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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019
International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019
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Confining Contingency
By Farhan KarimThe self-contained designation ‘nation-state’ as a discrete field of knowledge and its use as an analytical framework to study architectural history requires critical revision. This paper suggests that instead of exclusively focusing on the nation-state as the geopolitical and temporal limit of historical subjects, we may examine new concepts, such as ‘boundary’ and ‘flows’. These two concepts provide new perspectives on the developments, negotiations, and conflicts in identity politics that have shaped architecture and urban spaces, but do not adhere to the normative ideologies and structures of the nation-state or of nationalism. Defining ‘boundary’ and ‘flow’ can also shed new light on how we imagine relationships between the nation, self, cities, and architecture. This essay focuses on the contemporary debate over the abandoned Indian house of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, one of the founders of Pakistan and its first governor-general, and discusses how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness to enable, obstruct, accumulate, and control flows. Jinnah left his house when he moved to the newly created Pakistan, but he never ceased to believe that one day he would return to it and his hometown, which now stands in a ‘foreign’ country. South Court, as his house is popularly known, sparked new controversy when Hindu nationalists demanded to demolish it. As the debate over South Court still unfolds, it provokes an effort to revisit the normative relationship between self and identity as they emerge on a personal and transnational scale.
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One House of Worship with Many Roofs: Imposing Architecture to Mediate Sunni, Alevi, and Gülenist Islam in Turkey
More LessIn 2013, Turkish media announcements declared that a complex containing a mosque for Sunni prayer, a cemevi (ceremonial hall) for the Alevi Muslim minority, and a shared courtyard and kitchen was to be built in the Tuzluçayır district of Mamak, Ankara. Computer renderings displayed the relationship of the parts within the walled precinct as equal in scale and scope, but the clear power imbalance between government-supported Sunni mosques and marginalized Alevi cemevis across Turkey suggested that merging the two sites of Islamic practice might have assimilationist aims. Alevi groups, heterogeneously comprised of hereditary spiritual lineages with a variety of teachings and practices that typically eschew Sunni tenets, protested the assimilationist pressures of the ‘mosque-cemevi’ while it was being constructed. The impetus for the project came from Fethullah Gülen, the religious leader of the ‘Hizmet’ movement living in exile in the United States. Once in favour with the Adalet ve Kalkınma Party-ruled Turkish government, he was accused of terrorist involvement in 2014 and of instigating the failed coup attempt of July 2016. The mosque-cemevi was never completed. This article will examine how state-supported Sunni, Alevi, and Gülenist Muslim selves encountered the mosque-cemevi project, and its role in imposing intra-Islamic relations in the Turkish Republic.
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Housing Others: Design and Identity in a Bedouin Village
By Noam ShokedIn the 1960s, the Israeli government decided to build towns for the Bedouin population of the Negev, a desert area in the southern part of Israel. These towns have often been interpreted as the outcome of an ill-intentioned history of colonization and expropriation. This article offers a different account of the Negev towns, by examining the first plan for a Bedouin settlement commissioned by the government in 1960 that was never built. The outcome of a collaboration between an Israeli Palestinian architect and a Jewish dilettante, the plan aimed at preserving what the two imagined to be a Bedouin identity at risk of being lost through the process of modernization. It thus modified modernist design principles so they would rehabilitate that identity. This article examines the conception and the reception of the plan. It argues that for the architects, the challenge of housing the Negev Bedouin was not a matter of expropriation, nor was it necessarily about accounting for the actual needs of the Bedouin; rather, the architects saw the commission as an opportunity to develop a counter-voice to high-modernism and to the state’s project of blanket modernization.
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Staging Baghdad as a Problem of Development
By Huma GuptaThis article examines a cinematic artefact from 1957 titled The Housing Program of Iraq, which contains rare footage of sarifa (reed and mud) settlements inhabited by rural migrants in mid-century Baghdad. The film, which was never finished, was produced as a collaboration between the Greek architect Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the director Demetrios Gaziades, who shot and edited the footage between Baghdad and Athens. Through this film Doxiadis intended to complement the Doxiadis Associates’ (DA) entry for the Iraq National Housing Exhibition and also to promote the modern housing projects designed by DA. In this period, various statist actors used the representational medium of documentary film in an attempt to redefine the boundaries of Iraqi citizenship. This film, thus, offered a cinematic portal into an other Baghdad, which was staged as the problem of development. Subsequent scenes narrated the solution to these neighbourhoods and positioned a family in a modern low-income house to animate the film’s developmental fantasy. The film projected universal Iraqi home ownership as a form of citizenship where the house was an instrument to facilitate financial, legal, and social agreements between rural migrants and the Iraqi state. By interrogating the methodological question of how to assemble an archive of ephemeral and subaltern places, this essay suggests expanding our notion of historiographic evidence to understand the intertwined relationships between the politics of development and architecture, and their representation in media.
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Architecture of Exclusion: The Savujbulagh-i Mukri Garrison, Border-Making, and the Transformation of the Ottoman-Qajar Frontier
By Nader SayadiThis article investigates the emergence of the Savujbulagh (current-day Mahabad) garrison during the transformation of the Ottoman-Qajar frontier into the bordered lands in the Mukri region in southern Azerbaijan and eastern Kurdistan in the late nineteenth century. During its short life between 1883 and the second decade of the twentieth century, the garrison was a manifestation of the exclusion of the Mukris from the Qajar political power structure and the transformation of the Ottoman-Qajar frontier into bordered lands in the Mukri region. By examining a newly found architectural drawing of the garrison and images from an album of photography by ‘Ali Khan Vali, this article suggests that the Savujbulagh garrison participated in the symbolic constitution and institutionalization of the processes of border-making in the last stages of the final establishment of the Ottoman-Qajar borders.
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Reconstructing the Muslim Self in Diaspora: Socio-Spatial Practices in Urban European Mosques
More LessScholarship on mosques in Europe largely reflects public debates over the visibility and (in)civility of large diaspora Muslim populaces. This paper argues that postmigrant communities forge or dismantle boundaries with the mainstream through spatial practices in the mosque. Through a comparative study of two large representative mosques in Europe – the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin and the East London Mosque – this paper shows how mosque communities employ local and transnationally linked spatial practices in order to reconstruct collective identities in diaspora. The mosque becomes a spatial opportunity in which post-migrant Muslim populaces engage with, and in, the two capital cities at hand (Berlin and London), rather than the subject of ongoing debates over national belonging. In both cases, the space of the mosque is used to espouse specific visions of collective identity and belonging, in spite of myriad exclusions. Analysing the spatial practices of mosque communities opens new opportunities for understanding the reconstruction of Muslim selves in diaspora.
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The Rome Mosque and Islamic Centre: A Case of Diasporic Architecture in the Globalized Mediterranean
Authors: Theodore Van Loan and Eva-Maria TroelenbergThis article’s reading of Paolo Portoghesi’s and Sami Mousawi’s Mosque and Islamic Centre in Rome (1975–95) offers an understanding of its visual program as one that can be productively framed under the concept of diaspora, a condition that evokes movement and non-linearity, and one that undermines fixity to geographical borders and cultural heritage. The first section analyses various visual elements of the mosque and the tangle of temporalities they evoke, ranging from high modernism to postmodernist historical quotation, to living craft traditions of the Islamic world. The visual program is also conceptually tied to an idea of the Mediterranean as a geographical space between classicism and orientalism. These findings are then put into conversation with the current historiographical conditions within the study of ‘global art’ and then more specifically with the modern study of Islamic architecture. The Rome mosque is thus seen as a test case with which to provoke new methodologies in the study of twentieth-century Islamic architecture. In the last section the concept of diaspora is introduced as a means by which to situate a monument that appears on the periphery of both the history of modern architecture and the history of Islamic architecture.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Jessica M. Marglin, Dawn Chatty, Razan Francis, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Ian Straughn and Nicola VerderameJEWISH SALONICA: BETWEEN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND MODERN GREECE, DEVIN E. NAAR (2016) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, xxviii, 366 pp., illustrations, maps, ISBN: 9780804798877 (hardback), ISBN: 9781503600089 (paperback), ISBN: 9781503600096 (e-book), $24.95
THE MERCHANTS OF ORAN: A JEWISH PORT AT THE DAWN OF EMPIRE, JOSHUA SCHREIER (2017) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 216 pp., ISBN: 9780804799140 (hardbacsk), ISBN: 9781503602168 (e-book), $50.00
THE CONSTRUCTION OF EQUALITY: SYRIAC IMMIGRATION AND THE SWEDISH CITY, JENNIFER MACK (2017) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 344 pages, 78 b&w photos, 6 maps ISBN: 9780816698714 (paperback), $30.00; ISBN: 9780816698691 (hardback), $120.00
POWER, PATRONAGE, AND MEMORY IN EARLY ISLAM: PERSPECTIVES ON UMAYYAD ELITES, EDS ALAIN GEORGE AND ANDREW MARSHAM (2018) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 384 pp., 119 b&w and 13 colour illus. ISBN: 9780190498931 (hardback), £64.00
AFFECT, EMOTION, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN EARLY MODERN MUSLIM EMPIRES: NEW STUDIES IN OTTOMAN, SAFAVID, AND MUGHAL ART AND CULTURE, ED. KISHWAR RIZVI (2018) Leiden and Boston: Brill, xii, 222 pp., 94 illus. ISBN: 9789004352841 (hardback), $140.00
THE TEMPTATION OF GRAVES IN SALAFI ISLAM: ICONOCLASM, DESTRUCTION, AND IDOLATRY, ONDREJ BERÁNEK AND PAVEL TUPEK (2018) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 272 pp., 17 b/w illus. ISBN: 9781474417570 (hardback), $125
ITALIAN ARCHITECTS AND BUILDERS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND MODERN TURKEY: DESIGN ACROSS BORDERS, EDS PAOLO GIRARDELLI AND EZIO GODOLI (2017) Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, xvi, 285 pp, illustrations, plans ISBN: 9781443851947 (hardback), £61.99
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Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Heba Mostafa and Deanna KashaniTHE WORLD OF THE FATIMIDS, AGA KHAN MUSEUM, TORONTO, CANADA, March 10–July 2, 2018
IN THE FIELDS OF EMPTY DAYS: THE INTERSECTION OF PAST AND PRESENT IN IRANIAN ART, LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA), MAY 6–SEPTEMBER 9, 2018
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Précis
By Nilgün YücelSYNAGOGUE, CHURCH, MOSQUE: CONNECTIONS AND CONVERSIONS, SWEDISH RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN ISTANBUL, TURKEY, NOVEMBER 16–18, 2017
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