A moment in a mosque
For just over a year, the biggest mosque in the Balkans has been the one you see in the photo above. It’s in Albania’s capital city, Tirana, and has capacity for 10,000 worshippers. Gleaming white in the sunshine, it rises proudly, pristinely, in the city’s centre. The call to prayer rings out from its minarets and soars over car-logged streets. Moved and captivated, I find I want to be obedient to the call, so I look for a way in.
The entrance for women leads up some stairs to the wide, open spaces of a gallery overlooking the main worship area. Tirana’s new Great Mosque, opened in October 2024, is a vast open area, full of air, full of light. Looking down, I pick out the key features which, as a young RE teacher, I would explain to my pupils before taking them to visit mosques nearby. My shoes are off by now, of course, and I’m aware that, in some curious way, I am experiencing the moment through my feet as well as through my eyes and ears.
It’s Friday but still early in the day, the main service is several hours off and there’s almost no-one here, just a few men praying below and several women too, on the far side of the gallery. It’s only then that I notice her. A woman very near me but facing Mecca and therefore away from me. When I first see her, she is standing, her arms raised above and beside her in adoration and submission. She seems to be dressed in black from head to toe but then suddenly she plunges to her knees and bends right over, her forehead at home on the blue carpet and I see one white ankle sock peeping out from under the black, exposed. The vulnerability of that small white foot is touching, as are the woman’s spectacles which sit perched on her bag, beside her on the carpet.
I cannot see her face but, watching her from behind, it feels as if she is entirely caught up in the moment, in this exposing of her whole being to the divine, in this offering of herself. There is nothing half-hearted here.
For a brief moment, the woman’s submission draws me in, softening me, enabling me also to submit, to respond with openness and self-giving. I don’t know anything about her. I never even saw her face. But the loving reverence of her raised arms and hands, and then her head low on the ground, her upended bottom and unprotected feet, these were the things which humbled me, which stilled me, which helped me - for a nanosecond - to worship.
Later, pondering the fact that I never even saw the woman’s face, I remembered the wooden carving of the Buddha which sits in our Norfolk home. It is undeniably beautiful from the front, slicks of gold on the exquisitely fashioned folds of cloth catching the light, but, despite being far less ornate from the back, it is from this vantage point that I am most moved. Gazing at the utterly absorbed figure from behind, I see a tender vulnerability in the neck and shoulders, a poignancy in the utter stillness of the one meditating. As with the woman in the mosque, it is the rear view of this figure which stops me in my tracks and draws me too into stillness.
