Video: A place for people to pray and birds to sing

<span class="caption">A bird house on an exterior wall of the Yeni Valide mosque in Istanbul.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christiane Gruber / Anurag Papolu</span>, <a class="link " href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-ylk="slk:CC BY-ND;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas">CC BY-ND</a></span>

“At the very core, the mosque is the sacred place of Islam. It is where men and women and children go to pray,” says University of Michigan art history professor Christiane Gruber. But, according to her research on bird houses at mosques, some make room for other, non-human creatures too.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

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