“Mosque design,” says academic and Muslim convert Tim Winter, “has historically reflected the local cultures of the Muslim world. A mosque in Java bears no resemblance to a mosque in Bosnia, or a mosque in Senegal.” The question underlying The British Mosque, by the architect and academic Shahed Saleem, is, then, what one should look like in Britain.
There are an estimated 1,500 mosques in Britain, most of them built in the last decade or so. Some have become landmarks, their domes and minarets rising above the brick terraces of old industrial towns such as Blackburn and Sheffield, or cathedral cities like Gloucester and Peterborough, wherever there is a Muslim population large enough to support them. They are objects of speculation and debate, their interiors mysterious to many non-Muslims, sometimes targets of hate crimes, sometimes embraced as symbols of multiculturalism.
For all their visibility and significance, little has been written about their origins, how they come into being and why, who designs them and what they are trying to achieve. Saleem’s book sets out to put this right. It aims to be the “first ever overview and explanation of Islamic architecture in Britain”. Published by the public agency Historic England, it joins its list of sober surveys of other building types: signal boxes, seaside architecture, Catholic churches, postwar prefabs, medieval barns.
The tone is measured and informative. Saleem goes back to the earliest known British mosques – often built by British-born converts to Islam – such as the Liverpool Muslim Institute and the Shah Jahan mosque in Woking, both of 1889. He describes the early mosques in Cardiff and South Shields, built to serve mostly Yemeni recruits to the merchant navy, who had settled in these ports. Then came the partition of India and mass immigration from the subcontinent, in part to remedy labour shortages in British factories. Gradually new communities started to shape their places of worship, often starting with converted houses, moving in time to purpose-built structures.
Saleem picks apart the patterns and tendencies in what to a casual glance looks homogenous. There are the works of well-funded international organisations, such as the Ismaili Centre and the London Central mosque in the capital, and the bottom-up, locally resourced efforts of sometimes deprived communities in industrial cities. He observes the stylistic preferences that come with country of origin – Moghul for south Asians, Ottoman for Turks and Turkish Cypriots – also the varying tastes of the Deobandi (austere) and Barelwi (decorative), both Sunni movements originating in India.
The dominant theme is that of the expression of identity, the overwhelming preference in British mosque design being for traditional elements and decoration – especially dome, minaret and arches – applied to sometimes basic box-like structures. From time to time the cry goes up, including in Jonathan Glancey’s introduction to this book, that a “contemporary” Islamic British style should be developed. In the 1970s and 1980s there were intermittent, if not very successful, attempts at such a thing. Since then, the direction has mostly been towards ever more confident and wholehearted recreation of historic styles.
Saleem addresses, in his diplomatic way, the debates that arise from this architectural conservatism. Its critics, inside and outside Muslim communities, have accused it of architectural timidity and “inconsistent mish-mash”. Also of “self-orientalism”, a dangerous desire to define a separate identity to the point where it encourages outsiders to confirm their prejudices. The defence is that new mosques have a social role before they have an artistic one. “Imaginative architecture is a luxury,” says a historian quoted in the book, both financially and culturally.
A mosque is more about process, argues Saleem, than it is about the finished product. It is about the often slow, “iterative” business by which a community defines its needs, finds a site, raises money and commissions a building.
Mosques, he says, are “vehicles for the dynamic reconstruction of tradition” and their conservatism can be explained as a reaction to both racism and homesickness for countries of origin.
His own preferences do, however, become clear, in a non-traditional mosque that he has himself designed in Bethnal Green, London. He also likes the abstractly Islamic Cambridge mosque, now being built to the designs of Marks Barfield, architects of the London Eye. And, surely, the future of mosque design should indeed be about finding a British Islamic way of building to stand alongside – rather than copy – those of the Mahgreb, or Turkey, or the subcontinent. Just don’t expect this transformation to happen quickly.
• The British Mosque by Shahed Saleem is published by Historic England (£60). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
