Hybridity as an appellation of contemporary Islamic architecture

Abstract

Twenty century European architecture in Islamic extra-European settings is commonly attributed to colonial agency and consequently categorized as extra-territorial expressions of metropolitan architecture, i.e. British Indo sarracenic architecture in India, Italian architecture in Libya, French architecture in Algeria or Indo Portuguese architecture in India. This set into circulation a desire to document Islamic architecture and to question the nature of architectural practice in the ex-colonial countries where allegiance to Euro-American Modernism was superlative. The Islamic invites us to reverse the lens and consider a broader understanding of the mediation and domestication of architecture from Europe outside its original soil. During the last four decades, changes occurred in the theoretical discourse and material expression of Islamic architecture. During this time innovative scholarship questioned the Orientalist practices of Western history and attempted to resituate Islamic architecture within a conceptual framework that allowed discussion of representation, knowledge, and power. In 2007, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture published a book of essays entitled Intervention Architecture: Building for Change, by leading thinkers and practitioners and focused on contemporary buildings and landscapes located within the Islamic world. In the introductory essay, the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha identified an “ethic of global relatedness that reflects the ideals of a pluralist umma at the heart of Muslim societies which is repeatedly celebrated.” In another text of the same publication, the architect Farshid Moussavi addressing cosmopolitanism and architecture with reference to architectural projects of the 21st century, made a case for hybrid or cosmopolitan identities perceived as expressing a postnational condition resulting from processes of globalization. This paper will attempt to document that hybridity in contemporary Islamic architecture goes hand in hand with the mobility characteristic of the emergence and diffusion of Islam, the submission to Islam by people from different cultural backgrounds, and the mobility of Muslims. To make this argument, we will reflect on a definition of hybridity and we will draw parallels between architecture and language.