Saudi Vision 2030 is planning to preserve the Kingdom’s cultural identity by sustaining and improving 130 historical mosques that emphasize Saudi’s rich culture and unique architecture and represent the beauty of Islam within such spaces. This research highlights the importance of architectural identity in historical mosques in which “Masjids”, the place for worship and prayer, served the Muslim people and provided them with all the required services needed in one place to have a community engagement. Nowadays, the purely aesthetic aspects of architecture prevail in contemporary mosques, relating less and less to their history and Muslim community. The research applied a qualitative methodology, selecting four case studies of mosques in Riyadh. The four case studies were analyzed according to four criteria that characterized the architectural identity of a mosque: form, program, structure, and lighting. The comparison of the case studies through critical analysis underlined the loss of the identity of the contemporary mosques, demonstrating how architecture attentive to place and history, can represent an opportunity to provide guidelines for architects facing today the design of contemporary mosques. This methodology can be applied more broadly across Saudi Arabia.