For postsecular space

Abstract

Conflicts over formal and informal mosques constitute one of the dimensions upon which patterns of Islamophobia are enacted and experienced. Fostered by discursive arrangements embodied in everyday encounters with difference, such conflicts affect Muslims’ access to the public city. This article advances two arguments. First, by understanding postsecular space through Doreen Massey’s [2005. For Space. London: Sage] concept of throwntogetherness—the coming together of a multiplicity of imaginative trajectories of inhabiting human and non-human worlds—it argues for the centrality of imagination in thinking geographically. The article maintains that to challenge Islamophobia’s embodied knowledge requires to challenge imagination, framed as the capacity of mediating discursive thought and sense-perception. Second, the article argues for a postsecular thinking that exceeds the search for consensual paths of interreligious cohabitation and instead looks to publicly negotiate conflicts by pluralising imagination, identities, aesthetics, city forms, and theologies. These arguments are illustrated in reference to the multidisciplinary participatory project, “Reimagining the Mosque, Opening the City”, I conceived and co-curated with Muslim and non-Muslim scholars and artists in Rome and Bologna, Italy.