King Abdulla's Mosque

I for some reason left out from my blog about Jordan the visit that we made to King Abdulla's Mosque. He is the King that is reigning in Jordan right now. The people love him. One really cool thing that i learned about him is that he will go out and try to disguise himself to that he can go among the people and see how they live. He also sometimes will go out a be a taxi driver. He does this to get to know the people and their concerns. I thought that was very cool. No wonder the people love him so much.

Here are me and Bre before we entered the Mosque. We had to wear scarves around our heads to cover our hair and we had to put on these black robes. They looked like choir robes with hoods. As you know for Muslims they do this to be modest. Especially when entering a place where they worship.

Here is a view of the ceiling of the mosque. I thought that it was very beautiful. You will notice in my pictures that there aren't any kind of images in the mosque. It is forbidden to have anykind of statues or anything like that inside of a mosque. Mosques are just big and wide open. They don't have any chairs because people go there to pray and they don't need chairs.

Part of the Muslim religion requires Muslims to pray 5 times aday. Inside King Abdulla's mosque it had a list of the times that the Muslims are required to pray. Because there times to pray correlates with the rising and setting of the sun the times change in accordance. Right now these are the times that they pray. You might notice that there are 6 times listed there. The second time is the time that the sun rises. It isn't a time that they pray. For those people that have to work and are unable to go pray at those times they can make them up afterwards. For example if someone is Muslim and they aren't able to do any of the prayers that day because of work than that night when they go home they have to make them all up. So instead of praying five times throughout the day they pray five seperate times that night.

I don't have a picture of this but when Muslims pray they first start standing up and then go down to there knees and then they will bend over and touch there foreheads to the floor. They have someoen that stands in front of the group that leads the prayer. The prayers are recitations except for when they have their foreheads on the ground. This couple minutes they are able to have their own personal petition to Allah. Walking around the streets of Jerusalem you can tell which Muslims are devout because they will have a callous on there foreheads from praying so much.

Here i am in the mens section. The cutout in the wall behind me points the Muslims in the direction of Mecca. They are in all mosques.

This is me in the Womens section of the Mosque. When they go to pray they have different sections. One for the Men and one for the Women. This is actually an entirely different room from the main room where the men go to pray.