Representing the unrepresentable: the Mosque of Córdoba and the ideal Islamic temple (Link to open access article) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Making of the Mosque: A Survey of Religious Imperatives
The Islamic History and Thought Series (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2019)
In the absence of reliable archaeological evidence, the question of how the mosque was made represents a real challenge. Its origin remains moot despite many attempts to settle the question. While the structure built by the Prophet Muḥammad at Madina, soon after the Hijra in 622 AD, is believed by many to have later provided the prototype of the mosque, the dominant theory that it was only a private residence casts doubt on that belief. The current study provides fresh evidence, based on the Qurʾān, ḥadīth and early poetry, that this structure was indeed built to be a mosque. The study further investigates what such a finding may have to say apropos a number of undecided issues such as the immediate origins of the mosque type and the kind of impulses and modalities that determined its design and character. More particularly, this study seeks to explore whether early Islam, within the framework of the Prophet’s teachings and practices, as well as the Qurʾān, might have provided the necessary prompts for the making of the mosque and the shaping of its essential functional and architectural features. It also investigates how such religious imperatives may have interacted with the political, cultural and socio-economic contexts in which the mosque type materialized. As such, this book scrutinizes two dominant tendencies regarding the mosque type: the modern Western views on its non-Islamic origins and the Islamic legalistic views on what it should look like. This survey is positioned at the intersection between art, historiography, religious sciences and politics; it is not a typical monograph on architecture. As we shall see, it cuts across topics such as early Islam’s outlook on visual arts and aesthetics in general.
THEOLOGY OF A MOSQUE: The sacred inspiring form function and design in Islamic architecture
LONAARD, 2012
This paper looks at how a standard mosque concept's architectural and decorative features stem from Islamic principles and Islam's kalam (philosophical theology). It considers how the mosque is inextricably bound to convey the message of Islam through its architectural and decorative designs according to a mosque’s fundamental purpose as articulated in the Qur’ān, Surah An-Nur (The Light, chapter 24) verses 36 and 37: “to be erected for the commemoration of Allah’s name; where Allah is glorified morning and evening…” (transliterated).
Hybrid Histories: A Framework to Rethink ‘Islamic’ Architecture
The Adelaide Mosque (1888-1889), the first urban mosque built in Australia, was founded by Afghan cameleers whose contribution to the exploration of Australia’s vast desert interior is largely untold. The cultural significance of the mosque is recognised locally and it is identified as “one of the few relics of Afghan immigration to South Australia and embodies in built form Afghan and Mohammedan culture which is otherwise not significantly represented” (City of Adelaide Heritage Study Item No. 159, Adelaide Mosque file, Heritage South Australia). However, despite this recognition, this unadorned bluestone structure has failed to draw the attention of architectural historians in surveys of ‘Islamic’ architecture. The scope of recent surveys in this field is increasingly inclusive. However, very few studies focus on the architecture of Muslim communities in regions where Islam is not the predominant faith, especially in the southern hemisphere. The Adelaide Mosque, and many others, is excluded from the historical record despite the instrumental role it played in the life of Muslim settlers. This absence raises questions about gaps, or histories untold, as well as myths received, in histories of ‘Islamic’ architecture that raise questions about the truth-value of the past. There is a need to examine hybridised forms and shared architectural narratives to counter the myopic but persistent representation—or fabulation—of supposedly authentic, largely Arab-centric, forms of ‘Islamic’ architecture. This paper argues, then, that new theoretical frameworks are required to interpret this architectural hybrid that is, we argue, typical rather than exceptional. Through a case study of the Adelaide Mosque, this paper critically re-examines the reductive but pervasive conceptions of ‘Islamic’ Architecture that obscure the historical processes of hybridization and its diverse morphological outcomes to comprehend the process of resilience and assimilation through which architecture is shaped in a particular context.
1987
In this study of four recent projects of mosque architecture in the Muslim world, the works of architects Abdel Wahid El-Wakil, Rasim Badran, Robert Venturi and Halim Abdel Halim conciliate the cultural heritage of Arab-Muslim societies with the Western modernizing design methods that have been introduced since the beginning of the twentieth century. The designs of the four architects addressed the apparent dilemma of the duality between tradition and modernity, in an effort to suggest a character for the identity of the contemporary mosque architecture in a dynamic cultural environment. The study seeks to discern and to evaluate the theoretical models and the methodology employed in the design process of each project, with the intention of understanding their cultural compatibility. All the projects are located within the same general area, Iraq,Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and all are based on the hypostyle mosque,although they differ in their fundamental use of the architectural vocab...
Sancaklar Mosque: Displacing the Familiar
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2017
Studying contemporary mosque architecture necessitates dealing concurrently with both the past and the present. Burdens of the past cause a crisis at a point when architects attempt to design prayer spaces that avoid historicist references while attending to the religion’s liturgical requirements. This crisis indicates the moment at which architects are forced to become critical of what is preceding, and thus creates a challenging situation in the evolution of mosque architecture. This article takes the Sancaklar Mosque, designed by Emre Arolat Architecture (EAA), as its main object of research in order to assess this challenge. The Sancaklar Mosque presents a significant attempt to free mosque design from the prevailing formal practices observed in the majority of current mosques, by rejecting any clear reference to the historical mosque type and the use of any conventional mosque elements. However, I argue that while Sancaklar Mosque displays a clear break with the past, it is not ahistorical. The mosque suggests both a suspension of discussions on mosque architecture reduced to formal significations and historical prototypes, but also a different way of dealing with the past, which is, in this article, conceptualized as ‘defamiliarization’. The Sancaklar Mosque provides a significant example for a project in which familiar codified formal elements are displaced as a particular response to the challenge that architects face when designing religious buildings.