Negotiating Muslim identity and diversity in Greek urban spaces

Based on a recent study of indigenous and migrant Muslims in Greece, this article provides an exploration of the spatial expressions of religious identity and practice among indigenous and migrant Muslims in Athens. Through a detailed analysis of ethnographic and visual material, we investigate the ways in which Muslim communities negotiate their religious identities and belonging in a city where there is no official mosque, considering that exclusionary perceptions of Islam constitute an important element of Greek national identity. The discussion concentrates on the management of visibility of Muslim identity through public displays of religious practices. Finally, we explore the ongoing debates surrounding the building of a Central Mosque in Athens as a symbolic claim to acceptance and recognition of Muslim presence and religious diversity in the Greek capital.     

Identities and agency in religious spheres: a study of British Muslim women's experience

This article examines the ways in which British born South Asian Muslim women engage with Islam through study circles, using data drawn from participant observation of, and interviews with, 25 women in two major cities in northern England. I argue that the religious spaces within which the women participate allow them to assert various identities, as well as agency, as they collectively search to comprehend Islam. In particular, I demonstrate that in traversing these religious spheres, women transform them from male dominated sites to spaces wherein feminine, political and cosmopolitan identities are expressed. Scholarship on Islamic feminism in western contexts has focused on visible symbols such as the veil and little attention has been given to the social processes that Muslim women may engage in order to better understand and practise Islam. For the women who formed part of this study, the veil was only one aspect of their religious identity. In examining religious spheres such as the mosque, I argue these are not disembodied sites where only religious rituals are performed, but are created, discursive spaces and social networks that allow women to feel empowered within British society.     

Turkish–Dutch mosques and the formation of moral subjects

This article explores how mosque spaces become everyday sites of ethno-religious subjectivation for immigrants and citizens originating from Turkey in the Netherlands. I argue that the symbolic and material constructions of mosques as simultaneously moral and moralizing spaces undergird the production of ethno-religious subjectivities through mosque-centered everyday practices. The articulation of Muslimness to Turkishness at mosques in culturally specific and gendered ways is crucial for the formation of a particular modality of the Turkish–Dutch self as moral subject. The ensuing incorporation of practices and activities that are deemed ‘secular,’ i.e. ‘cultural’ or ‘recreational’ to mosque services engenders a creative tension between the sacred and profane conceptions of mosque space. Mosque administrators and their congregations concur that recreational activities and quotidian accessibility to mosques are essential to the long term survival of Turkish–Dutch alterity, for mosques are spaces where children and youth are exposed to the performances of Turkish-Islamic morality and subjected to collective social control. However, the diversification of mosque services does not always sit comfortably with the meaning and use of mosques as sacred sites proper within a secularized framework. A creative tension between mosques as serene and pure spaces of the sacred and mosques as impure and immoral spaces of the everyday arises, as a result.     

A mosque event: the opening of a purpose-built mosque in Copenhagen

This paper explores the opening of a purpose-built mosque in Copenhagen, treating it as a case of cross-cultural encounters in urban public space. The encounters explored, then, take a specific form; they are mediated through the architecture and materiality of the mosque and the symbolic signs and public imaginations attached to it. And they are connected to a specific event – the opening of the mosque. In the first part, a conceptual framework is presented bringing together literature on three notions: encounters, visibility and the event. Following this, the paper explores the opening event, the public debate that surrounds it, the process leading up to it and some reactions in the months that followed. The paper concludes by showing how the opening event expresses several paradoxes. The controversies over the visibility of Islam in public space push stereotypical imaginations and Islamophobic feelings to the extremes. At the same time, however, they bring together different groups in unprecedented ways and create new constellations over political, religious and cultural boundaries.     

Daylight as a Design Strategy in the Ottoman Mosques of Tunisia and Algeria

This study investigates daylighting design in Tunisian and Algerian mosques from the Ottoman era. It aims to constitute a daylight-based architectural design knowledge which might serve the built heritage preservation as well as supports contemporary environmentally friendly mosques’ and building design. An intensive literature review and a field work research have been undertaken in Tunisia and Algeria in order to survey daylighting devices in the Ottoman mosques era. Nine Tunisian and 14 Algerian mosques, from the Ottoman era, constitute the study corpus. First, an inventory of architectural components and their associated daylighting strategies was carried out. This collected data is then examined by means of a building conformation lecture based on typological, topological, and morphological analysis. This research reveals the existence of an interrelated set of daylighting devices and structural models governing rules in the Ottoman mosque model, site conditions, and previous local architectural styles.