2nd Track : Rethinking the Mosque Architecture of the Future
Role/Contribution
Paper Presentation
Research paper Title
The Politics behind Mosque Architecture: Cases from the non-Islamic world
Personal Biography
I am a researcher/lecturer in the arena of strategic, security and peace studies. Based in India, I teach at the Aligarh Muslim University
Paper Abstract
Arts, Architecture and Aesthetics throughout history has played a critically significant role in the establishment, consolidation, promotion and sustenance of civilization. What constitutes the authentic, what lies in the realm of the ‘acceptable’, what may be tolerated and what could not be acceptable in any form, from the point of view of the broader ethico-religious and socio-political paradigm, have been essentially contested issues.
Islam as a religion emerged in the Arab world but it soon spread to different parts of the world. The religion, with its emphasis on being a religion for all in terms of the belief in the essential unity of mankind and monotheism, ideally and logically too, did not have any region-specific requirement, though was popularly constructed in the broader world imagination as a religion with the socio cultural and aesthetic sensibilities of the Arab region. How this contestation has manifested itself in different parts of the world, is a very interesting case. From Spain, to China, to the Nordic world and India, the study of the interaction between the existing socio-cultural and aesthetic sensibilities and the impact of the incoming Islamic Ideology provides a very important site to explore both ontologically and epistemologically, the novel innovation which was forged to save the beautiful from the opposite extremes of ‘accultration’ and ‘cultural schizophrenia’.
This paper, therefore, will analyse in detail, how the architecture of the mosque in the non-muslim majority areas have evolved and what governed the principle of mosque architecture in these areas. Does the way the construction of Mosques were carried out manifested a harmonious amalgam of the existing architectural style and the incoming one, resulting in the construction of innovatively new architecture of worship or does the mosque architecture remained exclusive to its original form? Was there contestation or innovation in the architectural style of mosque. This paper will explore these and other similar questions
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