A Mosque in a Mosque

Very little to date has been written about the mosques of Dakar in particular and Senegal in general. The aim of this paper is therefore to present some aspects of the earlier Dakarois mosques in an attempt to explore their historical and stylistic evolution through an analysis of two major sources: contemporary images and archival documentation. Thanks in particular to the collaboration of Georges Meurillon of Images et Mémoires1 , I have been able to piece together a tentative chronology for these mosques. As this is only a part of my thesis (Cantone 2006), I have selected a certain style of mosque whose earliest dated prototypes are found in the great mosques of Saint-Louis and rue Blanchot in Dakar. The principal unifying elements of this type of mosque, as we shall see, are their close resemblance to church architecture but also their building material, masonry.

A_Mosque_in_a_Mosque.pdf