The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque () is the largest mosque in Oman, located in the capital city of Muscat. Construction In 1992, the then Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said al Said, directed that his country should have a Grand Mosque. In 1993, a competition for the design of the proposed masque took place. The building contract was awarded to Carillion Alawi LLC. Construction commenced in December 1994, after a site was chosen at Bausher, and it took six years and seven months to build the mosque. The mosque is made of stone, with doors, windows and embellishments made of wood and glass. Around 300,000 tons of Indian sandstone was imported for the building. Five minarets have been built around the premises of the mosque: the main minaret () in height, and the four flanking minarets () are the mosque’s chief visual features from the exterior. In the interior, the main musalla is the focus of both prayer and tourism. The prayer hall is square in shape and has a central dome rising to a height of above the floor. The dome is embellished spectacularly from the inside and it is a major tourist attraction in itself. The main musalla can hold over 6500 worshippers, while the women's musalla can accommodate 750 worshipers. The outer paved ground can hold 8000 worshipers and there is additional space available in the interior courtyard and the passageways, making a total capacity of up to 20,000 worshipers. The mosque is built on a site occupying , and the complex extends to cover an area of . The newly built Grand Mosque was inaugurated by Sultan of Oman on May 4, 2001 to celebrate 30 years of his reign. Interior A major feature of the design of the interior is the prayer carpet which covers the floor of the prayer hall. It contains, 1,700,000,000 knots, weighs 21 tonnes and took four years to produce, and brings together the classical Persian Tabriz, Kashan and Isfahan design traditions. 28 colors in varying shades were used, the majority obtained from traditional vegetable dyes. It used to be the largest single-piece carpet in the world, but is now the second, after the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, the UAE. This hand-woven carpet was produced by Iran Carpet Company (ICC) at the order of the Diwan of the Royal Court of Sultanate. The carpet measures over , and covers