Effective Criteria to Create Sense of Privacy and Mystery in Mosques (Case Study: Jameh Mosque of Isfahan)

The sense of privacy in public worship spaces, such as the temples, is one of the most important spiritual needs of a worshiper for spiritual concentration and finally effective communication with the God. The Islamic mosques, according the Islamic attitude, have been considered as a social center for interacting with each other and an ideal place for Individual privacy in order to communicate with the God, but todays in contemporary mosques, people have lost their concentration and privacy and it can be the reason for reducing the mosque’s position to only a place for elders, places that have severely lost their individual and collective spirit. In this regard, the purpose of this research is to demonstrate the importance of privacy in mosques and to examine the characteristics and environmental factors that affect the creation of this sense based on Islamic attitudes. The main questions of this research can be explained as follows: What are the effective factors in creating sense of privacy in the mosques? How these factors influence the formal and spatial qualities, light, color and decorations? we study the concept of privacy in Islamic attitude and levels of perception in the approach of Islamic schools and privative and requisite qualities affecting this concept which are followed by a descriptive-analytical method. The case study of the subject is the Jame mosque in Isfahan as a successful example. The results show that factors such as revealing and covertness, vacuity (empty space), repetition and dynamic and static characters can enhance the sense of privacy by attending to decorations, spatial system, lighting system, colors and materials and it can be recognized as criteria for designing contemporary mosques.