Minaret is the tall slender tower of a mosque from which the call to prayer is traditionally announced five times daily.
The minaret (Arabic: 'manāra', a place of light) is the tall, typically slender tower attached to a mosque from which the muezzin issues the call to prayer ('adhan') five times daily. Early Islamic architecture had no minarets; the first appeared in the 8th and 9th centuries. Regional traditions diverged dramatically. The square minarets of North Africa and al-Andalus include the Giralda in Seville (1184) and the Koutoubia in Marrakesh (1195). The cylindrical minarets of the Ottoman tradition, perfected by the architect Sinan in the 16th century, became impossibly slender — the four minarets of his Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1574) are over 80 metres tall and only a few metres wide. The Iranian and Central Asian tradition produced the brick-banded minarets of the Friday Mosque of Isfahan and the Kalyan Minaret of Bukhara (1127). The minaret of Jam in Afghanistan (c. 1190), 65 metres of decorated brickwork standing alone in a remote valley, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today most calls to prayer are amplified electronically, but the minaret remains the defining vertical element of Islamic urban skylines from Istanbul to Cairo to Lahore.