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China’s Great Mosque of Xi’an, a Silk Road legacy
Like older Indonesian mosques, the Great Mosque of Xi’an is a testament of how early Muslims managed to immerse the faith into a local cultural setting.
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Thought-provoking: A library called the Unmatched Pavilion is located in the first courtyard of the Huajue Mosque complex. (Courtesy of M. Nurul Hudha/-)
A
group of social media influencers and The Jakarta Post were invited to visit Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai by the Chinese Embassy from Sept. 2 to. 8. The trip was organized by Tenggara Strategics.
So foreign yet so familiar — that is how I felt when visiting the Great Mosque of Xi’an.
If not for the Sino-Arabic inscription on its gateway, you would think the city’s largest mosque, also known as Huajue Mosque, was a Buddhist temple. Its architectural design is nothing like that of most modern Indonesian or Middle Eastern mosques, with their tall minarets and giant domes.
If you do not speak Chinese and are traveling alone, you could easily miss it. One of the reasons is that the mosque, according to archnet.org, has a layout of an ancient Buddhist temple with its successive courtyards, pagodas and pavilions.
The only difference is that the 12,000-square-meter complex is on an east-west axis facing Mecca and that the pagodas and pavilions are adorned with Islamic art and functionality.
One pagoda, called Shengxinlou or the Examiner of the Heart Tower, for example, serves as a minaret where the call to prayer used to be made.
