Lights illuminate Medina Mosque

Lighting is what crowns any place, with the way it shines onto spaces and buildings, requiring a great deal of creativity, imagination, and accuracy.

This is especially the case in a place as spacious as the Medina Mosque in Saudi Arabia, with passageways adorned with various forms of lighting, situated with a special aesthetic effect.

“Lighting in the Medina Mosques takes various shapes. There are lamps, pendent lights, sconces, and lanterns.”

While too much lighting can be a pain for the eyes, too little is confusing. That’s why it is important for lights in the mosque to be balanced in a way that serves worshippers who have varying age ranges and health conditions.

Light is distributed in the various angles of the mosque to accommodate all worshippers.

“There are more than 10,000 lamps and pendant lights in the mosque and around 300 sconces and lanterns.”

Lighting in the mosque plays an important role in shaping the relationship between worshippers and the Holy Quran from which they read. If lighting is weak, they become less able to read.

The power of the lighting system in the Medina Mosque amounts to 32 megawatts to provide worshippers with the right amount of light. There are also eight emergency power generators, the power of each of which is 2.5 megawatts.

“Most light fixtures are placed in engraved gold-plated brass casings. This makes the light come out of them in beautiful shapes and formations whether during the day or at night.”

Three of the five prayers Muslims perform every day fall during or close to the night. That is why their keenness to provide mosques with the proper lighting has long transcended the use of oil lamps. Now lighting is an integral part of any mosque and mastering it has become a worldly ritual Muslims cannot do without.