Muslim sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a Muslim site, and that covers rather more than mosques. Cemeteries, madrasas, prayer rooms and offices sit on the map alongside them, though mosques and their grounds are most of what you will see. There are more than 330,000 sites worldwide. Colour represents what kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

A mapper added each of these at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we use no register of mosques.

What we include

A site counts when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says Muslim, or when the feature is a building tagged as a mosque. That second rule recovers more than 13,000 mosques that record no religion, and it is safe because almost every mosque building that does record one says Muslim. We leave off several hundred drinking-water points and wells tagged as Muslim, sabeels among them, on the grounds that a water point is not a site. That is a judgement, and you may disagree with it.

Colour

Colour represents what kind of site it is rather than which religion, because the religion is the whole map. Places of worship are more than four-fifths of it and burial sites about a tenth. Mosque buildings that no other rule named come next, then schools and grounds, and offices, markers and former sites each appear in small numbers. The marker class is small here because of tagging rather than practice. Shrines and tombs such as mazars, dargahs and türbe are numerous, and OpenStreetMap records them as tombs and mausolea, which this map does not count.

Religions we keep separate

We do not fold Yazidi, Yarsan and Druze sites into this map. OpenStreetMap records each as a religion in its own right, we follow the tag, and they appear on the map of other religions. How those communities describe their own relationship to Islam is not a question we should answer for them. Branches of Islam are a different matter. Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Ahmadiyya and Ibadi live in the `denomination` tag, so we show them in the panel and they play no part in deciding whether a site belongs here.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. Fewer than a third of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, because a mosque and a cemetery are both usually traced as areas, and we draw those at a nominal size. We draw mosques as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about half as wide again, because a tenth of this map is burial ground and that covers far more ground than any building. The largest sites are the cemeteries at Najaf, one of which is the largest cemetery on earth, and the plain of Arafat where pilgrims gather during the Hajj. We cap the size scale well below them.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a mosque there, not that nobody worships there. This is the layer where that warning matters most. Mapping is a long way from complete across much of West Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, and in several countries only a small share of the mosques that exist have been drawn.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A site shown here may have closed or changed use, and the building usually stays where it is.

Source and licence

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