[Discussion] Deconstructing the American Mosque

[sule tarakcioglu]

Akel Ismail Kahera. Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender,
and Aesthetics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xiii + 194 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-292-74344-0.
*Reviewed by:* Moustafa Bayoumi, Department of English, Brooklyn
College, City University of New York.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(June, 2004)

Before the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo was completed in 1983, it
was an unfinished edifice of soaring double minarets and arched doorways
rising inexplicably out of the ground. From the highway, one could spot
the curious structure, which closely emulates a fifteenth-century
Ottoman mosque in design. The incongruity of this image--a little bit of
the Middle East on the Midwestern landscape of an American highway--led
one trucker driving down the road to explain to another that the nascent
place of worship "must be a new Mexican restaurant or something" (p. 64).

In truth, the trucker's comment makes a certain amount of sense. In the
postmodern grab bag that makes up contemporary American architecture,
Mexican restaurants commonly derive their design from referencing,
however superficially, a little bit of architectural history, namely the
mission style of the American southwest. And, as Akel Ismail Kahera
reminds us, the mission style itself owes a debt to Muslim architectural
forms of Andalusia, hence the trucker's confusion. Of course,
fifteenth-century Ottoman mosques are very different in form from
Iberian-inspired mission architecture, but in the American vernacular,
where there is no established idiom for the architecture of the mosque,
a mosque could look like anything, or anything can look like a mosque,
even a Mexican restaurant.

Kahera's Deconstructing the American Mosque, the first book-length study
of American Muslim architecture, seeks to give theoretical weight to
American Muslim architecture so it can locate its own idiom, and it
largely succeeds. At the core of the book is an attempt to resolve
precisely the same tension between history and regionalism we saw in the
Toledo mosque example above. Should an American Muslim community, which
is often comprised of a large number of immigrants from various
locations, seek connection to its past and traditions through
architectural design? Or ought a community aim to redefine itself
architecturally through its new environment and built form? Such a
redefinition may mean forgoing or reworking certain customary attributes
associated with mosques, but it may also mean exploring anew what the
requirements are for making spaces sacred. By the end, Kahera has
clearly decided with the latter.

Kahera's aim here is reminiscent of "critical regionalism," an
architectural position Kenneth Frampton staked out in the early 1980s.
Critical regionalists, for Frampton, are not interested in serving
nationalist or universalist creeds in their designs. Rather, they
approach design regionally and are looking to "reflect and serve the
limited constituencies in which they are grounded" (as Kahera clearly
believes architects for Americans mosques should).[1] According to
Frampton, critical regionalism thus aspires "to some form of cultural,
economic, and political independence."[2]

Kahera's method operates similarly. He notes how there is no established
form for the American mosque and then asks, "will the stylistic features
of the American mosque grow increasingly isolated from those of its
counterparts in the Muslim world? One may cite a number of examples that
suggest over time, a regional style gains insular importance that allows
the freedom for such a style to develop" (p. 5).

Religious edifices are unlike other built forms in that they offer
communion with the transcendent, and this fact allows Kahera to push his
approach beyond Frampton. A critical regionalism in Kahera's hands would
first need to identify the essence of Muslim sacred space, what Kahera
calls the "spatial sunnah," and then integrate that notion into its
immediate environment, thereby connecting the local with the divine.
Minarets, onion domes, Kufic scripts, and cusped arches may no longer be
necessary to turn a building site into a space of sacred reflection for
Muslims in the United States. In fact, such attributes may be
inappropriate for the American idiom. Instead, Kahera argues, American
mosques should focus on "three guiding principles: order, habitat, and
repose" (p. 75).

Kahera dedicates the middle of the book to an examination of extant
structures along this line. Traditional edifices, like the Toledo
mosque, hold little interest for him. Such designs for mosques may
please the "emotional conditions" (p. 65) of an immigrant Muslim
community looking for reminders from home, but they do little "to
produce a new aesthetic language that will be appropriate to the
American form" (p. 65).

Next, he discusses syncretic designs for mosques, and uses the Islamic
Cultural Center of Washington, D. C., one of the older mosques in the
country, as his model. Like the traditional structure, this neo-Mamluk
mosque "ignores the American architectural context" and instead
"reinforces memory by using traditional crafts" from Turkey, Iran, and
Egypt (p. 69). But in its effort to speak to all segments of its
immigrant community, the mosque becomes a hybrid structure, a mish-mash
of iconography and form, where "the original meanings of the forms are
absent" (p. 72). Although perhaps appropriate for diplomats, such a
structure, Kahera writes, is "sentimental" (p. 72).

The Islamic Center of New York also serves an ethnically diversified
Muslim community, but its design answers are fundamentally different
from the syncretic solutions of the Washington, D. C. mosque. Kahera
labels the New York structure "avant garde" (p. 72) for its choice of
simple geometric schemes and bare compositional elements. "Closer to a
modernist, secular interpretation than to a traditional cosmological
one" (p. 73), Kaheri explains, the New York mosque does still develop a
space that has all necessary elements (order, habitat, and repose) for
the design of a successful sacred space. (He links the design, through
its interpretative feats, to ijtihad, the term for independent reasoning
in Islamic thought.)

But Kahera is most drawn to two other mosque designs, Gulzar Haider's
Islamic Center of Plainfield, Indiana (labeled as "transcendent form"),
and the legendary Hassan Fathy's Dar al-Islam Village in Abiquiu, New
Mexico (called "a Simple Order"). These are both visionary designs,
where the structures themselves become "aesthetic expressions" of the
sacred with "intelligible beauty and allegorical meaning" (p. 80).
Kahera finds that both structures integrate into their present
environments, enabling regional dialogue concurrently with the
experience of form to promote transcendent experiences. Here, the mosque
is both "material and spiritual." Rather than merely illustrating
Islamic design, these mosques allow form to encourage one's encounter
with the Omnipotent.

It is in these discussions that Kahera's insights are the most
revealing. Deeply interested in a kind of phenomenology of form and how
form relates to religious experiences, Kahera remains, at the same time,
sensitive to more mundane architectural concerns like satisfying a
client and building with available materials. Unfortunately, the fact
that he understands both the worldly and the otherworldly and their
relationship to each other so well is what makes his discussion of
gender disappointing.

Although the subtitle of the book promises an investigation into "space,
gender, and aesthetics," gender remains under investigated. Kahera does
provide a lengthy and rich discussion of why women and men should both
be able to worship in and use any mosque. However, this discussion
remains largely at the level of history and argument and frustratingly
not one of design. Why not include examples, even theoretical ones, that
would push the design discussion further? There would be both
theoretical and practical benefits to be had by such exercises.

Furthermore, Kahera develops and employs his own critical vocabulary,
adapted largely from the Islamic legal and cultural lexicon, towards his
theory, but this I also found distracting. Thus, Kahera reinterprets the
sunnah, i.e. the traditions of the Prophet, into "spatial sunnah."
Ijtihad (independent reasoning in Islamic legal and moral thought)
becomes an architectural effort, and maslahah, traditionally a method
toward legal decision making in Islam, becomes the architectural demand
to meet the needs of the community. Can such terms, invested with
specific histories and methods in Islamic law and culture, be so easily
transposed onto an architectural terrain?

On the flip side, deconstruction, we are told early on, has nothing to
do with Derrida but much to do with Ibn Arabi, the thirteenth-century
Andalusian philosopher. Deconstruction, for Kahera, "suggests the origin
of a core and an outer shell" (p. 2), and Ibn Arabi's deconstruction
"argues that the created object is not necessarily an absolute
innovation, since it exists in relation to proceeding products of the
agent" (p. 11). Kahera employs Ibn Arabi's ideas creatively, but why
label them "deconstruction" in the first place? In all this word
re-association, there is a certain will to create a new critical idiom
out of redefinition, but it strikes me (perhaps ironically) as too
syncretic (for what histories are diminished when one meaning
substitutes for the other?) and too idiosyncratic, for idioms and
languages develop organically from a community, not individually.

This issues do not disqualify the work from its significance or
achievement, however. Indeed, this book is part of a growing corpus of
material on American Muslim life, and it is deeply invested in the
relationship between faith and form and integrally interested in the
future of Islam in the United States, all important subjects to many.
Architects and historians will find much to work with here. And general
readers will find that what most characterizes the book is its abundance
of heart and optimism for the future.

Notes

[1]. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London:
Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1985), p. 313.

[2]. Ibid.

Library of Congress Call Number: NA5212 .K34 2002

Subjects:

    * Mosques--United States.
    * Architecture--United States--20th century.