Review: The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East, by Kishwar Rizvi

Abstract

Kishwar Rizvi The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015, 296 pp., 5 maps, 25 color and 90 b/w illus. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781469621166 Taking up themes and methods often associated with Islamic art history and applying them to the contemporary era, Kishwar Rizvi's The Transnational Mosque serves as a timely reminder of the multifaceted and complex outcomes of modernity and its ever-changing relationship with history. Through well-researched and detailed analyses of major mosque projects that have altered cityscapes from Rome to Lahore, Rizvi examines how transnational interests have used architecture in the service of political Islam, transnational capital, and international dominance. Recognizing contemporary religious architecture not simply as retrograde or populist reprisal of historical styles, she identifies how architecture continues to serve its function of articulating public policy through mass expenditure within a religious guise. In recent years, a lack of scholarship in this area has increasingly been addressed through the study of modernism in the Middle East, both in architecture and in the visual arts. In keeping with the dominant association of modernity with secularism in the late twentieth century, religious works have largely been excluded from this study. Yet since the rise of populist Islam in the 1950s, a movement that accelerated in the 1980s and flourishes in our era, monumental mosque architecture has returned. Like the monumental religious architecture of earlier generations, monumental mosques serve to publicize power and naturalize ideology. Unlike their earlier counterparts, they are often not the efforts of single dynasties; rather, they are the products of a complex system of power that reflects shared histories, contemporary political alliances, and the flows of transnational capital. Thus, the study of the transnational mosque renews an old vantage point on the Islamic world, in which a focus on public architecture enables insight into the role of religious monumentality in economies of power. In The Transnational Mosque , Rizvi examines how projects transpire over time and space, respond to delays …