Mosque

By Omar Khalidi

The following article is taken from Contemporary American Religion, vol. 2, edited by Wade Clark Roof, MacMillan Reference USA, New York, NY, 2000. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

The Arabic word masjid means "the place where one prostrates oneself in worship." All that God requires is that a place of worship should be set aside (Qur'an sura IX, 107-108) that it should be a sanctuary (sura IX 17-18, and sura LXX, 11, 17), and that the direction of prayer should be indicated in some way: "And now verily We shall make thee turn (in prayer) toward a qibla (direction of prayer) that is dear to thee. So turn thy face toward the masjid al-haram (Mecca) and ye (O Muslims), wheresoever ye may be, turn your faces (when ye pray) toward it" (sura II, 144). No mention is made of a building, but every Muslim -- both female and male -- who has attained majority is bound to observe the five daily salat prayers of dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and late evening. In addition, Friday is the weekly day of communal worship (at mid-day) and incumbent on all adult male Muslims. Finally, salats are performed on the two Eids annually, one at the end of Ramadan, the other after the Hajj.

The first mosque was the house of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. This was a simple rectangular enclosure containing rooms for the Prophet and his wives and a shaded area on the southern side of the courtyard that could be used for prayer in the direction of Mecca. This building became the model for subsequent mosques, which had the same basic courtyard layout with a prayer area against the qibla wall. An early development of this basic plan was the provision of shade on the other three sides of the courtyard. The roofs were supported by columns made of wood. Several features that were later to become standard features of mosques were introduced at an early stage. The first is the minbar (pulpit), which was used by Muhammad to give sermons; the second is a prayer niche called a mihrab, in the qibla wall. The minaret, a towerlike structure and the most conspicuous feature of mosques in many Muslim societies, has the least liturgical significance. Its purpose of calling the faithful to prayer is now redundant with the advent of electrical public address systems. Like the manaret, the domed mosque is also a later innovation. Thus the primary feature of a mosque is a qibla wall facing Mecca.

In the United States, unlike long-established Muslim societies, a majority of the mosques are housed in buildings originally constructed for other purposes. Thus we have abandoned churches, Masonic lodges, fire stations, funeral homes, theaters, private homes, and warehouses converted into mosques. A survey of 1997-1998 showed that of the nearly two thousand mosques, little more than a hundred were purpose-built. Initially, the poverty of both struggling immigrants and African-American Muslims prevented the believers from constructing mosques designed by architects. A number of crudely designed buildings emerged as mosques in Highland Park, Michigan (1919), Michigan City, Indiana (1924), Cedar Rapids Iowa (1925), Ross, North Dakota (1926), Quincy, Massachusetts (1930), and Sacramento, California (1941). Many of these mosques were named "cultural centers" of the ethnonational population who built it, exemplified by the Albanian Cultural Center, the Arab Banner Society, the Indian/Pakistani Muslim Association, and the like. Many of these buildings had a hall for prayer but also served as ethnic clubs complete with a social hall for weddings, a ballroom dance floor, and even a basement for bingo!

Although historically the mosque experienced fourteen centuries of stylistic development, it is certainly an architectural novelty in the United States. The thematic and visual characteristics of mosque architecture in America must confront an alien environment, one that has its own deeply embedded historical and visual vocabulary. The response, then, of the architectural characteristics of the American mosque to its context is one of tension, resulting both from religious and cultural paradigms. While the building must respond to its own inner formal determinants (cultural and functional), it cannot ignore its regional setting. The stylistic features of mosques built since the late 1950s in America vary considerably. However, it is possible to identify three basic themes that prevail in the aesthetic content of the buildings. These are: traditional design transplanted from Islamic lands (e.g., the Islamic Cultural Center of Washington, D.C., designed by Abdur Rahman Rossi, an Italian convert to Islam and built in 1957); reinterpretation of historical prototypes (e.g., the Islamic Cultural Center of Manhattan, New York, designed by Michael McCarthy of Skidmore, Owings, and Merill and built in 1991); and finally, innovative, unprecedented mosques (e.g., the Islamic Society of North America mosque in Plainfield, Indiana, designed by Syed Gulzar Haidar and Muhammad Mukhtar Khalil and built in 1981, and the Albuquerque, New Mexico, mosque designed by Bart Prince and built in 1986).

Functionally there are also some distinct characteristics -- for example, most of the buildings do not operate strictly as places of worship alone but rather as places of public gathering; therefore many are called Islamic centers. They have facilities for a variety of uses: Islamic school on the weekend, library, conference center, bookshop, kitchen and social function hall, recreation facilities, residential apartments, and sometimes even a funeral home.

Since the American Muslim family is usually nuclear, the entire family turns out for worship, necessitating separate space for women, usually at a mezzanine level. Although women have never been barred from a mosque, lack of separate space prevented most women from going to mosques in traditional Islamic societies. However, in the American context, more and more women are taking their rightful place in the mosque along with their brothers, sons, and husbands.

Bibliography

Holod, Renata, and Hassan-Uddin Khan.

The Contemporary Mosque: Clients, Architects, and Design Since the 1950s. 1997

Kahera, Akel Ismail, and Latif Abdul Malik.

"Designing the American Mosque." Islamic Horizon (October 1996): 40-41.

Khalidi, Omar.

"Approaches to Mosque Design in America." In Muslims on the Americanization Path?, edited by Yvonne Y. Haddad and John L. Esposito. 1998.