Masjid means place of prostration, and that is the entire requirement: a clean space and a known direction. There is no consecration ritual, no altar, no reserved sacrament and no priest, which is why the religion could travel as lightly as it did — a trader could establish practice in a port with a room and a compass. The great mosques are civic architecture rather than sacred machinery: the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali is mud brick and is replastered every year by the whole town in a festival; the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus was a church and before that a temple. The imam is whoever leads the prayer, in principle the person with the best Quran, and there is no ordination — although Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and others now employ state-appointed and state-trained imams, which is a modern arrangement with obvious political consequences. In most Western countries the mosque committee that owns the building has more real power than the imam it employs, who is frequently on a short contract and sometimes does not speak the congregation's language.