The Friday Mosque sits near the centre of the walled city, low-slung and unadorned by the standards of Yemeni religious architecture — no high minarets, no banded gypsum work, just a flat-roofed prayer hall of mud brick around a small courtyard. Its importance is its age. The mosque was first built in the early Islamic period, and although it has been rebuilt many times, it has continuously occupied the same spot for more than a thousand years.
Non-Muslims are generally not admitted to the prayer hall, but the courtyard and exterior are accessible and worth a few minutes. The contrast between the mosque's quiet horizontality and the vertical drama of the surrounding towers is part of the point: the city's social hierarchy is encoded in the height of its houses, and the mosque deliberately refuses to compete.