American Mosque Architecture

The scholarship on religious space in America from the 1940s through the 1960s exists at the intersection of several kinds of literature, including history, religious studies, and material culture (Price, 2013). Furthermore, because of the increased mobility of people and beliefs and an increasingly worldwide diaspora, the scholarship asks whether cultural and political boundaries—both material and figurative—have been manufactured or dissolved as research is carried out. This essay focuses on the aesthetic features of the American mosque, a religious edifice caught in a temporal, cultural, and spatial nexus as academics (sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and so on) as well as architectural practitioners survey its unique set of urban architectural patterns and aesthetic development. Many motivations and sentiments mediate multicultural, multisensory, and/or multitemporal aesthetic features of mosques. Above all, the aesthetic features of the American mosque also define the way in which we experience the edifice, even if these features may be overly romantic or dissonant. At the outset, it is rewarding to consider the extent to which the previously noted assertions have proved influential in descriptions of American Muslim life in literary discourses, historical narratives, and religious practices, especially in the post-9/11 era. For example, the number of mosques built or planned since 9/11 has clearly declined, with some buildings being delayed for political reasons.