"Diary Entry - February 7, 2026"
16:58 No estimates
TIL about the #NoEstimates movement in software development:
17:22 Courtyard of a Mosque at Broussa
Today I looked deeply at the Courtyard of a Mosque at Broussa by Frederic Leighton, it's a 1867 painting;
I genuinely miss when mosques looked like this, simple and messy yet cozy and very beautiful. When I was young, my Dad used to take me to a mosque in our town were I used to do Hifz. It was called the Wastani mosque but this was only the colloquial name, as I grown up to learn that the name in the official government references is "The Antique Mosque" المسجد العتيق in Arabic. Although it didn't have a courtyard, that mosque had a very similar architecture and as similar dome. I never thought that it was beautiful when I was young (again, I used to go everyday for at least 4 years continuously, doing Kuttab with Dad), I just accepted it as a part of the town.
It had the same redness in the artwork, and sometimes a beautiful yellow vectors of light coming from the open fractals of the dome, that aging and its wither have produced. It was really beautiful. For some reason it reminds me of houses in Cinema Paradiso (1988).
Later, when I was in high-school, I found a book about the history of my town and other nearby towns, it was written by an agricultural engineer from the Ottoman empire, the book surprisingly mention the mosque by its name, and I realized how this mosque is old then and I decided that "once I get time" I will spend some time there again, preferably with my dad. However, I didn't expect to come back to town to find that people are happy that they demolished the mosque and are rebuilding it, by the help of an anonymous donor (it's been said that, that donor, is an ex-infamous drug dealer who was trying to repent to God, thus he rebuilt so many mosques around the areas and built new ones too, which is likely, I don't expect a lot of intellect from someone who builds a mosque instead of a school or any other utility needed much more than a mosque nowadays), and I felt sad for I couldn't find any pictures of the mosque. I know that some people filmed some places of it in some few occasions, but it never captured the beauty it had.
I learnt that I should never say "Once I get the time for it" again, for it may never be possible again. That being said, once I have the time, I will learn how to do good painting, and I will paint this beautiful mosque from my own memory.