All the colours of a Mosque

Today is the day I buy a MIDI keyboard, ooooh yeah. I’m off to the music shop hopefully around 5 if I’m lucky and then taxi back, I’m not risking my brand new keyboard on the Bombay trains! So today I am studying colour and Islam, in the hopes of understanding what colours to paint the mosque plasterwork. We (the conservationists) want a lime based paint, to allow the building to breath, but our client wants to use modern paints. We’ve compromised with painting the outside lime based and the inside modern, so that at least one side is breathable, although the client says that modern paints are just as breathable. Just remember folks, if you live in an old building, let it breath, ie. allow moisture to freely move through it and evaporate from its surface.

So how to colour a mosque, remember that there is only geometric and natural patterns here as no physical representation of anyone or any creature may adorn a mosque. Firstly. the colour green is very important in Islam as it represents life and was said to be Allah’s favourite colour. In Islamic culture green and gold are the colors of paradise.

If you look at a lot of pics of mosques you will see green in them. Green however, is actually part of a symbolic code in colours for Islam. The four colours most important in Islam is red, yellow, green and blue. Red is fire, yellow is the air, green is water and blue is the earth. Above these though is white, black and Sandalwood (brown). White is the light of the sun, received as a manifestation of divine power which allows the colours to flow forth. Black is part of the divine emanation (the origin of all things out of the unchanging completeness of divine unity), a part of a divine quality which withdraws and hides itself (God hides in his own radiance). Black thus symbolises the destruction of the self as the prerequisite for reintegration. The third colour is sandalwood, the colourless earth and the neutral basis on which nature (the system is explained below in the system of four colours) and the polar properties of white and black take effect. So many mosques can be seen painted in these colours, many with coloured tiles, paintwork on flat plaster or paintwork on decorative plaster.

I have written a suggestion that they ask some art historians and painters to get a better Idea; I myself am suggesting dark rich colours revolving around the gold/green ideal. Here’s a few pics as examples.