The myth of the orientalist mosque: Towards an iconography of Islamic architecture in the Netherlands Eric R. Roose Prominent mosques in the Netherlands figure repeatedly in international discussions of modern Islamic architecture. Increasingly frequently, they are adduced as proof of the extent to which socially disadvantaged Muslims in the diaspora make use of exotic stereotypes in order to emphasize their own identity in an environment which is foreign to them and in which they are considered as foreigners. The few Dutch examples which do not appear to refer back to historical mosques are then usually presented as proof that some communities have been able to move away from this kind of ‘self-orientalism’. In this article I first give a chronological overview of the relevant literature on the subject, and demonstrate that any causal connection between orientalism and oriental-looking mosques in the west is based less on empirical investigation than on critical projections. I then present an alternative approach, originally developed in Leiden to study Christian architecture in the Low Countries, which allows scholars to penetrate deeper into the nature of a religious building as a multifaceted collection of meaningful elements. Using previous research into design processes around mosques in the Netherlands, I show that in most cases of mosques which are internationally considered as examples of either orientalist or innovative design, the sponsors of the projects in reality often had completely different objectives. A close consideration of the intentions and actions involved in the design and creation of the buildings rather suggests that the sponsors intended to create a purposeful combination of prototypical examples from Islamic architectural history, whether actually occurring or idealized. Their goal in doing this was not to position themselves as ‘oriental’ or ‘western’ vis-à- vis Dutch society, which would in any case be unable to interpret the subtleties involved in such complex configurations. Rather, they sought to position themselves amongst the distinct Muslim communities, as competing leaders with mutually exclusive religious interpretations and power bases, in an internal struggle much like that which has already been recognized in the study of Christian architectural history. Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 84 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE Key terms: Orientalism; Architecture; Mosque design; Iconography. Introduction Mosques in the Netherlands, perhaps due to the prominence usually attributed to the innovativeness of Dutch design, have come to find themselves at the forefront of a growing international discourse on modern Islamic architecture by critical architects and architecture critics. Thus, prominent examples of Dutch mosques have not only been formally categorized according to the customary opposition between the ‘historicist’ and the ‘innovative’, but they have also come to play an important role as evidence of a causal relationship between western orientalism and a need for exoticist imagery among western Muslims, supposedly looking to identify themselves as ‘the other’ vis-à-vis their non- Islamic surroundings. Recently, however, in my own studies of mosque design in the Netherlands, I have argued that the forms chosen by Dutch Muslim patrons generally were not an unequivocal mass of eastern bells and whistles, but intricate recombinations of elements from venerated Islamic buildings that were only understandable to small groups of Muslim insiders. If it were true that the recognizability of these complex forms to westerners was never a consideration at the time they were being produced, then what would be left of the idea that they were meant to represent an orientalist mode of Muslim self-identification vis-à-vis the West? In order to bring clarity to the matter, I will first present the reader with a chronological outline of the literature in which the relationship between western architectural orientalism and Islamic architecture in the West came to be assumed. I will show how it grew from a mere associative connection in the critical minds of the authors themselves, to the scholarly hypothesis that orientalism might have historically caused western mosques to look oriental through the thoughts and actions of the actual design producers. I will then discuss the literature that subsequently, but without further empirical research, changed this hypothesis into the ‘fact’ that Muslim building patrons in the West, with the Netherlands as a prominent example, either closely followed imperialist stereotypes or liberated themselves from it. As an empirically grounded alternative, I will present the reader with a less critical and more historical methodology, particularly developed for studying churches in the Low Countries but arguably more suited to analyze religious buildings in general as amalgamated iconographies. Drawing on an iconographic study of Dutch mosques that I conducted and published earlier, I will then briefly revisit those particular examples from the Netherlands that were used in the international discourse as evidence either of a self-imposed orientalism or of its long-awaited Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE 85 demise. In the end, I hope to show that the idea of the orientalist mosque, as well as its complement, the western mosque, may be as much a product of critical fiction now as it was in the beginning. Mosques from Thousand and One Nights The first and most prominent author to make a connection between modern mosques and orientalism was the Pakistani-Canadian architect Gulzar Haider. In 1980, he presented a paper during the seminar directly leading up to the first round of awards given by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Haider formulated a list of guiding principles for other architects, stating that “[i]n the choice of architectural motifs it should in no way reinforce the erroneous mythology of Near Eastern “Islamic” exotica of the Thousand and One Nights” (Haider 1980, 123). Subsequently, in the Aga Khan volume reporting on the Awards, the architect Nader Ardalan commented on a comparative survey of 113 historical mosques by region, analyzing their pre-Islamic origins and subsequent transformations (Ardalan 1983). This resulted in a catalogue of a limited number of formal types, varying with circumscribed ecological zones and each representing a circumscribed cultural identity. Ardalan advocated for a complete inventory of major Islamic buildings, in order to come to “a useful road map to more relevant forms appropriate today for each of the ecological/cultural zones of Islam” (Ardalan 1983, 55-56). Rising from this first round of Aga Khan Architecture Awards was the confident belief that Islamic architecture had always developed regional styles in the new Muslim territories; that contemporary objects somehow no longer followed that development; and that modern architects needed to come up with solutions that once more made appropriate use of local cultural characteristics – especially in the West, where oriental-looking mosques would only provoke undesirable associations with fairy tales. In 1985, these tenets were combined by the architect Ihsan Fethi in a second volume by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. According to Fethi, the arrival of modern technology and a general liberalization in architectural design had resulted in the breakdown of tradition and in a new permissiveness that was the cause of “some sound innovation” but also of “much misguided experimentation”, resulting in what he saw as “stylistic transplants” and “strange hybrids” (Fethi 1985, 54). Diametrically opposed to the few mosques that showed “a remarkable degree of originality and purist simplicity”, stood what Fethi called “Arabian Nights Mosques”, in which “whimsical and often bizarre combinations of Islamic forms and symbols have been used. The eclectic use of symbolic elements from various regional architectural styles, such as multifarious onion domes and frilly minarets, curious arches, and the excessive Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 86 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE use of decoration, evoke Hollywood images of the Arabian nights” (Fethi 1985, 55-7). However, whereas Haider had still merely warned other architects against the undesirability of such forms in light of what they evoked among outsiders, Fethi suggested a reason for their persistence, which he placed in “a resistance on the part of the Islamic clergy to all design innovation” (Fethi 1985, 59). In 1990, in another publication by the Aga Khan Award, Haider described how, despite all his attempts to change the oriental imagery of western mosques, most of his Muslim clients still generally refused to cooperate. As an example, he mentioned his design for the Bait ul-Islam Mosque in Toronto, commissioned by an Ahmadi community which initially simply wanted to “express its Islamic presence in Canada”, but whose mosque would eventually carry a towering dome and minaret. Haider suggested that he was confronted with an overly ambitious committee, grandly imagining to plant “the seeds of a Muslim town in North America on the model of the Prophet’s Medina” (Haider 1990, 157). Six years later, when the number of oriental-looking mosques in the West appeared to be rising nonetheless, Haider started supporting his argument by way of visual analogy, printing photographs of orientalist theaters and a casino next to actual mosques (Haider 1996, 32-5). As a reason for the phenomenon that “the demand for what is seen as visual authenticity in the mosque ... has intensified over the past decade”, Haider now suggested that “efforts at “melting into the pot” have given way to assertion of a Muslim identity as a better alternative. There are also global movements afoot that have given Muslims in the diaspora a sense of identity and linkage as part of the umma [the collective community of Islamic peoples]” (Haider 1996, 41). It needs to be said that Haider did not think very highly of his Muslim clients, suggesting that they often were simple, impoverished and unknowledgeable immigrants who could do no more than rearrange cut-outs from mosque calendars into child-like pastiches (Haider 1990, 158). He even compared himself to “a volunteer nurse in a room full of Alzheimer’s patients at various stages of their condition” (Haider 1996, 38). This critical dismissal of ‘orientalist mosques’, as well as the belief that a strong conservatism among contemporary Muslims stood at the basis of the popularity of such architecture, subsequently had a great impact on the way in which the subject of modern mosque design was studied at the influential Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, where new generations of western Muslim architects were being trained. The head of its library, Omar Khalidi, signalled that both clients and architects considered with pride the “capturing [of] the essential symbols of Islamic architecture” (Khalidi 2000, 322). However, by refusing to engage in a dialogue with the dominant culture, “[t]he mosque and its community are in danger of reinforcing Western views about the Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE 87 “otherness” of Islam” (Khalidi 2000, 328). In 2004, as a countermeasure to such tendencies, the Aga Khan program director and architect Nasser Rabbat devised a methodological framework that focused on Islamic architectural history as a continuous cultural dialogue. As modern examples, Rabbat mentioned “some recent modernistically sensible mosques such as the White Mosque of Visoko or the Parliament Mosque in Ankara, to list but a few” (Rabbat 2004, 21). In his opinion, however, since the presence of this process had been negated in Orientalist scholarship, and obstructed by the use, over and over again, of cultural standards such as the arch and the dome, elements such as the latter had come to permeate all religious structures built by Muslims in the last century. Importantly, the author suggested that the producers of such design thereby “resurrected” – although “unfortunately and possibly unwittingly” – “the defamed Orientalist view that identifies Islamic architecture with sedate, static and supra-historical forms” (Rabbat 2004, 23). In effect, Rabbat hypothesized that contemporary oriental-looking mosques not only provoked unwanted associations with orientalist look-alikes, but that they were being produced by Muslims who had actually been influenced by orientalist stereotypes – imposing the latter upon themselves even if they did not realize it. Expanding on Rabbat’s hypothesis, the architect Nebahat Avcioğlu then ascribed the use of (what she considered to be) non-innovative oriental imageries in western mosques wholly to a generalized postcolonial member of the diaspora (Avcioğlu 2007). In her eyes, the latter looked to identify himself as ‘the other’ by adopting orientalist stereotypes. In support, she further developed the visual analogy that Haider had applied earlier, chronologically strengthening her argument by the pictorial presentation of what she presented as a “genealogy” of mosque building in the West (Avcioğlu 2007, 95). Starting from eighteenth century garden ornamentations such as the ‘Turkish Mosque’ at Kew Gardens in London, and moving through nineteenth century “Islamically clad” industrial buildings such as a steam driven pump station in Potsdam (Avcioğlu 2007, 93-94), the author finally arrived at late nineteenth and early twentieth century mosques, which she illustrated by the 1889 Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking, the 1926 Great Mosque of Paris, and the 1973 Iranian mosque in Hamburg. However, instead of moving beyond the mere mention of the powerful patrons involved and the historical examples they used, and empirically researching the available archives in order to find out what they did and what they wanted, Avcioğlu simply signalled “an astonishing visual proximity” (Avcioğlu 2007, 97) and “an uncanny resemblance” (Avcioğlu 2007, 98) to structures like the fake Kew Gardens mosque. To support this subjective connection, the author described the Orientalist projections that had been applied to these mosques in the western societies where they had been built. Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 88 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE And she subsequently implied that such external and post facto form comparisons and meaning attributions were what the imperialistically subordinated Muslim minorities themselves had in fact aimed for (Avcioğlu 2007, 96-98). In her eyes, this “genealogy” of mosque building in the West also “has important implications for our understanding of post-colonial purpose-built mosques because what emerges is not a rejection, but a continuation of such formally authorised, yet equally disenfranchising, modes of diasporic self- representation” (Avcioğlu 2007, 98-99). Even the most recently built mosques supposedly presented Islamic space as “either unchangingly distinct from the “West” or identical everywhere in the “East”…” (Avcioğlu 2007, 99). Importantly, among the rare examples of mosques that prove the contrary case, the author mentioned the Nour Mosque in Gouda. “These mosques have none of the identity politics trappings; they are not conceived as religious signposts. ... These mosques foster a sense of cultural context and artistic concentration, and can be seen as not only contesting the modes but also the dominant forms of representation” (Avcioğlu 2007, 105). In 2009, Avcioğlu repeated her conviction that modern exoticism in western mosques was self-inflicted by displaced Muslim communities, embedded as they were in colonial stereotypes represented by English garden ornaments and German pump stations. Now, however, she also saw several Dutch mosques as examples of “an introverted neo-colonialism where the post- colonial diaspora are unable to negotiate their identity outside the context of a colonial discourse” (Avcioğlu 2009, 65). A project such as the Westermosque in Amsterdam, for example, which she thought was a copy of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, “harkens back to European Orientalist visual practices, … testifies to the dead-end of identity politics as far as architecture is concerned, … reduces the architectural gesture to a mere ‘not from here’” and “can do nothing but hinder both the process of architectural creativity and distinction” (Avcioğlu 2009, 65). Also the Essalam Mosque in Rotterdam she found to be “traditional looking” (Avcioğlu 2009, 65-66). Nevertheless, the author expressed hope that, since the mosque had always showed “strong regional variations”, the notion of a European mosque was not doomed to fail (Avcioğlu 2009, 67). Another international author to expand on the argument, also highlighting a number of Dutch mosques as case studies, was the architecture critic Christian Welzbacher. After having closely copied Avcioğlu’s visual and textual ‘genealogy’, he similarly claimed that “this model is adopted and perpetuated by Muslims themselves. ... In so doing, Muslim immigrants confirm European clichés, taking on the “foreigner” role of their own accord. This mirrors their actual self-image insofar as they actually do feel – for a wide variety of reasons – that they are foreign in Europe” (Welzbacher 2008, 38-43). Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE 89 Welzbacher, however, lifted the argument to a different – and politically rather more dangerous – level by suggesting that this self-imposed orientalism reflected a wilful refusal to assimilate. “The dome and the minaret, transferred to the suburbs of European cities, thus become visible symbols of the opposite of integration” (Welzbacher 2008, 43). Turning his attention to concrete Dutch examples, Welzbacher claimed that in the Essalam Mosque in Rotterdam “we see a radical turning away from the present, a layering of numerous historical models, and above all a reduction to the “image” of a mosque, i.e., dome and minaret” (Welzbacher 2008, 37). In his formulation, “four young architects [calling themselves MemarDut©h] were especially irritated by the Essalam Mosque ... For their alternative proposal, they demonstratively chose the exact requirements and location of this building – and did everything differently” (Welzbacher 2008, 86). According to the author, their design, which they called “the Poldermosque”, was “a protest project by self-confident young Muslims who no longer wished to be labelled as exotic” and “evidence of a process of Islamic-European assimilation that is taking place across the continent. [...] They have no need for the kind of illustrative architecture that has been built in the West since the Kew Gardens mosque” (Welzbacher 2008, 91).1 Another positive Dutch example to the author was the catalogue of mosque projects designed by the architect Erdal Önder and commissioned by the Turkish organization Holanda Diyanet Vakfi (‘Dutch Islamic Foundation’). “Almost all of the projects are adaptations of the formal vocabulary of classical Modernism. The subdued basic approach and the use of brightly coloured building material recalls the work of the Delft firm of Mecanoo, not outwardly distinct from the Dutch tradition of sober protestant rationalism” (Welzbacher 2008, 93). After its publication, Welzbacher officially presented his book to the Dutch Minister for Housing, Communities and Integration (Minister van Wonen, Wijken en Integratie) as the ‘solution’ to the issue of mosque design in the Netherlands. The critical author also appeared in a radio interview, during which he was taken by a Dutch journalist to the Taibah Mosque in Amsterdam. Confronted with a building he obviously did not know, but nonetheless encouraged to explain it from his particular vantage point, he stated: 2 “It has an Oriental style. ... It is, of course, really not a European building. ...You never know what really goes on inside a building. But, of course, if a building has a societal meaning, and aspires to be a symbol, then the style does say something about what goes on on the inside, indeed, about the idea of religion and the idea 1 See Sunier (this issue) for an illustration of the Poldermosque design. 2 Radio 1, interview on 14 October 2008, min. 6-10, translation from Dutch to English by author. http://www-test.radio1.nl/items/1908-euro-islam-architectuur. Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 90 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE of cohabitation, and naturally also of integration. ... This is what I call a cliché mosque.” Iconographic studies of religious architecture in the Low Countries Meanwhile in the Low Countries itself, a quite different view of religious architecture has emerged. It could offer a much deeper understanding of amalgamated Islamic iconographies than seeing the overwhelming majority of western mosques as temporary conglomerations of eastern bells and whistles, caused by a need of suppressed orientals to distinguish themselves as ‘the other’. This view was developed by the architectural historian Aart Mekking, who expanded the methodology of architectural iconography as introduced by the architectural historian Richard Krautheimer, and who particularly applied it to the built environment of the Low Countries (for a short historiography, see Bosman 1994). In 1995, Mekking initiated a large scale long-term project at Leiden University named ‘Art and Region’, with participants from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. They dismissed the ideology behind the formalist perspective that imagined ecclesiastical architecture as having always progressively followed a neat pattern of styles, determined by semi-autonomous architects who creatively reacted to shifting geographical and cultural environments. Instead, they turned their attention to the continuous process by which rivalling Christian patrons, spreading throughout Europe, had been using contemporary religious connotations of venerated historical prototypes. The patrons did so by reshuffling and recombining strategic aspects of these prototypes, as well as of buildings with a more local importance, into wholly new and creative iconographies that nonetheless were claimed to exude historical authenticity, and that effectively served to legitimize their own authority versus that of contested Christian patrons. With an endless variation in politico-religious circumstances and prototypical connotations, historical examples from for instance Jerusalem and Rome had thus come to be transformed to the Low Countries in extremely divergent ways. Any intended connections between the actual origins and the multifarious New Jerusalems and New Romes in this part of Europe would often have been recognizable only to the immediate allies and opponents involved, positioning themselves in their limited but ever-shifting struggles for religious power. Once the empirical field in the Low Countries was closely studied, the paradigm of the regional consistency of styles, the natural evolution of forms, and the determining role of architects, proved to have been founded on artistic ideals formulated since the nineteenth century within design institutes, not on actual architectural historical research. Thus, the numerous empirical instances Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE 91 in which existing building schemes were incorporated into new ones should not be passed over as lamentable expressions of nostalgia temporarily disturbing some ideal aesthetic evolution, but as the main target of architectural historical scholarship. And since any apparent chronological and/or geographical coherencies in building elements – ‘styles’, if you will – would have been largely the result of the social agency of networks of patrons positioning themselves in alternate religious hierarchies, any changes in their political contexts and architectural connotations could result in the immediate adoption of completely different building programmes (Bräuer et al. 2004). Although the Art & Region project ended in 2004, Thomas Coomans, erstwhile participant from the Catholic University of Louvain, has recently shown that Christian patrons did not suddenly stop competing with each other when they spread across the planet, but that they continued to affirm their contemporary, and mutually exclusive, religious identities once outside Europe (Coomans 2012). In China, from Guangxi to Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, Christian missionaries of all sorts built churches in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, but thus far these were left unstudied. Coomans’ aim was to look further than the evident polarization between Chinese and western architectures, and instead to analyze the wide range of internally deviating ‘gothic styles’ (French, English, Flemish, early gothic, late gothic, etc.) and attempt to understand their specific meaning in the Chinese context. He thus found that Scheutists – originating in Belgium – were inspired by a Flemish gothic, while Lazarists – originating in France – referred to a French gothic. To most Chinese, such differences would have been unrecognizable and irrelevant; the Chinese looked at gothic churches in particular as arrogant colonialist representations in contradiction with Chinese building traditions, and as a consequence they were frequently demolished during anti-imperialist revolts (Coomans 2012). To the modern missionaries, however, as to their premodern forebears spreading their messages within Europe, it would have been these differences that determined their design choices in the first place. Explaining the latter through the eyes of local observers, projecting their own ‘occidentalist’ attributions onto the actual producers, would therefore not lead to an understanding of the objects and their iconographies. That an iconographic perspective could also have value for the study of contemporary Islamic design in the West, was shown in my own doctoral research study of modern Dutch mosques, conducted at Leiden University between 2005 and 2009. As we have seen in the discussion of the international literature, the plans for the Essalam Mosque in Rotterdam and the Westermosque and Taibah Mosque in Amsterdam have been critically evaluated as self-inflicted representations of a being ‘from the East’; exceptions were the Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106 92 ERIC R. ROOSE: THE MYTH OF THE ORIENTALIST MOSQUE Nour Mosque, the Poldermosque and the Turkish HDV mosques, that were considered artistically creative and socially integrative. My own empirical reconstructions of the design processes of these Dutch mosques, however, showed that their forms, within a variety of municipal restrictions, were largely generated by an internal competition between Islamic interpretations, represented by patrons who positioned themselves in mutually exclusive religious hierarchies by selecting and reshuffling diverging aspects of venerated models, and by recombining the results with strategic aspects of other prototypical buildings (see Roose 2009 and 2012). In order to speed up the design process, from among a wide range of competing architects those were selected whose oeuvre was presupposed to best fit the ideal. What the surrounding western communities would make of the complex end-results only became a concern after construction, when verbal representations to the public would be specifically geared towards reaching the greatest social acceptability possible. In the remainder of this section I will briefly discuss the actual actions and intentions of the patrons behind these three Dutch mosques, as well as those of the patrons behind their supposedly more innovative opposites.3 The Essalam Mosque, Rotterdam Contrary to the above mentioned critical reflections on the supposedly traditionalist Essalam Mosque (built 2010), its Moroccan patron, Ahmed Ajdid, in fact intended it as a highly topical and contemporary representation of his choice for the Islamic Movement of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born sheikh associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and propagating a pan-Islamic vision exceedingly popular among young western Muslims. Al-Qaradawi strove for a reinstitution of an authentic caliphate by returning to a state of unity through religious abstraction, stripping each Islamic view of its excesses in order to extrapolate an original essence. His ideal rejected nationalist Islamic visions as for instance embraced by followers of the Moroccan king, who used a Malikite interpretation of Islam in legitimizing his own claim to being the successor to the prophet. It also rejected the Sufi visions that circulated among other Moroccan religious communities, who resorted to their living Sufi saints as the real heirs to Mohammed and who practiced the worship of graves, with a large role for the tomb of the prophet. And this ideal rejected the growing popularity of Salafism, which also dismissed the theology underpinning the Moroccan throne, since it was not according to the purity of the Sunna (the example and the teachings of the prophet), but which aimed for a complete de-culturalization instead. 3 For the social and political ramifications surrounding the building projects of these mosques, see Sunier (this volume). Can. J. of Netherlandic Studies/Rev. can. d’études néerlandaises 33.2/34.1 (2012-2013): 83-106