Phenomenology of the Minarets of Shiite and Sunni Mosques; Looking at Eliade's Religious Phenomenology

The art of architecture has always provided valuable services to religious culture and has manifested the sacred in symbols and holy places. Fundamental research on the architecture of holy places and their symbols has clearly revealed the intellectual and religious infrastructure of a society and has led to the continuation of religious and cultural beliefs. The sacred symbol of the cosmic pillar, known in Islamic beliefs as the "minaret", with this approach causes distinctions in the architecture of mosques of the two Islamic religions, Shia and Sunni. The present study, with a phenomenological analysis, seeks to examine the foundations of the emergence of this symbol in Islamic holy places and discover the reason for the aforementioned distinction. For this purpose, first, the phenomenology of religion with the approach of Mircea Eliade and then the possibility of adapting it to Islamic teachings was examined to clarify that the minaret of mosques has a cultural function in revealing the holy place and the emergence of ways of communication between earth and sky, and its multiplicity is also rooted in the beliefs and foundations of the two religions. In Sunni religious principles, the path to heaven is limited to the Book of God, which is why mosques are designed with a single minaret; while Shiites consider the Ahlul Bayt of the Messenger of God (PBUH) as a path to heaven, in addition to the Book of God, and for this reason, they use two minarets in the architecture of their mosques.