Nebahat Avcıoğlu

The Modern and Contemporary Mosque: A Cross Cultural Analysis
Today many cities in Europe possess big and small purpose-built mosques, constructed in diverse styles,
establishing a visible presence of Islam appropriate to the diversity and growing Muslim population in the West.
This desire for visibility underlines the political nature of mosque’s architecture. My book deals with the stylistic
transformations of these mosques in response to the public, intellectual and aesthetic controversies surrounding
them as well as focusing on the discursive roots of the refusal of the mosque in Europe, particularly the idea of
the Islamic city vs the European city. By focusing on the relationship between the mosque and its urban context
this book deals with the changing identity of the European city, and argues that the reasons behind conflicts,
which are manifold, are as much to do with history and resistance to Islam as with the fear of a disappearing
European city, a polemic which has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century. As the
quintessential Islamic space, the mosque is seen as pivotal in drawing distinctions between the Islamic city and
the European city – concepts that were in fact born out of Orientalism, in which the Islamic city is often invoked
as a contrasting image of cities in the West – or between Islam and modernity. I argue that the appearance of the
mosque on European soil both unsettles the key Orientalist principle, namely that the European city must
preclude the mosque, and serves various imperial and later modern democratic ideologies.
*Discussant will be Zeynep Celik, distinguished professor of architecture in the
College of Architecture and Design at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Nebahat Avcıoğlu is professor of art history at Hunter College, specialized in Islamic art and architecture with a particular emphasis on Ottoman/European cultural encounters. Her publications include Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1737-1876 (2011), Globalising Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century, (ed. with Finbarr Barry Flood), Ars Orientalis vol. 39 (2011), and Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and Its Territories 1450-1750, (ed. with Emma Jones), (2013). She is also the author of ‘Istanbul: The palimpsest city in search of its architext’, RES, 53/54(2008) and ‘Form-as-Identity: The Mosque in the West’ Cultural Analysis, vol. 6 (2008), as well as other articles appeared in Art Bulletin and Muqarnas.

Friday

 May 3, 2013

1-3PM

The Graduate Center    CUNY

365 Fifth Avenue

Room: 6304.23 [MEMEAC Space] 

*All seminar participants are asked to read the paper in advance of the meeting. For reading and registration  please contact:msulos@gc.cuny.edu

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