The Gaze of the West and Framings of the East
This volume explores Western attitudes towards the phenomenon of Easternization, drawing upon Eastern perspectives and examining the impact upon contemporary culture to argue that Easternization is another type of globalization.
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Interpreting Mosque Architecture in the Twentieth Century Trapped between Two Worlds Mohamad Tajuddin Mohamad Rasdi DOI: 10.1057/9781137009289.0020preview Palgrave Macmillan
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Interpreting Mosque Architecture in the Twentieth Century: Trapped between Two Worlds Mohamad Tajuddin Mohamad Rasdi
Introduction The main intention of this chapter is to summarize some of the discourse related to the interpretation of mosque architecture in order to demonstrate how the discourse is trapped between the two worlds of academia and practice. One is the intellectual framework of what constitutes the ‘history’ of architecture and the notion of ‘Islam’ in the West. In the second, that of architectural ‘practice’, there is a serious lack of commitment and professionalism on the part of architects to design mosques in the true spirit of what practice should be, which is replaced instead by the popular approach of Revivalism. The result is a confused state of architectural language that, at one end, makes it difficult to use, and, at the other, presents Islam as an extravagant religion, relegating most architectural issues regarding mosques to object-centered rather than value-centered discourse. There are three sections to this chapter on the interpretation of mosque architecture. The first examines the historical problem of interpretation by Western historians. The second deals with the extant typologies of mosque design in Malaysia and the third with the problem of revivalism in mosque architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and America in order to contextualize the issue of revivalism in Malaysia.
European views of the mosque in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries With respect to the historical documentation of buildings deemed to be ‘Islamic architecture’, there are several issues worth taking note of in such work. The first is the idea of ‘architecture’ as something grand that evokes a sense of beauty. The second is the methodology of sampling and description. The third is the idea of ‘religion’ and the perception of ‘Islam’. The fourth issue concerns the treatment of Islamic religious sources to explain mosque architecture. 184 10.1057/9781137009289.0020preview - Interpreting Mosque Architecture in the Twentieth Century, Mohamad Tajuddin Mohamad Rasdi
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