Segesta: The Mosque On Mount Barbaro

In the late 1980s, after finishing her doctorate, Alessandra Molinari turned her attention to a promontory in northwestern Sicily. Archaeologists believed Segesta had given up its ancient secrets, with nothing medieval left to offer. The ancient city draws visitors with its Elymian-built Doric Temple, a grand theater, and aging cemeteries past the point of the macabre.

Molinari’s attention caught instead on a recess in a ruined wall, a most curious clue. Rectangular on the outside and hollowed into a niche within, it projected from the southern side of a long, low enclosure.¹ To her team’s astonishment, it was a mihrab.

Today, it remains the only mosque from Islamic Sicily identified through excavation.

The Mosque Ruins at Segesta

Molinari’s investigation formed part of the systematic excavations begun in 1989 by the Trapani heritage authorities and collaborating universities. The remains of the mosque had been visible to archaeologists during earlier surveys, but for decades they registered as little more than an anomalous rectangle of masonry near the third-century BCE theatre. 

Molinari’s crew cleared the interior down to bedrock and exposed the bases of three columns that had once divided the room into two long naves. The room measured twenty meters long, eleven wide.² Its walls were limestone blocks, and was constructed directly against the rocky terrain, suggesting that the exposed rock may have served as part of the prayer surface. While the evidence suggests a tiled roof, archaeologists have found no trace of a minaret or a wudu fountain.³ No inscription survives to name the people who commissioned it.

Muslims of Segesta

Had this been a military outpost? The excavations suggest something more settled. In the area of the ancient agora, the dig found dwellings whose rooms opened onto small courtyards or blind alleys.⁴ Paleopathologist Pier Francesco Fabbri later reported a Muslim necropolis nearby, suggesting families living on the hill.⁵

Then comes the chronological complication. There were fragments of ceramic found during the dig, and fortunately, due to a well-established dating method (based upon comparative style and technique analysis with other Islamic-period ceramics found on the island) helped to place the mosque’s construction in the twelfth century.⁶

By then, Sicily was squarely under Norman rule and political power lay firmly in Christian hands. Muslim communities now found themselves negotiating their place in a new order.

Given this precarious position, how could a mosque have been built after Sicily had fallen to Roger II? Who exactly built the mosque in Segesta? 

There is little about Segesta in the historical written record. We know that the city lay on 

Mount Barbaro, and close by stood Calathamet – Qal’a al-Hammah – a fortified settlement that Muhammad al-Idrisi, the famous cartographer serving in the court of Roger II, described as an exceptionally strong fortified site.⁷ Ibn Jubayr, who traveled through Sicily in 1184 and 1185, passed near it after spending a night at Alqama (modern Alcamo) on the road to Atrabanish (modern day Trapani) described the countryside as inhabited entirely by Muslims:

We spent one night on the road in a town known as ʿAlqama. It is large and spacious, and in it are a market and mosques. Its inhabitants, and the inhabitants of all these estates along this road, are Muslims. We rose from it before dawn on Saturday, the twenty-third of this blessed month and the twenty-ninth of December.

We passed, near it, a fortress known as the Fortress of al-Ḥamma. It is a large town in which there are many baths. God has caused them to gush forth as springs in the earth and made them flow as waters whose heat the body can scarcely endure because of its excess. We passed one of them along the road, so we dismounted from the beasts and refreshed our bodies by bathing in it.⁸

Archaeological work by the École française de Rome identifies both their references with the medieval site of Calathamet, part of the same landscape of upland strongholds and water sources around Segesta.⁹ Modern travel writer and journalist Tharik Hussain, in his book Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History, writes that from the top of Mount Barbaro he could see the area of the hot springs where Ibn Jubayr likely stopped to bathe.¹⁰

The obscurity surrounding Segesta, and Muslim Sicily at large, owes much to the attrition and selective transmission of its written record. Churches and monasteries preserved records to substantiate claims to property, making Muslim inhabitants more visible as tenants or taxpayers than as narrators. Modern scholarship has sometimes compounded the imbalance by organising Sicily’s history around its Christian dynasties. Recent decades, however, have brought renewed scholarly attention to the island’s Islamic past, a development Molinari herself acknowledges.¹¹

Living Alongside Christians on Mount Barbaro

Bioarchaeology has been one source of attention in Segesta. In a 2024 study, Aurore Monnereau and colleagues, including Molinari, examined twenty-seven bodies that were recovered from two cemeteries in Segesta.¹² Eighteen were Christian and nine were Muslim, inferred in part from the orientation of their bodies facing towards Mecca. Radiocarbon modelling suggested that Muslim burial began well before the mosque’s construction. Furthermore, it also gave a 99.3% probability that the burial of Christians began before Muslim burials ended. This suggests that both Muslims and Christians lived at Segesta concurrently.

Taking all of this into account, one interpretation holds that Segesta’s Muslim community was made up largely of people displaced from lowlands as Norman control consolidated. They were forced to move to a defensible hilltop that already held a fortified settlement and castle. Molinari observed that renewed Muslim occupation on Mount Barbaro coincided with the establishment of a Norman lord at nearby Calathamet.¹³ The hill could have offered refuge that eventually led to the growth of a community large and organised enough to warrant a permanent place of congregation: the mosque. 

The timeline of earlier burials points to another interpretation, one that places Muslim Segesta’s beginnings with the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily. The issue is, although the sampled Muslim burials show North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry, genetics cannot tell us whether someone had personally crossed the Mediterranean, or had an ancestor who had done so, settling in Sicily generations earlier. 

Additionally, during the Swabian period (roughly 1194 to 1266, when the German Hohenstaufens ruled), Molinari identifies a substantial expansion of the inhabited area and an improvement in material life, evidenced by finer ceramics, abundant coin finds and dwellings of differing quality.¹⁴

Refuge, Revolt, and Decline

Unfortunately, such an era must have been short-lived. Arrowheads and traces of burning support the date of the settlement’s abandonment around the middle of the thirteenth century. Molinari connects it with Frederick II’s campaigns against rebellious Muslims and recalcitrant feudal lords, leading to the community increasingly concentrating in fortified strongholds.¹⁵ Segesta may have been one such refuge.

There was even recovered coinage of the rebel leader Muhammad ibn ʿAbbad in Segesta.¹⁶ Assuming the title Amir al Mu’minin, Ibn Abbad was one of the principal leaders of Muslim resistance in Western Sicily.¹⁷ He was eventually captured and executed on Frederick’s orders, although resistance did not end with him. His daughter took command of the stronghold at Entella Castle, until her death too.¹⁸ Fredrick II was ultimately successful in suppressing the rebellion through military campaigns and forced relocation of Muslims to Lucera on the mainland.

Around the thirteenth century, a Christian lord established a more conspicuous presence on Mount Barbaro, with the construction of a dongione (a castle’s main tower), a church, and a cemetery castle. Molinari connects this with the mosque’s probable demolition, while other accounts suggest its masonry was subsequently reused for other buildings.¹⁹

Other historical mentions include the mosque’s appearance in the documentary record under the name Calatabarbaro, possibly derived from the Latinisation of Qal’at Barbari (“Castle of the Berber”). The record trail fell silent for more than a century thereafter, with nary a mention except for in 1442 when inhabitants of the nearby Calatafimi commissioned a church on Mount Barbaro.²⁰ Unfortunately, the historical saga ends here. Until the 18th century antiquarian-led interest in the region, it was a bare, monumental landscape.

Visiting the Segesta Mosque Today

Visitors today come to Segesta for an altogether different antiquity than the one told above. The Doric temple, for example, commands touristic attention with its magnificent colonnade, while higher up on Monte Barbaro, the Segesta mosque scarcely registers as more than a smattering of limestone remains. 

The Muslim story does not end here, however. 

In 2022 Shaykh Hamzah wald Maqbul, after obtaining permission from the park authorities, led Asr in congregation with a group of tourists.²¹ Tharik Hussain too, recounts his own trek to Segesta (after a dip in the perhaps the same thermal waters Ibn Jubayr may have experienced).²² During my own visit, my husband stood upon the ruins of the old mosque and recited the call to prayer – one of the first, but God-willing not the last, to have done so in almost a thousand years.

Footnotes

1. Molinari, Alessandra. Segesta II: Il castello e la moschea (scavi 1989-1995). Palermo: Flaccovio, 1997. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Pier Paolo Racioppi “Mosque” in “Discover Islamic Art”, Museum With No Frontiers, 2026. 2026.
   https://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=monument;ISL;it;Mon01;14;it.
   ↩︎
4. Molinari, Alessandra. “L’Europa tardoantica e medievale. Le testimonianze islamiche nella penisola italiana: Segesta.” Il Mondo dell’Archeologia. Treccani, 2004. ↩︎
5. Pier Francesco Fabbri, “Segesta. Sepolture islamiche dell’area del teatro (SAS 12; 1995): scavo ed analisi antropologica preliminare,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 6 (2001): 495-501. ↩︎
6. Molinari, Alessandra. Segesta II: Il castello e la moschea (scavi 1989-1995). Palermo: Flaccovio, 1997. ↩︎
7. Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Idrīsī, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق), 609), (accessed through https://app.turath.io/book/11787?page=609.) ↩︎
8. Ibn Jubayr, Riḥlat Ibn Jubayr (رحلة ابن جبير), 271) (accessed through https://app.turath.io/book/10883?page=271.) ↩︎
9. “Chronique des activités de l’École française de Rome: fouilles de la section Moyen Âge,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge–Temps modernes 96, no. 2 (1984). ↩︎
10. Tharik Hussain, Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History (London: Viking, 2025). ↩︎
11. Alessandra Molinari, “La Sicilia islamica: riflessioni sul passato e sul futuro della ricerca in campo archeologico,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge 116, no. 1 (2004). ↩︎
12. Monnereau et al., “Multi-proxy bioarchaeological analysis of skeletal remains shows genetic discontinuity in a Medieval Sicilian community,” Royal Society Open Science 11 (2024). ↩︎
13. Alessandra Molinari, “L’Europa tardoantica e medievale Le testimonianze islamiche nella penisola italiana Segesta,” Il Mondo dell’Archeologia, Treccani, 2004. Settlement development, mosque demolition and evidence of violent abandonment. ↩︎
14. Molinari, Alessandra. “L’Europa tardoantica e medievale. Le testimonianze islamiche nella penisola italiana: Segesta.” Il Mondo dell’Archeologia. Treccani, 2004. ↩︎
15. Ibid. ↩︎
16. Molinari A. 1997 Segesta II: il castello e la moschea (scavi 1989-1995). Palermo: Flaccovio Editore. ↩︎
17. Ibn ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Ḥimyarī, al-Rawḍ al-miʿṭār fī khabar al-aqṭār, s.v. “أنطالة” (Inṭālah [Entella]) (acessed through https://app.turath.io/book/1043?page=56). ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎
19. Alessandra Molinari, “La Sicilia islamica: riflessioni sul passato e sul futuro della ricerca in campo archeologico,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge 116, no. 1 (2004). ↩︎
20. Alessandra Molinari, “L’incastellamento in Sicilia in epoca normanno-sveva: il caso di Segesta,” in L’incastellamento (Rome: École française de Rome, 1998), 271-290. ↩︎
21. Hamzah wald Maqbul (@hwmaqbul), “The Last Masjid of Sicily,” Twitter (now X), October 31, 2022, https://x.com/hwmaqbul/status/1587112367959121920?s=46. ↩︎
22. Tharik Hussain, Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History (London: Viking, 2025). ↩︎