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The record
265 m869 ft
Djamaa el Djazaïr
Algeria
The record
The tallest minaret in the world is Djamaa el Djazaïr, in Algeria — 265 m (869 ft), minaret height.
Source: Guinness World Records / Wikidata P2048. Verified .
The Qutb Minar is the minaret most people can name, and it is nowhere near this list — at 72.5 metres it would finish last by a wide margin, and it was raised as a victory tower rather than to call anyone to prayer. Seville's Giralda, built as a minaret in 1198, now rings bells for a cathedral. Marrakesh's Koutoubia, the template half of Morocco copied, falls more than twenty metres short of twelfth place.
The twelve here run from 100 metres to 265 metres across ten countries and four continents, and they are ordered one way only: by the height of the minaret itself, measured from the ground to the tip of its finial, never the mosque's roofline or its dome. Every one belongs to a working mosque and is standing today, which is exactly what keeps victory towers, ruins and repurposed bell towers off the list.
The tallest minaret on earth is also the tallest building in Africa — the 265-metre tower at Djamaa el Djazaïr in Algiers out-tops every skyscraper on the continent.
Guinness and the reference lists disagree by 70 centimetres. Guinness World Records surveyed the Algiers minaret at 264.3 metres, while most published rankings round it to 265.
Minaret heights are often coded messages. The four tall minarets at Çamlıca Mosque in Istanbul measure 107.1 metres because 1071 is the year of the Battle of Manzikert.
The tallest group of minarets is Malaysian, not Middle Eastern — four towers of 142.3 metres each ring the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Mosque in Shah Alam.
The tallest minaret in the Americas stands in Venezuela, not the Gulf: 113 metres in central Caracas at the Mosque of Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim, and nothing in Europe comes within 35 metres of it.
At 265 metres, the minaret of Djamaa el Djazaïr is not just the tallest minaret ever built — it is the tallest building in Africa, outranking every skyscraper on the continent.
It rises over the Bay of Algiers from a complex raised between 2012 and 2019 at a reported cost near a billion dollars, and it opened in April 2019. Guinness World Records, which measured the tower itself rather than taking the published figure, lists it a shade lower at 264.3 metres.
The scale is hard to register from the ground. The mosque around it ranks among the largest anywhere, behind only the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, and the minaret is a slender square shaft that reads more like an office tower than a traditional Maghrebi minaret — a deliberate break from the squat, decorated form Morocco and Algeria had used for eight centuries. On a clear day it is visible from most of the city.
At 210 metres, the minaret of the Hassan II Mosque held the world record for twenty-six years and remains the tallest structure in Morocco. Completed in 1993 to a design by the French architect Michel Pinseau, it is built on a promontory at the edge of Casablanca, with part of the prayer hall projecting out over the Atlantic so that worshippers are, quite literally, praying above the sea.
The minaret earns its height twice over. A laser mounted at the top projects a beam roughly thirty kilometres toward Mecca after dark, turning the tower into a navigational gesture as much as an architectural one.
This is also one of the few mosques in Morocco that admits non-Muslim visitors on guided tours, which makes it the easiest entry on this list to see from the inside — the retractable roof over the prayer hall is the detail most people remember.
At 201 metres, the minaret of Masjid Rahmatan Lil-Alamin is the tallest in Southeast Asia and the tallest outside Africa. Known as the Menara Pemuda dan Perdamaian — the Tower of Youth and Peace — it stands inside the Ma'had Al-Zaytun boarding-school complex at Indramayu in West Java, and it overtops Jakarta's National Monument by a comfortable margin.
It is also the entry on this list with the softest paper trail. The 201-metre figure comes from the institution itself and is the one the standard reference lists carry, but some Indonesian outlets have reported the tower at 210 metres instead, and no independent structural register publishes a survey of it. We rank it on the lower, institution-stated number; either figure would leave it third, since both sit between the 142.3 metres below it and the 210 metres above.
At 142.3 metres each, the four minarets of the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Mosque form the tallest group of minarets in the world — no other mosque puts four towers this high around a single courtyard. Completed in 1988 as the state mosque of Selangor, it is universally called the Blue Mosque for the blue-and-silver dome at its centre, which spans 51.2 metres.
The proportions are what make it work. The dome and the minarets were designed to be read together, so the towers do not simply stand beside the building — they frame it, and from the approach across Shah Alam the four shafts and the blue shell resolve into a single silhouette. It remains the largest mosque in Malaysia and among the largest in Southeast Asia by capacity.
55. Egypt's Islamic Cultural Center
New Administrative Capital, Cairo Governorate, Egypt
At 140 metres, the twin minarets of Egypt's Islamic Cultural Center are the tallest in Egypt and the third tallest in Africa, behind only Algiers and Casablanca. Known locally as Masjid Misr, it anchors the country's New Administrative Capital east of Cairo, opened in March 2023, and covers a site of some 467,000 square metres with room for around 137,000 worshippers — enough to make it the largest mosque in Africa.
The minarets are the least record-breaking thing about it. The building collected three Guinness World Records at completion: the largest wooden pulpit in the world at 16.6 metres, and a chandelier that took two titles at once as both the largest by diameter, at 22 metres, and the heaviest ever made. The whole complex was conceived as the religious centrepiece of a capital built from nothing in the desert.
At 116 metres, the minaret of the Putra Mosque is the second tallest in Malaysia and one of the most photographed on this list, largely because of where it stands. Completed in 1999, the mosque sits on the edge of Putrajaya Lake in Malaysia's administrative capital, and the rose-tinted granite it is built from turns the whole structure pink in low sun.
The design looks to Persia and to Morocco rather than to Southeast Asia. The minaret is divided into distinct tiers by balconies in a manner borrowed from Middle Eastern precedent, and the basement wall of the prayer hall echoes a Moroccan mosque. With space for roughly 15,000 worshippers it is modest next to the giants above it, but the lakeside setting gives the tower a reflection almost no other minaret gets.
At 113 metres, the minaret of the Mosque of Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim is the tallest in the Americas — a fact that surprises most people, since it stands not in a Gulf capital but in the El Recreo district of Caracas. Construction began in 1989 and finished in March 1993, funded by the Saudi sheikh the mosque is named for and designed by the architect Zuhair Fayez.
It is the only entry on this list from the Western Hemisphere, and it exists because of an unusual convergence: Venezuela's oil relationship with the Gulf and a local Muslim community numbering in the tens of thousands. Covering around 5,000 square metres and holding some 3,500 worshippers, it is the second-largest mosque in Latin America. The minaret rises a few blocks from a Catholic cathedral and a synagogue, and out-tops both.
At 107.1 metres, the four tall minarets of the Çamlıca Mosque are the highest in Turkey, and the odd tenth of a metre is not an accident — the figure encodes 1071, the year of the Battle of Manzikert.
Two shorter minarets of 90 metres complete a set of six, one for each article of Islamic faith. The mosque opened in March 2019 on Çamlıca Hill in Üsküdar and is the largest in the country, with room for some 63,000 worshippers.
The numerology runs through the whole building: the main dome spans 34 metres for Istanbul's vehicle-plate code, and its design references the seventy-two nationalities said to live in the city. That 107.1 metres also puts it a tenth of a metre above the two entries below — the narrowest margin on this list, and close enough that a different survey could reorder all three.
At 107 metres, the two minarets of the Emir Abdelkader Mosque are tied with Abu Dhabi's for ninth place, and we place Constantine first on the documented secondary measure: it finished thirteen years earlier. Built between 1972 and 1994 and named for the scholar and commander who led resistance to the French conquest, it was the tallest building in Algeria for fifteen years — until the capital's own record-breaker went up.
It is more than a mosque. The site is an Islamic complex that houses the Emir Abdelkader Islamic University alongside two prayer halls holding around 15,000 people between them, which makes it a working campus as much as a place of worship. Constantine's dramatic gorge setting does the towers a favour: from the ravine bridges the minarets read as taller still.
At 107 metres, the four minarets of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque match Constantine's exactly and take tenth on the completion-year tiebreak, having opened in 2007. They stand one at each corner of the main courtyard, and they are the tallest element of a building better known for its white marble and its scale than for its height.
Each minaret is a deliberate history lesson, stacking square, octagonal and circular sections that quote Mameluke, Ottoman and Fatimid traditions in a single shaft — the architectural argument being that the mosque belongs to the whole Islamic world rather than one region of it. They are not hollow ornament either: the towers hold the mosque's offices and its library. It is among the most visited buildings in the United Arab Emirates and welcomes non-Muslim visitors.
At 105 metres, the tallest of the ten minarets at Al-Masjid an-Nabawi crown the second-holiest site in Islam. Six of the ten reach this height, added during the second Saudi expansion completed in 1994; the four earlier towers stand at around 70 metres, so the mosque carries two distinct generations of minaret at once.
The Prophet's Mosque was founded by Muhammad himself in Medina, and the site has been rebuilt and enlarged repeatedly over fourteen centuries — the minarets are among the newest things on it. The green dome over the Prophet's tomb remains the building's defining image, but it is the ring of tall shafts that gives the modern complex its skyline, visible across Medina and to pilgrims arriving from every direction.
At 100 metres, the tallest minarets of the Al-Saleh Mosque close out this list, and they are visible from almost anywhere in Sana'a. Four of the six towers reach 100 metres and the remaining two stand at 80, framing a building that opened in November 2008 as the largest mosque in Yemen, with capacity for around 40,000 worshippers.
It is the one entry here that has changed its name. Authorities in Sana'a renamed it Jami ash-Shaab — the People's Mosque — in 2017, and that is the name in local use today, though international references still list it under the original. The architecture is deliberately Yemeni rather than imported: the minarets and the stonework draw on the distinctive building tradition of the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site a short distance away.
FAQ: The World’s Tallest Minarets
What is the tallest minaret in the world?
The minaret of Djamaa el Djazaïr in Algiers, at 265 metres. Completed in 2019, it is also the tallest building in Africa and stands more than 50 metres clear of the runner-up, the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca. Guinness World Records puts its surveyed height slightly lower, at 264.3 metres.
Why is the Qutb Minar not on this list?
Two reasons. At 72.5 metres it falls well short of the 100-metre cutoff for twelfth place, and it was raised as a victory tower rather than as the minaret of a working mosque. It still holds a record of its own: it is the tallest brick minaret in the world.
How is a minaret’s height measured?
This ranking uses the height of the minaret structure itself, from ground level to the tip of its finial. That deliberately excludes the mosque’s roofline, its dome, and any podium or hillside the tower happens to stand on — measures that would otherwise let a short minaret on high ground outrank a genuinely taller one.
Which countries have the most of the world’s tallest minarets?
Algeria and Malaysia lead with two entries each, and the twelve are spread across ten countries and four continents. Africa holds the top two places and Southeast Asia takes third, while the Gulf states — despite their reputation for building tall — appear just once inside the top ten.
What is the tallest minaret in the Americas?
The 113-metre minaret of the Mosque of Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim in Caracas, Venezuela, finished in 1993. It is the only entry on this list from the Western Hemisphere and the second-largest mosque in Latin America, and it rises a few blocks from both a Catholic cathedral and a synagogue.
