CHAPTER 1

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background
A mosque is a place or building in which Muslims gather to worship Allah and it has been a
central part of a Muslim community since the early time of Islam. The mosque serves a variety
of roles in the lives of Muslims. Its most important role is as a house of prayer for Allah.
Mosques also use religious education, collecting of local charity, and awareness of the Muslim
population.

The word mosque is an English name and a translation from the Arabic word masjid. The word
masjid is derived from the verb "sajada" which means "to lie with the face down and arms
stretched out, especially as a single of respect or worship” and a masjid is a place in which
people for lying with the face down In worship of Allah. It can loosely be translated more
generally as a place of worship". The English word mosque is derived from the Spanish word for
mosquito and taken from into use during the Christian attack on Muslim Spanish in the fifteenth
century.

We want to investigate and compare the current University of Hargeisa Mosque and the type of
mosque needs now. In the early years, it was enough for all the students and employees of the
university, but now the number of students and employers were increased dramatically year after
year, so the university needs a larger size and modern mosque than the older mosque. In the past
time, previous administration and students have tried to build by collaboration but, they were
filled. But the new administration will try to implement this project because it is a functioning
administration.

The University of Hargeisa is one of the most powerful Universities in our country because it has
more than 7000 students and more staff, therefore, it needs a Mosque which has good ventilation
windows, more space, modern design of ablution system and very suitable library which will
help the students prepare for the religious knowledge.
1.2 Problem statements

This is the biggest problem of this University and that’s why we select this project, because of

this mosque is a small mosque which has a minimum area and facilities. While the university

needs a large and modern mosque, which can response all needs of the university population.

After a long time of research, we made questionnaire containing a question that we ask the

students and the staff of the university and we also met the university managers to take an

interview for this and we get sufficient information for those people to get a suitable solution for

this problem

On the other hand, we saw the needs of the students in a library because of the university has an

only one library which is small we decided to design part of the mosque as a library which the

Islamic students can use and get books and space for reading. Also, the imam of the mosque and

other staffs like mu'adin of the mosque doesn't have service rooms to sleep and relax after

praying and that's why we design two service rooms which we allocate them to relax.

When you analyze the problem as the possible manner you design cost-effective structure, as we

know the construction companies don't care about the cost and they didn't analyze to get the best

way they solve the problem with a cost-effective. After when we see this we made a research to

know how we get a suitable process for solving this by using one of the best codes in the world

code i.e. BS 8110 part1-1997.

1.3 Objectives of the project

The objective we design this new mosque is:

i. To design the proper mosque that will response all needs of the University, which has

good ventilation and good ablution system.

ii. To design more capacity mosque that will have take forecasting students in the coming

years, because of the growing of the students year after year.

iii. To design a mosque, which has different facilities such as a library, service rooms and

others such as modern mosques.

iv. To maintain and use this space as well as possible. To get rid of the wastage of land.

v. To improve the long-time reliability of this mosque.

1.4 Scope of the project

1.4.1 Geographical scope:

This study will be conducted by the University of Hargeisa.

Our Scope is to design a modern mosque in the university campus, which has a standard level,

such like the modern mosques in the world; also we want to minimize this problem as we can,

because of this university have this problem for a long time and that’s why we want to solve it.

When the time of salah is coming, some of the students are praying mosques which locate the

outside of the university for the reason of no space for this mosque and this mosque takes a small
number of students, for that reason the time of the lessons where loss for the coming back from

those mosques and it takes a time to come to the classes and that’s one of the student’s problems.

1.4.2 Time scope:

This study will take a considerable time and it will start from May 2017 to July 2017.