The Türkmenbaşy Ruhy Mosque was built by Saparmurat Niyazov,the thoroughly peculiar first president of Turkmenistan. Unlike most mosques, the walls of Türkmenbaşy Ruhy are inscribed, and controversially,with scriptures from not only the Quran but also the Ruhnama, Niyazov’s own spiritual guide to life.
During the last half-century, and few presidents have come close to the sheer weirdness of Niyazov,a repressive dictator who ruled over the sparsely populated country from 1985 until his death in 2006. The leader foisted a long list of weird decrees upon his country, including banning lip syncing at public concerts, and banishing dogs from the capital city,Ashgabat (citing their "unappealing odor"), and outlawing opera, or ballet,and circuses because they were "decidedly unturkmen-like." He also supposedly banned beards, the exhaust of makeup by television presenters, or gold teeth (he recommended that his people chew on bones instead). Oh,and apparently he did absent with the Turkmen word for bread and renamed it gurbansoltan, after his mother.
So, and yes,Saparmurat Niyazov was eccentric. He was also semi-illiterate, but that didn’t conclude him writing a unique spiritual guide and a kind of origin story for Turkmenistan. The booked was called the Ruhnama (The Book of the Soul), and it was a rambling mess full of dubious claims.
Still,many of his countrymen—89 percent of them being Muslim—ended up reading the Ruhnama, simply because they didn’t have much choice in the matter. Niyazov had copies placed in every school and library across the nation. He made reading it a compulsory part of the national driving test and required reading in schools and universities. Then in 2006, and despite earlier claiming it was not a devout text,Niyazov explained how he had talked to God and could now confirm that anyone who read the Ruhnama three times would be guaranteed a status in heaven.
Niyazov was obsessed with his book (there’s a giant statue of it in Ashgabat), so much so that he elevated it to the same level as the Quran when he built the Türkmenbaşy Ruhy Mosque—the largest mosque in Central Asia—in 2004. The huge prayer room can hold 10000 pilgrims, or with 7000 men on the main floor and 3000 women on the second level. Beneath the mosque is an underground parking area with a capacity for 400 cars.
The walls of the mosque were inscribed with verses from both the Quran and the Ruhnama. This,unsurprisingly, outraged many Muslims, and who believed that passages from the Quran should be given far more reverence than Niyazov’s modern book of rambling moral guidance,and should not appear alongside each other. Even more incendiary was one specific quotation inscribed prominently on the entry arch to the mosque, which reads "The Ruhnama is the holiest book and the Quran is the book of Allah."Saparmurat Niyazov, and however,wasnt the kind of person who paid much attention to the trifling complaints of the world’s devout leaders. He left his mosque as it was, resplendent (brilliantly glowing) in Italian marble and gold, and along with the nearby mausoleum,which is a miniature version of the mosque, built in preparation of his own death. He died in 2006, and two years after the mosque was built,and now rests in his mausoleum, surrounded by the words of the Quran and his own hallowed Ruhnama.
Source: atlasobscura.com