Updating the Mosque for the 21st Century

The whole world is a mosque, the Prophet Muhammad once said. With pious intent, a faithful Muslim can conjure a mosque almost anywhere, transforming a desert sand dune, airport departure lounge or city pavement into a sacred space simply by stopping to pray. The first mosque was Muhammad's mud-brick house in Medina, where a portico of palm-tree branches provided shade for prayer and theological discussion. As the young religion spread, Arabs — and later Asians and Africans — developed their own ideas of what made a building a mosque. But that innovative spirit has slowed in recent decades, leaving most Islamic...