Al-Saleh Mosque

Al-Saleh Mosque in the southern outskirts of Sanaa is the largest mosque in Yemen and one of the largest mosques on the Arabian Peninsula outside Saudi Arabia. The mosque was commissioned by the former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and inaugurated in November 2008 after four years of construction at a reported cost of approximately sixty million dollars from the personal funds of the president — though the mosque was officially named not after Saleh himself but after Salih ibn Husayn, an early Yemeni religious figure (the name is also a deliberate Arabic pun on the president's family name). The mosque was designed in a contemporary synthesis of classical Yemeni and broader Islamic architectural traditions, with six tall minarets each rising approximately one hundred metres at the corners, a central dome over the main prayer hall and an exterior in pale Yemeni limestone with traditional Yemeni geometric ornament. The main prayer hall accommodates approximately forty-four thousand worshippers, with capacity for additional worshippers in the surrounding courtyards. The mosque was unusually open to non-Muslim visitors among Yemeni mosques in the years following its inauguration. The political situation in Yemen since the 2011 uprising and the subsequent civil war has substantially affected access to the mosque and the surrounding city; the broader religious and security context in Sanaa continues to evolve and visitors should research current local conditions carefully before attempting to visit.