The Role of Religious Spaces in Recent Development Plans: (With Particular Reference to the Prepared Plans in Tehran)

Religious places are the places for the believers to pray. Holly Qur’an clearly defines these spaces as the places that belong to Allah, and Muslims worship and express their belief there. The word ‘mosque’ is mentioned 28 times in the Holly Qur’an. The overall function of mosques aims to generate harmony, harmony of Muslims with respect to God. Mosques have two integrated purposes of religious and social activities. The religious purpose is to worship God in congregational prayer five times a day. The social purpose is to unite Muslims within the community and strengthen their social relationships. Mosque is a symbol of religion, unity, beliefs, identity, peace, strength, justice and solidarity of Muslims. It promotes collective strength; defines hierarchy and allegiance; resolves conflicts with the community; strives for social cohesion; and imparts restrictions and controls of human behavior. The ideal use of mosques was in traditional Muslim cities. They were used as multi-purpose spaces, serving for prayers, studying Holly Qur’an, making political decisions and solving socio- cultural problems. In those times, mosques had to be equally distributed in the built environment and in proportion to the size of population of various sections in the cities. Building mosques in an equal and proportional distribution provided all inhabitants equal access to the use of the spaces in a mosque. So it seems that in traditional Islamic cities mosques had more important roles; they were able to unify Islamic cities physically, socially and culturally but recently, planning of the cities lack the utilization of this characteristics. The study shows that in recent urban planning and design, religious spaces especially mosques have not been paid proper attention. This article is mainly concerned with the role of religious places and specially mosques in planning and design organization in Islamic cities. The main question here is that whether planners and designers have considered the main role of the religious spaces and mosques in planning and designing of a contemporary city for Muslims or not? It seems that there is no significant attention to religious places in the recently prepared city plans. In order to examine the above hypothesis, the comprehensive plans of five districts of Tehran Municipality (2 ^th, 3 ^th, 12^th, 17^th& 20^th regions) were selected as case studies. These parts are located in different parts of the city. To pursue the research; a number of variables were determined and defined. What we found out is that one of the reasons for the decreasing of social interaction and spiritual values in our contemporary cities, is the forgotten role of our religious magnets as a social capital of the society in the planning and designing of our cities. It means that this factor is the one that ought to be under strong consideration in all Muslim communities all over the world.