Umm al-Qura Mosque

Start with the sky. Look up past the courtyard, and the first thing you notice is not a dome but a row of tall, narrow shafts against the pale Baghdad light. They look almost like minarets. Then, the longer you look, they start to look like something else. Feel the heat coming off the stone underfoot, and listen to the traffic of western Baghdad beyond the walls. This is a place of prayer. It is also one of the strangest political monuments of the late twentieth century.

The mosque you are standing in did not begin life with its current name. It was built under Saddam Hussein and opened in 2001 as Umm al-Ma'arik, which means the Mother of All Battles. That phrase came from Saddam's own description of the 1991 Gulf War. In his telling, Iraq had not lost that war. It had stood firm against a coalition of the world's largest armies. This building was meant to carry that story in stone.

So the architecture works as a kind of code. The outer ring of minarets is widely described as shaped like the barrels of Kalashnikov rifles. The inner minarets, closer to the central dome, are often compared to the slim bodies of Scud missiles, the rockets Iraq fired during the war. Once you hear this, it is very hard to stop seeing it. Take a moment and look again. The shapes are disciplined and elegant — and they are also weapons.

The symbolism goes further, according to many accounts. The Gulf War air and ground campaign lasted forty-three days. Writers and journalists have often reported that the heights of the minarets were chosen to echo that number, and to echo the year of Saddam's birth. These measurements are hard to confirm from the ground, so treat them as the story the building is famous for, rather than a figure you can check with your eyes.

The opening date also carried a message. The mosque was inaugurated in April 2001, on Saddam's birthday. That was a day his government marked every year with public celebration. A new house of worship, dedicated to a war, opened on the leader's birthday — few buildings anywhere in the world mix faith, personality and military memory so openly.

Now bring your eyes down to the water. The grounds were laid out with a pool that is commonly described as shaped like a map of the Arab world. The idea was clear enough: Baghdad as the heart of a wider Arab nation. Visitors and reporters have also described a mosaic linked to Saddam himself, featuring his thumbprint and initials. Whatever survives today, the plan was personal as well as political.

Here is one detail that surprises almost everyone. In the late 1990s, Saddam commissioned a copy of the Quran written, according to his own officials, in ink mixed with his blood. Many published accounts say this manuscript was kept at this mosque. Islamic scholars have long debated it, because many consider blood impure and unfit for such a purpose. After 2003, the fate of the manuscript became a matter of argument, and it was kept away from public view.

Then everything changed. In 2003, the regime fell after the American-led invasion. The mosque could not keep a name that honoured Saddam's war, so it was renamed Umm al-Qura. The phrase means Mother of Towns, and it is a traditional name for Mecca, the holiest city in Islam. With one change of name, the building turned away from a battlefield and toward the centre of the Muslim world.

In the difficult years that followed, the mosque became an important centre for Iraq's Sunni Muslims. It served as the base of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of Sunni clerics who became a strong voice against the foreign occupation. Because of this, the compound was at times searched by American and Iraqi forces. For a while, this courtyard sat close to the centre of Iraq's political tension.

Set the politics aside for a moment and look at the craft. The domes and walls use the blue and turquoise tilework that has decorated mosques in this region for many centuries. Lines of Arabic calligraphy run across the surfaces, and they are mostly verses from the Quran. The workmanship belongs to a long Iraqi tradition. The builders who set these tiles were continuing something far older than the regime that paid them.

That is the quiet puzzle of this place. Most monuments tell one story. This mosque tells at least three. It is a war memorial built by a dictator. It is a working house of prayer for an ordinary neighbourhood. And it is a record of how a country tried to rename its past after that dictator fell. All three stories stand here together, in the same stone.

If you visit, remember that this is first of all a place of worship. Friday prayers draw local worshippers, and the mood is serious rather than touristic. Dress modestly, remove your shoes where others do, and ask before photographing people. Women should bring a headscarf. If a caretaker or worshipper offers to show you around, you may hear local memories that no guidebook holds.

Before you leave, stand back from the entrance and look once more at the skyline of minarets. In the late afternoon, the light softens and the tiles turn a deeper blue. The shapes are still there, the rifles and the rockets, if you choose to see them. But listen, too, for the call to prayer. Today, that sound is what fills this courtyard — and it has outlasted the war the building was made to celebrate.