Talk page
Title:
‘Mosque Architecture and the Experience of the Islamic Sacred’
Speaker:
Abstract:
This presentation aims to introduce Islamic visual culture through an explanatory description of the forms, space and ornamental design of mosque architecture in diverse areas of the Muslim world, at different periods of its history, including the contemporary era. The mosque is the Islamic institution by excellence where the faithful experience the sacred in everyday life, in the expectation of the ultimate religious events on earth in Islam, namely the encounter with the sacrosanct sanctuary of the Kaaba in Mecca during the hajj and umrah pilgrimages. Following the Islamic ethos stipulated in the Qur’an, being Muslim requires not only the conscious individual engagement in the faith but also the active participation in the community of believers’ life through collective devotional practices. Mosque architecture constitutes the material frame of these quotidian collective practices in which varied aesthetic stimulations playa major role. I will show how this material frame aesthetically works in a world that prohibits divine representation but in which God’s numinous presence is tangibly manifest in the geographic locus of the Kaaba, the physical and metaphysical centre of the Islamic cosmogony.
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