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| Sheikh Zayed Mosque in the United Arab Emirates |
The threshold of the Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) in London’s Brick Lane consists of a tatty set of worn steps rising to an inconspicuous door, its once creamy paint scuffed and dirty. From the cheap aluminium door handle hangs a loop of plastic acting as an improvised lock.
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| The Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) in London’s Brick Lane |
The mosque is contained in a boxy brick shell, solid, soot-stained and dour. There is little to express the joy or wonder of worship. It is a building that allows the life of the street to carry on without drawing attention to itself. It is the architecture of self-effacement and modesty.
Just around the corner in Fashion Street, though, is a far more Islamic-looking building, with a long terrace of Moorish arches and Alhambra motifs. Another, newer mosque? No, a century-old attempt at a commercial bazaar, its Middle Eastern aesthetic aimed more at the Jews who were then Spitalfields’ majority constituency. It was a commercial failure but now it has found a new market in the arts organisations sprouting across east London.
The only trace of Islam in the architecture of Brick Lane is to be found in an anorexic archway near the Whitechapel Gallery, a municipal gesture in sickly purple and green that falls in the no-man’s land between street furniture and lamp posts (the latter are also Islamicised here, in kitschy shapes and bright colours). This, it announces, is “Banglatown”, a south Asian riposte to the kitsch chinoiserie of Soho’s Chinatown.
With about a quarter of a million Muslims living in east London, the intriguing question arises of how the surge in the Islamic community (portrayed by alarmist tabloids as growing at 10 times the rate of the rest of the population) might begin to affect the physical fabric of the city. The question seems particularly pertinent to Britain as our model of the integration of immigrant communities, much questioned in the wake of the July 2005 bombings, has traditionally been multicultural, not the US melting-pot model in which everyone is subsumed into a wider American identity. There are some basic expressions of an Islamic presence, the primitive DIY Islamic of fibreglass domes and minarets tacked on to cheap brick boxes, but little else.
Is it, I wondered, that Muslims are wary of making their physical presence too visible, as were the Jews of Spitalfields still fearing anti-Semitism a century before them, or is it the tight planning restrictions of a heritage city? Perhaps architecture is unimportant to a community that has other things to worry about, from poverty and education to racism. Is it the difference between the conception of sacred space in Islam and Christianity, where to a Muslim, any space so designated becomes a space for prayer – a rug is enough? Or, perhaps, is it that the idea of an Islamic architecture is a patronising conceit? After all, the once booming Dubai has re-exported its glassy, brassy skyscrapers as a model for cities to the rest of the world. Perhaps architecture has globalised to the extent that the idea of an architecture of Islam is absurd. Or perhaps the wide spread of Islam, from Africa to China, has produced such a depth of architectures that the possibility of them merging into a coherent aesthetic is remote and a symptom of a condescending, colonial world view.
Spitalfields, with its mainly Bangladeshi, and still far from prosperous, community, represents one end of the social scale but it is hardly possible to blame a lack of Islamic buildings on poverty. From the 1970s London has been home – or second home – to some of the Arab world’s wealthiest figures. There are the big landmarks of Islam: the Regent’s Park mosque and the Ismaili Centre, both by establishment British modernist architects (Sirs Frederick Gibberd and Hugh Casson). There is even a lovely mosque, the Shah Jahan, at Woking, dating from 1889. All these were funded by wealthy donors, but what of buildings funded by local communities?
Dr Ahmed al-Shahi of St Antony’s College, Oxford, tells me: “Most of these mosques and community buildings have been built by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from small villages. They are just recreating the modest structures they have at home; architecture is not a high priority.”
Dr Hassan Abedin of Oxford’s Centre for Islamic Studies agrees. “These are poor communities who put all their trust in their elders, who are often not aesthetically educated. They take a few motifs and apply them to a building. Buildings funded by local communities tend to be conservative.”
It is easy to attribute the lack of compelling modern Islamic buildings in western cities to poverty, to a lack of ambition or education or to conservatism. But is it also part of a desire to keep a low profile? Dr Omar Khalidi, librarian for the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The great mosques of the Islamic world were a result of royal patronage. Mosques in the west are built by community subscription. They begin as an architecture of homesickness but, as Muslims have settled in, particularly in the US, the mosques tend to migrate with them to the suburbs, so they become less a part of the inner cities, more suburban in ambition.”
But the building of big mosques does still face startling opposition in western cities. Over the past couple of years there have been bitter battles across Europe – now home to an estimated 16m Muslims – as local communities have attempted to prevent major new Islamic structures. In 2007 the Swiss People’s party, part of the ruling coalition, called for a “minaret ban” in response to a wave of proposals for mosques in a country where more than 4 per cent of the population is Muslim. The motion was forcefully rejected in parliament earlier this year but not before it had prompted the Austrian right into similar attempts, taken up by the politician Jörg Haider before his death last year.
London generated controversy with a proposal for a “mega-mosque” at Abbey Mills near the 2012 Olympic site. Designed by young architects Mangera Yvars, covering 18 acres and able to accommodate 40,000 worshippers, it would have been the biggest mosque in Europe. A coalition of Christian groups and the far-right British National Party lobbied against it, citing its size, prominence and the way in which it would have overshadowed the architectural spectacle of the Olympics.
Then the sponsors were revealed to be the organisation Tablighi Jamaat, which had been linked by the FBI to the recruitment of members for al-Qaeda. The scheme was handed to another practice, downscaled to 12,000 capacity and seems to have quietly disappeared. Its website no longer exists and the new architects, Allies and Morrison, declined to talk to me about it.
Mangera Yvars, meanwhile, are planning a striking new building for an Islamic community centre in London’s Harrow. “At least the Abbey Mills plans shook up the scene and we’re now dealing with a new generation of more enlightened clients,” says founder Ali Mangera.
What the London mega-mosque did was to expose nervousness about the concretisation of the presence of the Muslim community. It was an insanely ambitious scheme but the vehemence of the opposition made it clear that there remains a significant residual fear of Islam.
The same symptoms appeared when another mosque, Germany’s largest with a 4,000 capacity, was proposed for the Ehrenfeld suburb of Cologne. The Turkish mosque association DITIB commissioned architect Paul Böhm to design the building. Böhm’s father and grandfather were the two most radical and admired church architects of their generations. His design is an amalgam of modernism and tradition. Its 34.5m-high dome resembles a Greek warrior’s helmet, while the 55m-tall minarets look like slender scrolls of scripture. The Catholic bishops, initially concerned that the mosque’s minarets were higher than the spire of the neighbouring church, to their great credit, ultimately supported the building and it is currently under construction, as are dozens of others across Germany, a country with around 3.2m Muslims.
One of the most recent to open was, uniquely in Europe, designed by a woman. Mubashra Ilyas, a German Muslim of Pakistani descent, is the architect of the Heinersdorf mosque in Berlin. A relatively modest building with a large, elegant dome, its construction was plagued with “accidents” and daubed with Nazi graffiti.
Of all the contemporary Islamic architecture in the west, the one most often cited as a success is the Institut du Monde Arabe (1988) in Paris. Jean Nouvel designed an unapologetically modernist building of steel and glass but relieved it with beautiful mechanical screens based on Islamic patterns that acted like the shutters of a camera lens, closing light out or letting it in.
But does that make it an example of Islamic architecture? Farshid Moussavi, the founder of Foreign Office Architects and a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, tells me: “There is no such thing now as an Islamic architecture. Is there such a thing as Christian architecture? Cultures are so complex and globalised that their expression is contemporary. The idea of applying Islamic ornament to a building relies on such a narrow definition of Islam.”
Hassan Abedin, though, is less dismissive of the idea. “There is a kind of Islamic pattern of living,” he says. “Architecture and public space are informed by notions of spirituality and community. The quadrangles of Oxford with their cloisters and foundations seem very familiar because they exist in this way.” The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is building its own new structure, designed by the traditionalist Egyptian architect Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil.
“There are also perhaps things we don’t see,” he continues, “[such as] adjacent terraced houses bought up and knocked together to create space for extended families, where the social dynamics inform the insides of the buildings more than the outside.”
Moussavi says that what we see as traditional Islamic architecture is often driven as much by climate as by culture. Yet historic Islamic cities, from the mud skyscrapers of Shebam in the Yemen to the awesome formal urbanism of Isfahan in Iran, have evolved the most beautiful, urbane, dense and most sustainable cities on earth. Surely we still have much to learn from them?
The history of Islamic architecture in the west is long and fraught. Racism, fear and conservatism conspire to make it a prickly subject. When the Ehrenfeld mosque in Cologne was proposed, the Holocaust survivor and usually impeccably liberal writer Ralph Giordano astonishingly called the project “a land grab of foreign territory”, and a monument to the failure of the integration of Muslims.
The motifs of Islam have become familiar in our cities through cultural theming. From cinemas to Masonic lodges, from the mongrel Mughal style of Brighton Pavilion to the Ali-Baba excess of the local Alhambra, a colonial version of Islam has been a constant presence. The question is when a genuine expression of Islamic culture will emerge in our cities.
The controversy may, perversely, help. Ìt may force architects to design beautiful buildings in an effort to assuage opposition, to use architecture, as did the Ottomans and the Moors in Europe, to persuade through the sublime. Perhaps the future lies also in commerce. We are enchanted as tourists by the buzz of the bazaar and the souk, exemplary forums for commercial and social life. Surely there is still much to learn about the infrastructure of an efficient trading city, from the earliest metropolises from Damascus to Baghdad.
There is a sundial on the façade of the grimy brick walls of Spitalfields’ Jamme Masjid, erected by its Huguenot builders. It is inscribed “umbra sumus”; “we are shadows”. The Huguenots came and went but still the shadows they left remain visible in their architecture, which has accommodated and welcomed generations of immigrants. Surely we can hope that Islam, too, can cast a similar legacy over London’s fluid fabric.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic
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Islamic architecture in Britain: Arabian courtyards to Alhambra cinemas
The title of the oldest mosque in Britain is highly contested. The exquisite Shah Jehan mosque (pictured) in – of all places – Woking, is usually credited. Built in 1889 by architect WL Chambers, it is the country’s most beautiful mosque. It was commissioned by Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a Hungarian linguist and founder of the University of the Punjab-Lahore as a place for students of the nearby Oriental Institute to worship. Executed in a kind of fantasy Saracenic-Mughal, it is closer to Brighton Pavilion than the Alhambra but remains a beautiful building.
The mosque at 2 Glynrhondda Street in Cardiff, founded in 1860 by Yemeni sailors, is earlier by several decades. A building at 8 Brougham Terrace, West Derby Street, in Liverpool, accommodated a mosque founded in 1889 – the same year as the Shah Jehan – by Muslim convert Henry William Quilliam. It was announced earlier this year that the now dilapidated Liverpudlian building would undergo a £3m rebuilding.
The earliest mosques were built not by immigrant communities but by western converts. Many Victorians were seduced by Islam and the impact of Islamic design could be felt beyond the few small mosques. When the painter and sculptor Lord Leighton rebuilt his house in London’s Holland Park in 1877, he put in an Arab hall, a space at the centre of the structure clad in 16th- and 17th-century Islamic tiles, with a fountain at its centre like an Arabian courtyard. Then there is the curious Sino-Islamic hybrid of the Prince Regent’s Mughal pleasure dome, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (1815-1822) built by the architect of Regent Street, John Nash.
A taste for the exotic in entertainment saw the Arabian Nights style emerge in theatres, of which Leicester Square’s 1864 Alhambra was the best known. But it was with the coming of the picture palaces that it really reached the high street. Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheikh (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922) set a taste for the Islamic style that found expression in an emerging building type, the cinema. Alhambras, Meccas and Granadas, as they were then called, were a riot of onion domes and ogee arches. They still stand imposingly and incongruously at the hearts of our city centres, often turned (without apparent irony) into bingo halls and music venues.
