Jamia Mosque Nairobi
Onion-domed mosque raised on land a cleric chose sight unseen, decades before its skyline arrived.
This guide to Jamia Mosque in Nairobi opens with a dare: in 1902, a Sunni cleric named Maulana Sayed Abdullah Shah was told he could claim any plot in a scrappy railway town for his mosque, and put his finger down on a swamp nobody wanted. It follows the two decades his choice sat frozen by a colonial land law, worshippers making do under a corrugated-iron shed, and the 1925 fundraising drive that finally began, drawing Sunni and Shia donors alongside Hindus, Sikhs, Parsees and the Aga Khan. A Scottish architect modeled the domes on Mughal mosques of Delhi and Lahore, until the city council intervened. Shah did not live to see any of it built.
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