Jamkaran Mosque
— the mosque the faithful come to on Tuesday nights.
Not only on a wall.
“A Shia pilgrimage mosque on the desert road east of Qom. Tradition holds that the Twelfth Imam ordered its building in 984, through the dream of a local sheikh. The complex has grown across the centuries into a wide blue-tiled courtyard with four minarets, drawing tens of thousands of pilgrims every Tuesday evening. The road from Qom fills with buses at dusk.
Jamkaran Mosque, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
Jamkaran Mosque sits about six kilometres east of Qom, in north-central Iran's high desert plain, roughly 130 kilometres south of Tehran. Qom is one of the two most important Shia learning centres in the world, alongside Najaf in Iraq. The mosque tradition begins in 984 AD, when, according to a long-standing account, the Twelfth Imam appeared to the local sheikh Hasan ibn Muthlih Jamkarani and ordered the building. The site has been expanded continuously, with the most recent enlargement in the early 2000s.
The mosque's exterior is faced in the deep cobalt and turquoise tilework characteristic of central Iranian sacred architecture, with calligraphic bands in white kufic and floral medallions across the iwans. Four minarets rise above the main prayer hall, and the central dome is finished in turquoise. The Marble Hall and the women's prayer hall were added in the early twenty-first-century expansion. Two small wells inside the courtyard, the Well of Petitions, receive folded paper prayers from pilgrims each Tuesday.
Tuesday evening is the central pilgrimage night, drawing tens of thousands of worshippers from Qom, Tehran, and across Iran for prayer and for the dropping of written supplications into the courtyard wells. The complex is reached by a short taxi or shuttle ride from central Qom, about ten minutes east along the Jamkaran road. The site is open to non-Muslim visitors outside main prayer times. Modest dress is required, and photography of interior prayer halls is restricted.