Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics

In the United States, the design and interpretation of Muslim religious art and architecture have been influenced by both the exclusion and the inclusion of historical fact, cultural bias, and a host of subtle contradictions. Each anomaly gives rise to a new discourse, and these discourses inform the corpus of this inquiry. Moreover, the American Muslim community has also claimed the freedom to compose and ultimately to forge a set of religious expressions apropos to the North American environment. The most obvious result of the freedom to compose is the generation of a new spatial form - the American mosque. My justification for the use of this idiom is explained in depth and at length below. However, the primary aim of this book is to explain the historical, cultural, and religious derivation of the themes that embody the brief history of the American mosque. My first point concerns the use of the word " deconstruction in the title of this book. Although adequately explained in later discussion, what I mean by this word can be briefly summarized here. First of all, it is significantly unrelated to Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction; and second, it is not an attempt to study some transitory, postmodern, nonobjective style, an abstract or whimsical mode, or an incoherent architectural subject. My use of the term " deconstruction concerns a concrete and serious study of Muslim religious aesthetics, which in the first instance is grounded in Muslim epistemology, and in the second is related to various ways of negotiating spatial relationships between tradition and modernity in the North American environment. Above all, I am concerned with the subjective and objective use of religious symbols by American Muslims and primarily with every individual Muslim's devotion to the wisdom of the sacred text, the Qur'an.