Örnek Mahallesi Cami

Örnek Mahallesi Camii serves the residents of Örnek Mahallesi — literally 'the Exemplary Neighbourhood' — in Mamak, a district name given to a mid-twentieth-century planned housing development intended as a model for how new urban neighbourhoods should be laid out. The aspirations of the planners are audible in the name itself: an entire neighbourhood conceived as an example to be followed, its streets straight, its squares open, its mosque placed deliberately at the centre. The mosque bearing the district's name is a well-kept neighbourhood structure with a single minaret, a central dome, and a generous forecourt planted with shade trees. Inside, the prayer hall is carpeted in warm tones, and the mihrab is carefully finished with Kütahya tile. Calligraphic panels along the walls include the divine names and verses from the Qur'an on the theme of exemplary conduct — passages such as those urging the believers to call to the good and forbid the wrong. The imam's Friday sermons often take their cue from the mosque's name and the neighbourhood's aspirations, returning to the themes of exemplary conduct in family life, in business, in the relations between neighbours. Women pray in a comfortable upper gallery, and Qur'an classes for children run throughout the year. Ablution facilities are clean and heated. During Ramadan the mosque runs a full programme of tarawih and community iftars. A small community noticeboard in the entrance hall carries announcements of upcoming neighbourhood events — weddings, mevlids, funerals, charitable collections — in a manner that recalls the central role that mosques have historically played in coordinating the life of a Muslim community, and the careful updating of the board by a long-serving volunteer is itself a small embodiment of that quiet but essential function. For Muslim visitors to Mamak, Örnek Mahallesi Camii is a welcoming place to pray, and the ambition encoded in the neighbourhood's name — that this ordinary urban district might stand as an example of how Muslims can live well with their neighbours and with their Lord — is itself worth a quiet thought before one steps back into the street.