk.