Identity-as-Form: The Mosque in the West (1)

Abstract

Abstract This article is a reconsideration of the ethical conceptual framework developed by Edward Said in his book Orientalism within an art historical context. It focuses primarily on the relationship between form and cultural identity in the architecture of contemporary mosques in Europe and North America to discuss key theoretical issues and current methodological tendencies in cross-cultural art history. The aim is to explore the highly charged topic of contemporary mosque architecture and minority cultural identity through the prism of what I call the Saidian turn. The article concludes by suggesting that one of the virtues of the Saidian turn is to contextualize 'otherness' not as a cultural dead-end burdened by an over-determining sense of identity but as an opportunity to participate in a material and open-ended becoming. Something in me mistrusts identity. Orhan Pamuk, 1998, 489 So, are you designing minarets? In the early nineties while practicing architecture in London I often heard people ask me this question after telling them that I was Turkish. At first I did not know how to take this joke, though I assumed it was a joke since it was followed by a smile. The frequency of the question was enough to reveal an underlying discursive structure whose principle has been described by Edward Said as an ideological construction of culture as a source of identity geared to differentiate 'us' from 'them,' almost always with some degree of xenophobia. (Said 1994, xiii). This ideological construct rests on a syllogistic intellectual and moral deduction based on an essentialist chain of signifiers, whereby minarets are seen as a common denominator of Turkish culture as well as of Islam; and, in turn, a Turkish architect is seen as the correlative bearer of that form wherever she or he may be in the world. Apart from the baffling degree of arrogance and blindness to other histories that this narrative reveals, what is explicitly suggested (and reproduced) under a smile in this ahistorical, discriminating, and deterministic portrayal of an individual (architect), a culture (Turkish), as well as a civilization (Islam), is a postmodern Orientalism under the guise of cosmopolitanism. As Said has shown, Orientalism led the West to see Islam, or the East, as static both in time and place, as eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself (Said 1995, 15). In addition, by this artificial telos, working against today's liberalism, all agency and creativity are also disturbed according to pre-set categories. The contradiction between current tendencies towards architectural open-endedness, abstraction, or internationalism, and the cultural authenticity or ethnic religious identity, subconsciously or consciously implied by the above question deserves a closer scrutiny. Challenges to alterity, assimilation, or multiculturalism through the uses of culture and tradition are not only a symptom of latent Orientalism, they have also become a general phenomenon of identity politics in the face of fragmentation and alienation, nurturing varieties of religious and nationalist fundamentalism worldwide. Critical post-colonial theory has in this respect pointed out many similarities between colonial and post-colonial discourses of identity claims; both are based on a system of ambiguities, contradictions, and separations, aiming at a homogeneous order by marginalizing or alienating one another. Identity, or a sense of existential belonging or subjective determination, is not a coherent path through unproblematic instances, but a contingent and precarious sense of constructions produced by sets of mediations and discourses, opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built out of those things (Said 1995, 352; Said 1994, 60). In this article my aim is to both historicize and contextualize Said's claim that Orientalism is the blind spot of identity politics through a reading and interpretation of metropolitan architectural culture, and in particular, of the purpose-built mosques in Europe and North America since the late nineteenth century. …

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