_Comparative Study between Traditional and Contemporary Islamic Mosques Architecture

The fundamental objective of Islamic architecture is creating space to meet Muslims’ spiritual and to some extent non-spiritual demands. Actually, mosques are physical places and their existence formed by Muslims’ interrelationship with physical environment. According to this points of view mosque plays an important role in Muslims religious community through the link between its physical realities and their beliefs. Presence of the mosque is the most complex, sensitive and controversial issues that its tremendous architectural design is known as symbol of the Islamic architects’ design ability. In fact, mosques and their fundamental components leads to individuals going from non-spiritual to spiritual space and they must provide both visual and spiritual aspects. The architectural characteristics of the mosques have involved various transformation from the beginning which has been ‘Muhammad Prophet ‘Mosque up to our contemporary world. Through ages, mosques’ architecture has resulted in a shift from ancient to new development. The secular aspect of contemporary life created new movement in mosques’ architectural form as tool to generate new conceptual design. Although these transformations tries to link the traditional mosque to contemporary ones and mapping their similarities and differences but created gaps by faded away spiritual space in mosque architectural space rather than past. The aim of the research tries to investigate what are the causes of these gaps in the differences between traditional and contemporary mosque architecture. This thesis will focus on the role of Muslims religious beliefs on space spirituality in both traditional and contemporary mosques. The study have been limited to Jameh mosques type in the cities of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Domghan in Iran and Istanbul and Ankara in Turkey and the totally nine mosques have been chosen in both periods. According to mosques types analysis in terms of decline and intensity of religious beliefs in reaching spiritual space by considering general characteristic of the mosque architecture, comparison of these characteristics in both traditional and contemporary periods and literature review methodologies based on observation technique findings revels that the basic reasons derive from deviation of Muslims religious beliefs from the past and modern technologies. Consequentially, mosque as a most important factor in city structure becomes faded and its role in the organization of Islamic city space is ignored.