mosque by jon

 

1/5/2015.  So Jon and I dragged two very grumpy jet-lagged kids to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque today.  An enormous mosque that took ten years to construct.  There are rubies and pearls handlaid into thousands of columns and you can walk under the largest crystal chandelier in the world.

 

mosque misery.jpg

The struggle is real.

 

mosque colonnade

Actually, I'm sleepwalking too.  Wish I could've appreciated this more.

 

mosque-dome

 

In the picture above, the 99 names of God ("most merciful" "most just" etc) are engraved inside the stylized flowers.  At some point late in the design, they decided that the Mughal and Moorish stuff needed a contemporary touch.  So someone came up with the idea to illuminate the calligraphy from behind with fiber optic cable.

 

mosque-rug

 

This is the rug inside the mosque.  But it also happens to be the rug you would see if you walked inside 29 Washington Square, a building 2 blocks from our home.  Sheikh Zayed gave a facsimile of it to John Sexton, the president of NYU.  Our guide, Nils (an American who was part of the core team that came to Abu Dhabi in 2008 to build the satellite campus), told us that the two really hit it off in a meeting in 2007 and have been friends ever since.

Then Nils observed:  "The longer I live here, the more I see how good Emiratis are at giving gifts, and how bad Americans are at it."

 

 

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