The Qibla Wall and Minbar
The Qibla wall is 23 metres high and 50 metres wide, and decorated with the 99 names (qualities) of Allah using traditional Kufi calligraphy. Worshippers face the Qibla (the Holy Ka'aba in Mecca) while praying. The Minbar (pulpit) is where the Imam delivers the sermon on Friday.
11 comments:
Amazing. What a wonderful idea for a wall -- for people to face when praying. Beautiful.
It could be dialectal, but I have always seen it written "minbar" and I just check the Arabic and it looks to be mim, nuun, ba, ra... so it seems that "mimbar" would be a misspelling from those who can't read the Arabic... just sayin... :-)
VS
Everything is just fabulous — the wall, the pulpit and even the floor!
Thanks CH. I've seen it wriiten both ways but I think you're right so I've corrected it.
Beautiful picture, I like the wall with the names. When praying, one would read God's names. Wonderful.
As an ex-TEFL teacher in the Gulf, I know how our ears can trick us on the sounds of a language. The 'mimbar' is a logical way for an English speaker to spell it because it does sound like that to us... and I can't think of any words in English that have "nb" together... off the top of my head. Ah the joys of language transliteration... :-)
I like how the "lectern" is carved to match... but it appears too flimsy a Quran, so it is probably only to hold his sermon.
VS
Interesting. A quick search on the internet listed a suprising 452 words that contain nb. Although most of them could only ever be used in a game show or scrabble: oxyphenbutazone; sanbenitos; moonbow!
Beautiful! Great ornamentes!
Notice that your first two examples are not English: Science/Latin - Spanish and actually two words.
I love moonbow!! I tried to google up 'nb' words but couldn't get it to give me anything but NB Contractors or whatever. What do you put in the search box?
Now I'm off to see if anyone actually has seen a moonbow and took a photo. :-)
VS
"Moonbow" - has a nice ring to it. I punched "words with nb" into to google and this what came back in 0.07 seconds. http://www.morewords.com/contains/nb/
Let me know how many actual "English" words are listed (and that are usable!)
You get a bunch of cool pictures if you google moonbow pictures. I have seen the circles around the moon, but never the normal rainbow shape. Naturally there is no color at night.
As to the list, one thing jumped out at me about it. They are almost all compound words like bean-bag, corn-bread, green-back, down-beat. The majority seem to be with prefixes like in-, non-, or un-. The words that are not the two options here are unfamiliar to me like vinblastine? kanban? Without doing research, the obvious borrowings from other languages are dieffenbachia, bonbon, steenbok, renminbi?. But my favorite is unbecomingnesses. Can't wait to wow my friends with it. Ha!
But, this list certainly backs up my feeling that 'nb' is not a normal combination for standard English spelling.
Thanks...
VS
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