[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]It is something of a cliché[.small-caps] that Italian Americans dream of their first trip to our ancestral homeland. The trope has been eternalized by television shows like The White Lotus and The Sopranos, and by comedians and popular memes – some highlighting the shock at discovering Italian American culture is not quite the same as Italian culture, others the perplexed confusion over why our ancestors “would leave this [gorgeous vistas] for New Jersey.” I must admit to having the latter reaction during my first trip to Italy over twenty years ago.[.article__paragraph--cap]

For me, it wasn’t so much Italy’s majestic landscapes as it was the numerous piazzas that left me awestruck: I saw people looking down from their apartment balconies watching the crowd file out of the church after Mass while church bells rang out in the background, making their way around the square to shop, to sit down and eat lunch, or to sip an espresso, while kids chased pigeons or kicked around a soccer ball, the priest eventually descending from the church steps to kick the ball around with them.

Having grown up in the suburbs, where zoning laws created a strict bifurcation between the public and private spheres, I was enamored by the concept of a space that mixed public and private, sacred and secular, residential and commercial. This dynamic spirit of spontaneity was foreign to my upbringing, one characterized by “penciling in” playdates with other kids and sitting in a car for at least ten minutes to reach “the public sphere.”

Indeed, sitting in one of Rome’s many piazzas was a spiritual experience for me as a thirteen-year-old. In the words of the priest and historian Father Stephen Koeth, “space shapes religious practice” and “ritual objects and actions spiritually transformed the faithful who experience them.” Koeth goes on to insist that this is even the case in America, especially in tight-knit urban neighborhoods where one can watch “the faithful spill out of these churches in processions, festivals, and the rhythms of daily life, the parish [lending] sacred meaning to the entire … neighborhood and the two [becoming] one and the same.”

Such sights became few and far between in the United States as urban dwellers began moving en masse to the suburbs. The spiritual lives of new suburbanites in the 1960s and 1970s were altered not just by the changes in their surroundings and the socioeconomic factors that gave rise to them, but also by the changes in church architecture. Plenty of scholars, like Koeth, have attempted to map out how economic, political, and sociological shifts shape religious practice. But few have focused on how these shifts shape the actual houses of worship – and their architecture in particular. Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni’s latest book, Mosque: An Architect’s Exploration of Form, Faith, and Meaning, sets out to do precisely this. Writing from her background as an architect and a practicing Muslim, Al-Sabouni reads deeply into the design of mosque buildings and their surrounding environments, offering sharp observations about the interplay between faith, economic policy, and political ideology.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Mosque builds on[.small-caps] Al-Sabouni’s 2021 book Building for Hope, which puts forth lessons “that Western societies might learn from Islamic culture and design” and provides “reflections on how our personal and communal spaces can provide the basic foundations for happiness.” Mosque is her attempt to uncover “the essence of the mosque both as a sacred place and as an architectural expression,” approaching this goal from three key angles: Islamic faith and worship, architectural form, and their sociopolitical ramifications.[.article__paragraph--cap]

Traditionally speaking, there is no exact template for how a mosque ought to be designed. Lacking the highly structured liturgical nature of worship found in Christianity, mosques are primarily a gathering space for the ummah, the Muslim community, to pray, as well as to engage in political, commercial, and other communal affairs. The only spatial prescription is that the mosque is designed around the focal point of the qibla, the direction of Mecca, and accordingly the floor space is arranged in such a way that every row of worshippers can see the wall indicating the qibla. This arrangement of space, with its absence of hierarchy, “is the fundamental quality of space in the mosque, for it is there where every person stands equal before God to announce his or her total submission and renunciation of any temporal affairs.”

This need to balance the tension between the axis of the qibla – representing total submission to God – and the axis of the rows – the equality and dignity of all humans – is symbolic of the greater cosmic, spiritual, and social vision of Islam. “The mosque combines many of these dualities as a representation of a religion that embodies dualism in its very structure – a dualism that is at the essence of human life and the creation of the universe, for which Islam offers structures as a means of navigation and reconciliation.” It is this very Islamic “mentality” – which aims to bring into harmonious synthesis with each other: God and creation, the public and private, rationality and sentimentality, justice and mercy, power and freedom – which characterizes the essence of “mosqueness.”

This spirit of bringing opposing poles into harmony with each other is reflected in the “rational and rhythmic qualities” of the language used in the Quran, as well as in the musical scales of the adhan, the call to prayer. Perhaps the greatest symbol of this ideal is the arabesque: “using the structure of fractions, which lies – like internal joints – at the heart of music and poetry, and enables all these arts to become as energetic as they are, capable of expanding, contracting and spinning forth with both ease and harmony.” In the arabesque, “definition is diffused through the omission of centrality and boundaries, and through the deliberate act of unfolding.” Arabesque-inspired arches inside a mosque “sprout form, divide, then are reintegrated again,” creating an atmosphere of “balance” that is “free of tension.”

Indeed, the arabesque testifies to two key features to Islam’s vision of harmonious synthesis of dualities: that it is accomplished organically, rather than by force in a top-down, imposed manner – seamlessly weaving them together with “respect, constant reference (and reverence)” to the design of God, who is their origin and destiny; and that it be dynamic and generative, breathing life and dignity into each part, rather than crushing their vibrancy and agency, causing them to enter into a lively “dance” with each other. By cultivating an ethos of reverence and harmonious interconnectedness, the mosque enables people to be truly “free”: to live in submission to God’s will and in relationship with others.

The Al-Farisiya mosque in Old Damascus, one of Al-Sabouni’s favorite mosques, is a stark example of this harmonious and dynamic interconnectedness. She vividly describes one of her visits there, nearly missing its entrance as it is seamlessly weaved into both the physical facade and the bustling energy of the activity of the souq (bazaar) in which it’s located. She describes “looking for ‘signs’ of the mosque” between “endless rows of compact shops spilling their wares into the main walking lane,” trying “not to be distracted by all the vibrant colours and wafting scents. And not to get run over by the packed trolleys that are whizzing by.” She watches a young delivery boy carrying a tray of warm chickpea salad overhead, her “eyes follow the tray, just as Alice in Wonderland followed the rabbit.” It isn’t until she notices a minaret jutting up toward the heavens that she is able to locate the mosque’s entrance. It plays a double function – to give both visibility to the mosque and audibility to the call to prayer, aiming to create a “minimal disruption to … its surroundings” by standing “in total harmony” with it.

The Al-Farisiya mosque’s seamless integration into the life of the surrounding bazaar embodies the true spirit of “mosqueness.” Even the business dealings in the bazaar are informed by this spirit, bringing commerce and economic exchanges into harmony with God’s will and the needs of the community. It is a prime example of the waqf charitable endowment system, by which private funds were provided to establish mosques as well as the public institutions, schools, and shops surrounding them – the profits of which went to sustaining the mosques and other needs of the community.

Yet ever since the dawn of “modernization processes” spurred by the colonial presence in Muslim-majority countries, such traditional waqf systems, she laments, have largely been replaced by government-run waqf systems, which in effect transfer “civil power to centralized state control,” thereby “devastating social and economic networks by abruptly interrupting the development of Muslim civil society and inhibiting its civic role.”

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]The effects of top-down[.small-caps] power structures and the ideologies that fuel them can be felt in numerous recently constructed mosques that Al-Sabouni cites throughout the book as antithetical to the spirit of Islam.[.article__paragraph--cap]

Take the Federal Territory Mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It combines five different architectural models, and uses of prefabricated materials that “challenge the centuries-old primacy of respectful and thoughtful craftsmanship.” Or take the Great Mosque of Algiers, completed in 2019 with the support of both the European Union and Chinese state-backed engineers. The “monumental suspension” stands apart from the city, “separated from it by vast spaces of empty landscape, esplanades, and a great highway. This,” she laments, “is the true desert.”

Perhaps the most egregious example is the Prophet’s Mosque in Saudi Arabia. Originally built by Mohammad and considered the second holiest site in Islam, the mosque’s recent expansion has required the demolition of “large swaths of the surrounding homes, mosques, schools, and commercial areas.” The local area has been filled with “the sterility and exclusivity of gleaming commercial tower blocks, shopping malls and luxury hotels, along with a suffocating interior ring road,” which have “strangled the life out of all the pre-existing human and natural networks.”

Al-Sabouni worries that this “tendency to destroy all that is related to history” is the nature of the ideal of modern urban planning. And she worries that it destroys “especially that which is beloved or venerated by the people.” Unlike the traditional Islamic model, the many modern building models prioritize “control of extracted wealth” and “control of the masses and the narrative.”

Modern architecture’s “utopian” ideals may “inspire the elite” – the experts imposing their ideas from the top – “but not the simple man.” Rather than breathing life into communities, cultivating connection, and valuing the actual needs of actual people, they foster separation and loneliness. Modern architecture is averse to “all that is organic, local, or natural,” preferring to replace humans with abstract formulas and machines. “Building becomes emotively detached, deliberately not responding to its context but instead making the response about itself.” In this ethos, “all the big questions have been answered, and there is no need for art to deal with them.”  Contrary to the Islamic ideal of bringing human affairs into harmony with the design of the Creator, this idea traps humanity “inside the illusion of holding power over the universe,” giving those in control the power to “do everything they can to maintain this illusion.”

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]My move from the bland[.small-caps] suburbs to a lively urban ethnic enclave – with its frequent street festivals and saint processions and the numerous places where one could spontaneously strike up a chat with one’s neighbors – gave me a taste of that dynamic interplay of public and private, sacred and secular I experienced my first time in Italy. And it’s thanks to the work of thinkers like Al-Sabouni that I’ve learned to articulate what exactly I feel to be lacking in certain spaces, and to understand the broader sociopolitical and spiritual factors at work behind them.[.article__paragraph--cap]

While Christian and Islamic theology, worship, and architectural principles are vastly distinct from each other, I couldn’t help but feel that Mosque gave voice to so many of my concerns about my experience as a person of faith living in a society where highly efficient yet grimly impersonal technocratic systems are replacing communities and spaces that give value to the lived needs of its inhabitants – namely, for beauty, community, and reverence for the sacred.

Al-Sabouni’s architectural expertise alone makes for a riveting read. But it’s the sincerity, vulnerability, zealous curiosity, and deep perceptiveness with which she writes that makes Mosque a true gem. The subtle aesthetic flourishes of her writing style, the transparent personal anecdotes, and her humble admissions breathe life into her prose and vividly communicate what she sees, thinks, believes, and hopes for.