Jerusalem: The Biography

* The modern mosque contains both a mihrab, a prayer-niche facing Mecca, and a minbar, the pulpit. Muawiya’s prayer-hall had the mihrab but probably not yet a minbar because early Islam was too egalitarian to have a pulpit. However, according to the historian Ibn Khaldun, Muawiya’s imperial reign changed that. His Egyptian governor, the general Amr, invented the minbar in his mosque in Egypt and Muawiya started to use it to give the Friday sermon, adding a latticed enclosure around it to protect him from assassins.