Great Mosque of Sana'a

High in the mountains of Yemen sits Sana'a, a city of tall gingerbread-looking houses decorated with white plaster patterns around every window.

In the middle of the old city is the Great Mosque, built in the 630s CE while the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was still alive. That makes it one of the oldest mosques on the planet.

In 1972, workers repairing the ceiling found a hidden space stuffed with old parchment. Inside were thousands of pages of very early Qur'an manuscripts, some written only a few decades after the Prophet ﷺ.

Scholars carefully cleaned and studied them, and the words matched the Qur'an that Muslims recite today — a beautiful proof of how carefully the Qur'an has been preserved.

The mosque itself is calm and simple: wooden ceilings painted with patterns, thick stone columns, and light coming through small windows onto the carpets.