The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque is the main mosque in the Sultanate of Oman, located in the capital city of Muscat.
In 1992, Qaboos bin Said al Said, the then Sultan of Oman, directed that his country should have a Grand Mosque. A competition for its design took place in 1993 and after a site was chosen at Bausher construction commenced in December 1994. Building work, which was undertaken by Carillion Alawi LLC, took six years and seven months.
The mosque is built from 300,000 tonnes of Indian sandstone. The main musalla or prayer hall is square and 74.4 by 74.4 metres with a central dome rising to a height of 50 metres above the floor. The dome and the main minaret and 45.5 metres four flanking minarets are the mosque’s chief visual features. The main musalla can hold over 6500 worshippers, while the women's musalla can accommodate 750 worshipers. The outer paved ground can hold 8000 worshipers and there is additional space available in the interior courtyard and the passageways, making a total capacity of up to 20,000 worshipers.
The chandelier above the praying hall is 14 metres tall and was manufactured by the Italian company Faustig. Since the mosque is 90 metres high, the chandler looks proportional, but it used to be the world's largest chandelier, before again being replaced in this respect by the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. It weighs 8.5 tons, includes 600,000 crystals, 1,122 halogen bulbs complete with dimming system, and includes a staircase for maintenance within the chandelier. Thirty-four smaller chandeliers of the same design are hung in other parts of the building.
The mosque is built on a site occupying 416,000 m2, and the complex extends to cover an area of 40,000 m2. The newly built Grand Mosque was inaugurated by Sultan of Oman on May 4, 2001 to celebrate 30 years of his reign.
According to wikipedia.org