A Whisper on the Waves: The Story of Jeddah’s Island Mosque
The sun dips low over the Red Sea, painting the sky in strokes of fiery orange and soft lavender. Along the Jeddah Corniche, the city’s vibrant waterfront promenade, life hums with a gentle evening energy. Families stroll, cyclists glide past, and the murmur of conversation blends with the distant roar of luxury cars. Amidst this modern tableau, perched on the very edge of the land, a small, brilliant white structure seems to defy the city’s pulse. It sits in serene contemplation, its elegant dome and slender minaret a testament to a different rhythm, a deeper history. This is the Hassan Anani Mosque, known to locals and discerning travelers simply as the Island Mosque—a jewel of devotion and design that offers a quiet counterpoint to the thrum of Saudi Arabia’s great port city.
Many visitors, drawn by tales of a mosque that floats on water, mistake it for its larger, more famous cousin further down the coast, the Al-Rahmah Mosque. But to overlook this smaller sanctuary is to miss one of Jeddah’s most profound architectural and spiritual statements. The Island Mosque is not an accident of geography but a masterpiece of intention, born from a period of extraordinary urban transformation and the vision of a man who sought to anchor the city’s future in the timeless beauty of its past.
The Vision of a Modern Jeddah
To understand the Island Mosque, one must first understand the Jeddah of the 1970s and 1980s. Fueled by an oil boom, the ancient “Bride of the Red Sea” was shedding its skin. The old city walls had long since come down, and in their place, a modern metropolis was rising with dizzying speed. Yet, amidst this rush toward the future, a remarkable civic leader, Mayor Mohammed Said Farsi, harbored a different kind of ambition. He believed that a great city needed more than just concrete and steel; it needed a soul. Farsi dreamed of transforming Jeddah into a vast, open-air gallery, a place where art and architecture would enrich public life.
His grandest canvas was the Corniche. This sprawling waterfront was reimagined not just as a thoroughfare but as a cultural spine for the city. Mayor Farsi commissioned over 400 sculptures from international masters like Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miró, placing their monumental works along the sea. But his vision extended beyond sculpture. He sought to commission buildings that were themselves works of art, particularly mosques that would serve the public while elevating the city’s aesthetic identity. It was within this climate of bold artistic patronage that the story of the Island Mosque began, a project funded not by the city, but by a private citizen who shared the mayor’s passion for blending piety with beauty.
A Patron’s Piety, An Architect’s Genius
The commission came from Hassan Anani, a prominent and devout Saudi businessman who wished to gift the city a place of worship—an act of faith known as a waqf. For the design, he turned to a figure who was quietly leading an architectural revolution in the Islamic world: the Egyptian architect Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil. A protégé of the legendary Hassan Fathy, who championed the use of traditional, earth-based building techniques, El-Wakil was a powerful critic of the soulless, concrete-box modernism sweeping the globe. He argued for a return to the wisdom of vernacular architecture, using local materials and time-honored methods to create buildings that were sustainable, beautiful, and deeply connected to their cultural context.
By the time he was approached for the Anani commission in the early 1980s, El-Wakil was already making a name for himself in Jeddah. He had designed a series of small but exquisite mosques along the Corniche—the Corniche Mosque, the Ruwais Mosque, the Island Mosque—each one a masterclass in his philosophy. His work was so significant that it would earn him the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture, an honor often equated to a Nobel Prize for the field. He was the perfect architect to create a building that felt both timeless and utterly at home on the shores of the Red Sea. Completed in 1986, the Island Mosque would become one of the purest expressions of his architectural creed.
An Architecture of Light and Water
Approaching the Island Mosque is an exercise in appreciating subtlety. Its form is simple, almost elemental: a composition of white-plastered brick domes, vaults, and arches that gleam under the Arabian sun. El-Wakil deliberately avoided a reinforced concrete skeleton, returning to the ancient technique of load-bearing brick walls. This gives the structure a powerful, organic presence, as if it grew from the coastline itself. The mosque is organized around a small, open-air courtyard, or sahn, which provides a tranquil transition from the outside world and allows for natural ventilation, a critical feature in Jeddah’s humid climate.
Every detail is a dialogue between faith, function, and environment. The minaret, a simple, unadorned cylinder, rises gracefully, its form reminiscent of early Islamic and Fatimid designs. Intricate wooden lattices known as mashrabiya cover the windows, shattering the harsh sunlight into soft, dappled patterns across the interior floors while catching the sea breeze. Inside the prayer hall, the space is intimate and humbling. A central dome swells overhead, its apex pierced to allow a sliver of light to illuminate the space below. There is no lavish ornamentation here; the beauty comes from the purity of the forms, the texture of the plaster, and the celestial play of light and shadow. The mihrab, the niche indicating the direction of Mecca, is a simple, elegant recess, focusing the mind entirely on prayer. The building feels cool, quiet, and profoundly peaceful, a sanctuary carved from light itself.
A Sanctuary Between City and Sea
The true magic of the Island Mosque lies in its unique position as a threshold between the terrestrial and the marine, the secular and the sacred. To visit is to experience a series of sensory shifts. One leaves behind the kinetic energy of the Corniche, a world defined by the sleek storefronts of upscale cafés and the distant allure of luxury shopping destinations like the Red Sea Mall or the boutiques of Al-Khayyat Center. You step across a short causeway, and instantly, the dominant sound is no longer the city, but the gentle, rhythmic lapping of the Red Sea’s turquoise water against the mosque’s foundation.
At high tide, the illusion is complete: the mosque appears to float, a solitary island of faith. Worshippers performing their ablutions before prayer do so with the boundless sea as their backdrop. During the call to prayer, the muezzin’s melodic recitation carries across the water, a sound that seems to merge with the ancient rhythms of the ocean. It is a place that invites contemplation, where one can sit in the shaded courtyard and watch the dhows drift by, feeling utterly removed from the bustling world just a few steps away. For the traveler, it offers a complete experience: one can explore the public art of the Corniche, witness the profound tranquility of the mosque at sunset, and then dine at one of the sophisticated sea-view restaurants that dot the waterfront, all within a single, memorable evening.
More than three decades after its completion, the Hassan Anani Mosque endures not as a grand monument, but as a quiet poem written in brick and plaster. It is a testament to a moment when Jeddah dared to invest in beauty, and a reminder that modernity does not require the abandonment of tradition. It stands as a tribute to the piety of its patron and the genius of its architect, a man who knew that the most powerful designs often speak in a whisper. For any traveler seeking to understand the soul of this dynamic city, a visit to this small white mosque on the water’s edge is essential. It is a place to pause, to breathe, and to listen to the timeless dialogue between the city, the sea, and the sacred.
