The Mosque and the European City

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m Chapter 5

The Mosque and the European CityNebahat Avcıoğlu

Today many cities in Europe, from Russia to England, possess purpose-built mosques, big and small, constructed in a variety of styles and locations (Avcıoğlu 2013). Ever since its first appearance in the late nineteenth century, the mosque in Europe has evolved as a continuous social and cultural effort to make Islam visible on the continent and to give agency to Muslim citizens. Scholars have already shown that the history and significance of this needs to be assessed against a rather complex background, entangled as that history is in a heavy past of colonial domination and forced economic migrations as well as the current trends of globalization.1 Encouraged by Europe’s boastful claim to pluralism, Muslims continue to exert their right to the city, and their claim to public space, within the boundaries of secularist legislations (Göle 2005). However, the process has been uneasy, slow and often politically acrimonious. Unlike other religious buildings seen as inherently or “naturally” European, the mosque is still read by those who oppose it as a marker of another, alien set of cultures and nationalities. Jocelyn Cesari succinctly sums up this uphill struggle thus: “From being invisible, Islam goes to being unwanted … [And only] through a process of [long and arduous] negotiation [does] the mosque’s incorporation into the urban space” become possible (Cesari 2005: 1018). The desire for visibility, then, underlines the political nature of mosque architecture in European cities (Crinson 2002; Khan 2002; Avcıoğlu 2008; Erkoçu and Buǧdacı 2009; Roose 2009a). Consequently, the rejection or incorporation of certain architectural features associated with Islamic traditions (such as domes and minarets) often defines the agenda and assumes central importance in negotiations between European Muslim and non-Muslim citizens (Avcıoğlu 2008; Khalidi 1998; Verkaaik 2012). This focus on iconography is symptomatic of tendencies that essentialize (e.g. Muslim otherness) or naturalize (e.g. Europe) what are in fact contingent and historically conditioned forms and identities. A minaret, for instance, quickly becomes the frozen signifier of an alleged eternal otherness of Islam in front of an equally fantasized immutable European identity.2 My object in

1 The literature addressing some of these issues is too vast to be listed here, but notable works include Metcalf 1996; Cesari 2006; Allievi 2009; Maussen 2009.

2 More often than not reduced to its Christian heritage, as for instance in Nicolas Sarkozy’s repeated rally slogan in the last French presidential election: “Voyez le long manteau d’églises et de cathédrales qui recouvre notre pays.” See http://lelab.europe1.fr/t/quand-nicolas-sarkozy-cite-nicolas-sarkozy-820.



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Islam and Public Controversy in Europe58

this chapter, however, is not so much the role of architecture in defining Muslim identity, but rather the tension that the mosque reveals in the European city. I will argue that the reasons for this tension, although manifold, are as much to do with history and resistance to Islam as with a more generic fear of seeing the European city dissipate. The latter is a polemic that has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century, parallel to the overall Western malaise that has been framed by a variety of discourses from Freud to Adorno to postmodernism and, in the field of architecture, by critiques of modernism, industrialization and urbanization. In his critical history of modern architecture, Kenneth Frampton writes that:

Increasingly subject to the imperatives of a continuously expanding consumer economy, the city has largely lost its capacity to maintain its significance as a whole. That it has been dissipated by forces lying beyond its control … as a consequence of the combined effect of the freeway, the suburb and the supermarket. (Frampton 1985: 9)

This anxiety, packed with all the disillusions of late modernity (about secularism, technology or multiculturalism), is today somehow reactivated around the familiar foreignness of the mosque-form. My aim is to show how the mosque, a byproduct of European imperialism and economic expansion, is seen both a symptom and a burden of such dissipation of the city, as well as a means for its regeneration. As such, it is a perfect entry point for understanding the ongoing, often troubled redefinition of the European city that lies behind the public controversies around Islam’s presence in Europe.

* * *

Since the eighteenth century, the city has been seen as a place of contrasts defined by the heterogeneous practices taking place within it. Given that the City of Man is no longer thought of as the flawed copy of the City of God, the dialectics between order and chaos, form and force, immutability and open-endedness have begun to be negotiated not only in the vertical dualism of religious transcendence but also in a new set of discourses (the Nation, the Empire, the Republic, the Global World, etc.) that require a more lateral topography (Mumford 1938; Sennett 1977; Habermas 1989; Lefebvre 1991). This new dialectics, reformulating the links between modern and traditional, universal and singular, religious and secular, came to permeate all of Western culture. Generally, the European city has become the concrete ground on which (for better or worse) this tension is played out, while at the same time constituting a key topos of its reflexivity: from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to today’s thriving urban studies, artists and thinkers have thought about the city and through the city. But architecture, or rather specific building types, by virtue of being both concrete and topographical, is often entrusted with the task of embodying the various negotiations at work in the city as process. The Louvre Pyramid in Paris is seen as an example of a smooth handling of heterogeneous



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The Mosque and the European City 59

temporalities, while the Gherkin in London has become a symbol of the city’s contemporary global standing.

The mosque adds to this constant reformulation of identity a spatial dimension (the East, meaning a non-European dimension), while complicating Europe’s relation to its past, as it is reminiscent of colonialism. With the contemporary mosque, the existential debate that the European city represents is no longer solipsistic. Other forms, other creeds, other practices – other lives – are here to be reckoned with. The secularism invented during the Enlightenment, and embodied by the city, is also put to the test. Focusing on the institutional mechanisms and discourses that bring Muslim citizens and political authorities together around the construction of mosques, sociologists and anthropologists have already considered the issues of Islam’s visibility as a process that fosters new forms (both diasporic and local simultaneously) of cultural identity in Europe, as well as fashioning and refashioning Islam itself (Göle 2005: 24–5; Powel and Rishbeth 2011). In doing so, they have drawn attention to issues of urbanization – to the conflicts, challenges and contradictions inherent in the planning and settlement of rapidly growing cities (Eade 1996; Gale 2004; Cesari 2006). Yet this has further shown that the anxiety, if not outright hysteria at times, around the mosque is not just about secularism per se.

The tension between the European city and the mosque started as early as the first mosques, which were imperial monuments steeped in the traditional styles of the colonies, such as those erected in St Petersburg and Paris in the early twentieth century, and later in London (the mosque in London, though conceived in 1910, was only completed in 1977 due to shifting politics). It may surprise the reader to learn that these mosques were constructed as landmarks in their respective cities. They aimed at establishing European empires as symbolic protectors of Islam, since at the time Russia, France and Britain declared themselves to be “great Musulman powers” (Dimnet 1926: 250). A 1942 editorial in The Times reports: “His Majesty indeed has more Muslims than Christian subjects” (Tibawi 1981: 193–208). The imperialistic ambitions behind these edifices impelled them to be located on prime sites befitting their exuberant style and monumental size. For example, the Executive Committee of the London Mosque Fund was quite categorical at its second meeting on 20 March 1911 that “the site must be in the center of Empire,” meaning “at Westminster.”3 The decision was clearly not based on necessity, as there were hardly any practicing Muslims living in Westminster at the time, and we know that even “by 1961 there were only 7 mosques in Britain” (Peach and Gale 2003: 477). Eventually, although not at Westminster, the Committee secured a site adjacent to Regent’s Park in 1942 for the first mosque to be erected in central London (Tibawi 1981: 202–3). It is striking that the St Petersburg Mosque and the Great Mosque of Paris are also erected in monarchical gardens, the former in Alexander Park and the latter on the edge of the Jardin des Plantes (formerly the Jardin du Roi). This was not a coincidence. In 1911, the London Mosque

3 Proceedings of the Mosque Committee, Camden Fifth Series, 38 (2011), 81–288.



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Committee suggested that an “enquiry might be made from the Russian Embassy as to the exact [location and] area of the mosque at St. Petersburg” before embarking on a specific site in London.4

Symbolizing imperial prowess (and with the architects in full awareness of the plans of the others), then, these mosques had to be built in prestigious locations. This is clearly a far cry from the industrial, derelict or suburban sites that are now home to minority places of worship in and around European cities. It is worth citing here the observation of Peach and Gale to underscore the contrast between then and now, who write:

Exotic religious buildings, some of exquisite beauty, have been built on unlikely inner-city sites. The Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, handcrafted in the Gujarat in India from white Romanian marble, was shipped to England and assembled into an astonishingly beautiful temple off London’s North Circular ring road – opposite an IKEA furniture store. The elegant Dawoodi Bohra Shi’a Masjid in Northolt is hidden away in a London industrial estate. The largest Sikh gurdwara in the Western world has been built almost under the flight path of Heathrow Airport in suburban Southall. (Peach and Gale 2003: 469–70)

Yet, although they were exceptional constructs both in their architecture and location, to say that the imperial mosques were embraced by the city would be an exaggeration. Built at a time when the idea of the European city was very much on the minds of contemporaries, particularly during the planning of modern colonial cities, these Orientalist mosques located at the heart of the metropolis were nonetheless set apart from it. If their oriental looks gave them a distinctive appearance, their location next to botanical gardens and zoos was no less ambiguous. Presented as part of a natural environment, and showcased thus, they were the product of both the eighteenth-century relativistic spirit (when exhibitions and ornamental mosques first appeared in gardens such as at Kew and Potsdam) and the nineteenth-century colonial Universal Exposition mindset (where exotic things brought back from the East were displayed in their so-called natural environment for maximum reality effect). Consequently, their garden locations in effect prevented even the landmark mosques from being legible as urban objects in their own right.

From the beginning, the mosque has been part of the ambivalence and fantasies of the European city. While the idea of tolerance, an imperial building block, classified the mosque as an urban curiosity, the assimilationist ideologies of decolonialization sought a more “passive” presence of Islam in the city. Functioning within modern secular imperatives, local authorities chose to grant planning permission for converting a variety of old and unused buildings such as stately homes, libraries, churches, and synagogues into mosques rather than allow for new constructions to be erected. Although operating within the homogenizing

4 Ibid., 82.



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tendencies of modernist and assimilationist ideologies, the recycled structures both rendered the Muslim presence implicit and prevented major transformation of the “traditional” European city. The real challenge began when later-generation European Muslims reacted against these homogenizing tendencies, which they read as erasure of their identities and that of their parents, and demanded larger mosques built in what they conceived to be traditional Islamic forms and archetypes. Authorities conceded to this by restricting their erection to the peripheries of the city, in contrast to the concomitant rise in Muslim migration to urban centers. Often located in the middle of nowhere, these structures were called, in unconscious irony, cultural centers rather than mosques – becoming centers of their own. Banishing mosques to the city limits or suburbs perpetuated an imagined identity of the European city without mosques. Faced with democratic pluralism and multiculturalism, current governments, seemingly impartial to matters of faith, whether secularist or not, still keep a tight control over decisions about the location and style of religious buildings.

It was in the 1960s that social engineering schemes characteristic of the utopian new town movement, originating in the British concept of the garden city and practiced from Finland to France, turned to places of worship to animate new suburbs. The housing projects surrounding the shopping mall, the train station and the church constituted the dreamscape of modern life for the underclass. The best-known example of the French version of this movement is Evry, in the southeast of Paris, planned in the 1970s with an “Agora,” forming “the most important multipurpose cultural and leisure centre in France” (Merlin 1980: 84). Right from its inception, the town was to contain a number of lieux de culte, including a pagoda, a cathedral, a synagogue and a mosque, to showcase liberty of conscience as enshrined in the French conception of laïcité (Brisacier 1990: 108–11). However, embroiled in public and legal controversies, because of the 1905 law of separation between state and religion, the realization of these places of worship took more than 20 years, with the mosque and the cathedral finally being completed as late as 1995. Aesthetically, they were conceived with a formal rationality to maintain modernist harmony with their surroundings. The vernacular thus embodied in the invented towns (eight in total for the Paris region) more importantly allowed the bourgeois city to keep the immigrants out of their midst. In effect, these new metropolitan centers merely exemplified the erratic nature of the modern project itself.

The 1990s saw the alternative to conversion or suburban mosque in the form of the out-of-sight multipurpose Islamic cultural centers built in the international style. The Great Mosque of Rome is a case in point (see Figure 5.1 in the color plate section). Though monumental in size and striking in its somewhat postmodern design, it is very hard to get to without a car. Located on one of the main arteries that connect the city to the green suburbs, the mosque and its huge courtyard with palm trees face the road but are separated from it by a painted green wrought iron fence. Designed by Sami Mousawi and Paolo Portoghesi and opened in 1995, it is one of many purpose-built mosques that give visible proof to the Muslim



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presence in Europe. And yet, like many others, it remains empty for the most part. The arrangement is clearly made to maintain a culturally and socially as well as ideally intact Rome, sending out a subliminal message that is not so much “There is a mosque but you can’t get there,” but rather “There is a mosque but this is Vatican City.” Similarly, the banning of minarets in Switzerland in 2009, though largely interpreted as racism and Islamophobia, is clearly also about iconophobia and the preservation of the traditional cityscape, as the ludicrous poster showing the country invaded by dark pencil-shaped minarets and a giant niqab-wearing woman demonstrates.

More recently, the unprecedented concentration of Muslims in urban centers and the general features of globalization, such as geographical and social mobility, diversification, image-making and consumption, make it hard for Europe to keep mosques at bay. At the same time, new proposals are considered not as individual structures but only if they form part of comprehensive urban schemes. Nevertheless, some of these projects are uncompromising in their Muslim, sectarian or national identities as regards their formal characteristics. But, at the same time, conscious of their urban context, they also react to the essentializing rhetoric of the East/West divide. Among them I isolate three kinds of reformulations: the urban-mosque, the open-mosque and the mega-mosque. All of these are in a way a rethinking of earlier practices, radically transformed to reach out to the city and some even conceived as little cities themselves.

The best example of an urban mosque is the Westermoskee in Amsterdam, which is in progress (see Figure 5.2 in the color plate section). It is designed as part of an urban rehabilitation of a 1930s neighborhood. The Hagia Sophia look-a-like structure stands in the middle of an irregular piazza surrounded by 118 units of housing and shops regenerated by the same project. The mosque is not only part of the same planning scheme but is also built with the similar redbrick and decorated with white stripes, which creates a vernacular atmosphere despite the Ottoman character of the mosque. By sharing the same masonry with the neighboring buildings, the building is not objectified but somehow camouflaged, which helps diffuse its urban impact, whereby the typology (sacred building) rather than style (oriental) expresses the hierarchical status of the building. Yet it differs from the converted buildings for it aims to speak of European pluralism and not only of Muslim assimilation.

If visual compatibility with the surroundings is a condition for the central urban mosque, then the precept for the open-mosque is literally to reveal itself to the city. The much-debated Cologne mosque currently in progress (designed by the architect Paul Bohm and, with its 1,200-worshipper capacity, set to be one of the largest mosques in Europe) is a case in point (see Figure 5.3 in the color plate section). Its central location in the city near a famous cathedral attracted heated adverse reactions, which led to the idea of a “transparent, open mosque” supported in particular by local authorities (Connolly 2012). After grueling negotiations, the architect came up with a modern design that is both distinctive and engaged with the city. The rigid and uniform hemispherical dome shell covering the prayer hall,



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which approximated the building to the traditional cascading Ottoman domes, is cut through by vertical openings to facilitate a dialogue with the city. Laid out on an open square, the complex lacks a protective fence, which is clearly intended to give direct access, both visual and physical, to the mosque from the city. The local imam enthusiastically interpreted the design and the setting as part of the multicultural rhetoric, saying: “The new mosque would put Islam in plain sight … [And show that] Our hearts are open, our doors are open, our mosque is open” (Lander 2007). The paradox is that, having tried to push Islam out of the city, European authorities now exploit it as an instrument of urban dialogue, but once again the burden is placed on architecture and on Muslim communities to develop and refine the new conditions. The proclamatory potential of the “transparent, open mosque” is also evident in other recent proposals: in the Netherlands, for instance, where many architects encourage mosques to be built of glass (Roose 2009b: 14; Verkaaik 2012: 168).

Perhaps the most radical response to the idea of an urban mosque is the project designed by Mangera Yvars Architects, winners of an international competition held in 2005, for a so-called mega-mosque in East London next to the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. Like the Westermoskee, it was conceived as an urban redevelopment project, but with multifunctional facilities created entirely anew together with a prayer hall of extraordinary capacity (40,000 worshippers). The design is based on movement patterns and activities rather than emphasizing the mosque per se. A high-tech roof stretches over multifunctional spaces and public walkways. Based on modern technology and ecological programming, the futuristic complex resembled an organic city with distinct sociocultural characteristics in favour of Muslim citizens (DeHanas and Pieri 2011: 798–814). Although initially welcomed, the project has become controversial and was ultimately halted because of its urban scale which is seen as a device to proselytize Islam in Britain. It seems that as soon as Muslim communities comply with the new requirements but propose a superior or better-conceived version of them, at least architecturally speaking, the rules of the game change.

The resentment vis-à-vis urban mosques is finally the same against both visually distinct mosques and discrete places of worship. This is indicative of the European city’s inability to come to terms with the idea of having a mosque in its midst. When it becomes impossible to avoid it, the lines of reasoning put forward seem even more perplexing. In Créteil, a satellite city of Paris, the mosque is erected “where everyone can see it” in order to “eliminate underground sites and extremist ways” (Moore 2007). The central location that was chosen for the building was not, therefore, for its religious or cultural merit, but rather for its utility as a way to survey Muslims. Another recent trend in suburbia is to insist on a “landmark building” through which municipalities seek to energize their expanding city. For instance, in the new town of Almere near Amsterdam (founded in the 1960s, now the sixth largest city in the Netherlands), “the municipality wants a minaret” while the users of the mosque do not. Such insistence is no less dogmatic and prescriptive. Indeed, Muslims no longer want to be judged



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according to certain iconic features broadly defined as Islamic. For them, the importance of the urban aspect of a mosque is not about acknowledging Islam; rather, as one commentator puts it, it is about the “acknowledgement of the city towards its citizens” (Moore 2007).

The Islamic versus the European City

These recent attempts are clearly geared toward both bringing the mosque back to the city and to undermining its exceptional status. They try to replace the unitary approach to its construction with urbanistic thinking. And yet, rather than the city openly embracing them, mosques still carry the burden of reaching out to the city. This turns the city (not the mosque) into a very particular kind of political space both for Muslims and non-Muslims, one that is not intolerant of Islam per se but that struggles to define itself through the instrumentalization of the mosque. As most projects remain unrealized, plagued by controversies often revolving around Islam versus modernity and the cathedral versus the mosque, the definition of the European city itself is performatively reproduced. With each mosque, appearing over time – be it orientalist, recycled, suburban, diasporic or mega-mosque – discursive strategies operate either in maintaining or (very rarely) dismantling the distinction between European and Islamic identities. It is this struggle in effect that forms the basis of the constantly negotiated architectural styles of the mosques. The contemporary version of this ongoing dilemma seems to be the struggle around the redefinition of the city, between its conscious evolution as postmodern melting pot on the one hand and eradication of its fundamental characteristics on the other. Consequently, the battles fought between “visionary” architects and “traditional” urban planners of the modern period are now replaced by battles between the myriad communities that make up the metropolis and refuse to be subsumed under a single identity. This cannot be properly understood without an analysis of the ways in which distinctions between the “Islamic” and the “European” city have been constructed, played out and reiterated through the erection of mosques across the continent.

It is important to remember that as the quintessential Islamic space, the mosque has been crucial in drawing distinctions between the Islamic and the European city – notions that were forged as binary opposites in early twentieth-century Orientalist discourse, with one (the European city or modernity itself) being the hierarchically superior model and the other (the Islamic city or Islam in general) being merely derivative.5 However, this claim was not only flawed in substance but was also laden with contradictions from the outset. The European city that was contrasted with the Islamic city was not the Greek polis, with the agora (intellectual and commercial space) as its core, but the medieval city where the

5 The literature on this topic is vast, but a full discussion of it is beyond the scope of this chapter. For one of the best treatments of the subject, see Raymond 1994.



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cathedral constituted the urban heart and fulfilled both religious and non-religious functions. Even though the medieval city and the Islamic city were structured around a sacred core, thus sharing characteristics, the mosque, unlike the church, was never seen as purely religious in nature. The mosque, seen as dictating the social, political and cultural life of the city, is portrayed as incapable of autonomy in the separation between the sacred and the secular, unlike the church, which demonstrated this capacity with the dawn of modernism.6 As recently as 2005, while reacting to the construction of the Cologne mosque, the German writer Ralph Giordano reiterated this prejudice by claiming: “[a] mosque is more than a church or a synagogue. It is a political statement” (Lander 2007). Though his point might be about the importance of secularism in society, to assume that religion became obsolete or impolitic in European cities is the myth of modernism, which came to play a significant role in the distinction between Islam and modernity. While Islam continues to be seen as intrinsically alien to Europe, modernity is regarded not as a fact of life in the East but as an exceptional phenomenon of the “Islamic city.” Speaking of a contemporary art event in Turkey, The Economist writes: “The Istanbul Biennale is a celebration of culture’s fundamental unity. It is a reminder also that this city of mosques is a place of modernity” (The Economist 2001: 79). These seemingly innocuous utterances show just how stubborn binary oppositions in European discourses are and how the mosque (as religion and culture) plays a central role in them.

Indeed, the Orientalist invention of the notion of Islamic city was not fortuitous. The argument proved particularly helpful in the European strategy of self-definition as it deflected attention away from the inherent contradictions between European universalism and its imperial practices as well as those belonging to the process of modernization itself. While orientalist claims about city types were formulated, Europeans were carrying out modernist and rational urban planning projects in the Muslim colonies, often fully embraced by the locals, creating public squares and laying out streets on geometrical patterns and erecting uniform building facades (Raymond 1994). This happened either through a total destruction of the existing urban fabric (as in Algeria) or through the construction of a new city adjacent to the old, where a sense of contrast between traditional and modern (i.e. “Islamic” and “European”) was forever engrained (as in Tunisia). The preservation of “la medina” helped demonstrate the irregular, labyrinthine streets sprawling around the mosque as a timeless fixture of an eternal Islamic city (i.e. both archaic and scenic). As the late André Raymond reminds us, during the colonial period, the Muslim natives living in these cities were called “Muslims” in official documents, not Algerians or Tunisian, let alone French.7 Claimed by Orientalists to fulfill most functions of the city, the mosque was seen to stand in

6 For the evolving role of the mosque as public space in the Muslim world, see Rabbat 2012: 1–9.

7 Raymond argued that “the classic concept of the Muslim is very much a French affair” (Raymond 1994: 3).



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the way of modernism and political progress. To curb this image, post-colonial secular-nationalist governments, exhilarated by their newfound independence, readily destroyed them to make room for new roads, railways and public parks, or converted them into museums to mark their indisputable modernity, thereby acting out an internalized self-orientalism. However, the adoption of modern urban layouts, forms, functions and ideals has done surprisingly little to lift the stigma around the mosques constructed in Europe. Perhaps the biggest challenge for Europe was to see the monumental, celebratory mosques erected in the hearts of Paris, London and St Petersburg. At least it was in this context that, by the 1950s, Gustav von Grunebaum formulated the doctrine of the Islamic city in which the mosque not only defined the city but was also categorically precluded from the European city. Tellingly, von Grunebaum claims that: “Constantinople would not have tolerated a mosque on its soil” (von Grunebaum 1961: 181).8 But, as recent research has shown, in this he was wrong. Constantinople contained not only a few Muslim spaces but also a purpose-built mosque for diplomatic use long before the Ottoman arrival (Anderson 2009: 87). Such an acknowledgement not only unsettles the key Orientalist principle but also signals the gradual erosion of the distinction between the European and the Islamic city, or rather European and Muslim identities, which were from the start tenuous constructs.

Reactions to current mosque projects in effect carry forward or (more rarely) repudiate the distinction between the Islamic and the European city made by Orientalists in the early twentieth century. Through these reactions, the status of Muslims as imperial subjects, permanent immigrants and eventually citizens is also negotiated. The political, social and demographic changes occurring over time affect the settlements and development of cities amid deepening national consciousness. Thus, the issue of having a mosque in a European city is closely bound to questions of where and how they should be built.

None of these conflicts distorts the reality of the tension between the sacred and the city, nor is such tension specific to Europe. Modern Turkish architects design and build mosques with flat roofs and without minarets in an attempt to reform Islam but also in order to challenge the image of the “Islamic city.” When Islam regained political currency in Cairo in the early 1990s, the illegal shanty towns were protected from the government bulldozers by a mosque built almost overnight to block road access (Al-Sayyad 1995: 18). Whether in aesthetic, political or social terms, religious architecture invites us to reckon with the city. It has a remarkable ability to adapt to new urban conditions based on the intrinsic relationship between the sacred and the city. Since the early twentieth century, this tension has often played out in the evolution of the architecture of mosques and the debates about their location.

8 For his theories of the Islamic city, see von Grunebaum 1961.



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The Mosque and the European City

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