Modern Mosques: Have We Lost the Spirit of Serenity in the Crowds of Ornament?

A mosque is where a person comes in from the noise of the street, sets the world behind him and stands in equal rows, the wealthy beside the poor, and the question here is whether chandeliers, gold and imported marble have buried that serenity. The book traces the mosque from the simple Prophet’s Mosque in Medina through the mosaics and open courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the forest of repeated arches at Córdoba and Sinan’s domes at Süleymaniye and Selimiye, then turns to modern answers: Emre Arolat’s Sancaklar Mosque descending into the earth, Marina Tabassum’s Bait Ur Rouf in Dhaka where light takes the place of gold, the Vali-e-Asr Mosque in Tehran, and lessons from Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light and Louis Kahn. Along the way it treats emptiness, light, sound, scent and temperature as materials of worship, asks what the minaret is for after the loudspeaker, and gives the mihrab, the ablution area, water and energy the same care as the dome. It also asks where the woman prays and whether she can see the mihrab and hear clearly, warns that a mosque which fears children will grow old, and wants a mosque in New York, Cairo or Jakarta to converse with its own street, neighbors and climate in place of arriving as an imported box. It ends with the mosque the narrator imagines, entered through a small garden to the sound of water, and with the thought that the finest mosque architecture is the kind that knows how to fall silent before God.