the City of Cordoba, one in 1262 and the other in 1445, both of which show the mosque (which by then had been converted to a cathedral) within whose walls appear tall palm trees. With secure evidence of its early date, this courtyard is the oldest continuously planted Islamic garden in the world. Qibla alignment of the mosque Mosques were normally aligned with the qibla (the direction of prayer), which is theoretically the direction of Mecca. From Cordoba, Mecca is to the east-southeast, but the Great Mosque of Cordoba is instead oriented more towards the south. This orientation, which doesn't match that of modern mosques, is due to historical differences in opinion about the appropriate direction of the qibla in far western Islamic lands like al-Andalus and Morocco. In this early period, many Muslims in the region preferred a tradition that existed in the western Islamic world (the Maghreb and al-Andalus) according to which the qibla should be oriented towards the south instead of pointing towards the shortest distance to Mecca. This was based on a saying (hadith) of Muhammad which stated that "What is between the east and west is a qibla", which thus legitimized southern alignments. This practice may also have sought to emulate the orientation of the walls of the rectangular Kaaba building inside the Great Mosque of Mecca, based on another tradition which considered the different sides of the Kaaba as being associated with different parts of the Muslim world. In this tradition the northwest face of the Kaaba was associated with al-Andalus and, accordingly, the Great Mosque of Cordoba was oriented towards the southeast as if facing the Kaaba's northwestern façade, with its main axis parallel to the main axis of the Kaaba structure (which was oriented from southeast to northwest). Although later mosques in Al-Andalus did have more eastern-facing orientations (e.g. the Mosque of Madinat al-Zahra in the 10th century), later expansions of the Great Mosque did not attempt to modify its original alignment. Expansions of the mosque In 793 Abd ar-Rahman I's son and successor, Hisham I, added to the mosque a ṣawma'a, a shelter for the muezzin on top of the outer wall, as the mosque did not yet have a minaret (a feature which was not yet standard in early mosques). The mosque was significantly expanded by Abd ar-Rahman II (r. 822–852) sometime between the years 833 and 848. This expansion