Muslim-Commissioned Mosque Design in The Netherlands
Introduction: The Representation of Islamic Architecture in The Netherlands
In 1950, the first plan for a Dutch mosque to be built as such was developed by a Pakistani Muslim missionary group to The Netherlands. At the time when this first mosque plan entered the scene, knowledge on the subject within architectural design schools was mainly produced by a small number of standard Dutch works on the history of world architecture, written by influential Dutch architects-cum-teachers in the preceding decades on the basis of international literature. Although the authors differed in their attitudes towards the desirability and application of Oriental elements in contemporary Dutch architecture, they generally assumed that it was the non-structural and non-functional aspects of Islamic buildings that gave the latter their place in history. One of the founding fathers of Dutch architectural education, E.H. Gugel, in a much-repeated architectural chronology, effectively placed ‘Arabian architecture’ just between what was thought of as the Byzantine and Romanesque style periods. He deemed it not to have added any ‘constructive’ elements to the historical development of world architecture: it merely copied classical forms, with only a further detailing of decoration patterns. According to W. Kromhout, the main difference lay in the fact that ‘they [the Muslims] saw the conspicuously decorative in everything, whereas we [the Dutch] saw the constructive. They used building elements because they thought them beautiful, providing the opportunity for hundreds of aesthetically pleasing decorative-architectural applications, while we used them in a purely constructive development’. In H. Evers’ view, Islamic buildings had been created ‘from the passionate imagination of the fanatical Oriental’, the ‘uncivilized conqueror driven by the need to be conspicuous’, and through their richness of form and color gave the impression of a ‘soothing of the senses’ more than of being ‘deeply touched’. J.H.W. Leliman found that ‘notwithstanding the many regional adjustments and periodical changes the architecture of the ohammedans was subjected to, all varieties were branches of the same tree, expressions of one and the same fantastic, exceptionally sensual, almost intoxicating art’. And J. Godefroy even went so far as to place ‘Mohammedan art’ in a phase of constructive degeneration. The phenomenon of Islamic architecture, believed to represent a singular religion and divided into a number of building styles related to the Arab, Persian, Moorish and Turkish culture areas, was widely regarded as completed. As such, H. Sutterland positioned it with other pre-modern building styles in the irrational, decorative, ornamental and symbolic phases of the evolution of the built environment towards the contemporary rational, sober, simple, honest, pure and constructional ideal. Whereas the association of Islamic areas with the Arabian Nights tales had, in earlier centuries, already led to the phenomenon that the Dutch saw Islamic building elements as pleasantly diverting to the senses, mainly to be used in garden tents, cigarette kiosks, beach paviljons, colonial exhibitions, exotic zoos and theaters, from the turn of the century they came to be seen as useful for the newly invented cinemas as well. Mixed with arcadian scenes in the façades of buildings called ‘Alcazar’, ‘Luxor’ or ‘Alhambra’, they were explicitly meant to evoke an idyllic atmosphere. Finally, in the 1950s, their capacity as outstanding representations of make-believe earned them a place in the fairy-tale forest of the children’s theme park ‘De Efteling’, as a moated, twotowered Islamic palace with a Fakir flying on a magic carpet. However, mosque design actually commissioned by Muslims in The Netherlands proved to be a different matter and quickly became a subject of heated architectural debates. In general, Muslim immigrant communities were known to be culturally dispersed but assumed to be religiously consistent, whereas Dutch Christian communities were known to be religiously dispersed but assumed to be culturally consistent.
Eventually, Muslims in The Netherlands came to be recognized as members of individual ethnic or culture groups, with Surinamese, Moluccan, Turkish and Moroccan Muslims represented by their own architectural style characteristics while sharing a basic Islamic belief system and liturgy. In this line of thinking, when municipalities were confronted with mosque plans, some saw the conspicuous use of building elements from the Muslim countries of origin as an unwanted and unnecessary intrusion on Dutch culture. Instead, Dutch Muslims were supposed to find ways to process their basic Islamic liturgical requirements into designs that on the outside would appear largely as Dutch buildings and not as transplanted Arabian Nights palaces. On the other hand, other municipalities found that although mosques were indeed thought of as mere practical places of Islamic liturgy, the introduction of building elements from the Muslim countries of origin would be a way for Dutch Muslim immigrants to feel at home in Dutch society, as well as a way to enrich Dutch culture. Whatever the exact contents and outcomes of these discussions, the fact is that Dutch mosque design was essentially viewed as a measure of to what degree its Muslim patrons, in their expression of a singular religion, chose to refer to their original cultures. Since the patrons, whatever their design requirements, also seemed to stress that their Islam was universal, their supposed stance on the manner of inclusion of a layer of ‘cultural’ building elements beyond the basic religious necessities came to be seen by the Dutch public as a stance on the manner of their inclusion in Dutch society. Whether the architectural visibility of Islam was to be monoculturally rejected, multiculturally stimulated, or pluriculturally solved, most Dutch parties seemed to regard the issue of Dutch mosque design as an issue of the culture clash and not of some internal religious dispersion. To be sure, a number of illuminating studies of purpose-built mosques in The Netherlands have been published, but these generally aim at an analysis of the history of establishment, the political and public turmoil, or their position in discourses of the negotiation of space and place, without delving into particular motivations behind the particular architectural choices of particular Muslim patrons.11 Only two – unpublished but much-referred to – studies have treated the relation between Dutch mosque designs and their patrons in a more concrete way. Importantly, in their MA theses, both Barbara Dijker and Wendy Wessels interpreted the Dutch empirical data within the methodological framework of a popular international publication on the subject, prominently present on the bookshelves of – and heavily influencing – many Dutch architects, architectural teachers and architectural students. In this publication, Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan by and large formally assigned Islamic architectural history to a limited number of building types corresponding to a limited number of Muslim ‘regions’. In effect, their publication continued and extended the older notion of a limited number of circumscribed Muslim culture areas being characterized by their own recognizable building styles. Within Frishman’s and Khan’s overview, India and Pakistan were characterized by the Mogul style around a formal type with triple domes and a large courtyard, Malaysia and Indonesia by the Southeast-Asian style around a formal type with a pyramidal pitched roof, Anatolia by the Ottoman style around the formal type with a massive central dome supported by half-domes, and Spain and North Africa by the Almoravid/Almohad style around the formal type with a hypostyle hall with a flat roof and open courtyard.12 (Figure 1) Based on this classification, Dijker understandably assumed that in the Dutch context ‘our’ Surinamese, Moluccan, Turkish and Moroccan Muslims shared a basic liturgy but needed to architecturally circumscribe themselves as consistent culture groups towards each other. Subsequently, she showed them to have been using, in their mosques, what she saw as the Indian, Indonesian, Turkish and Moroccan building styles. Any divergences from these ideal-types were explained by the author by the relevant patrons’ need to be more recognizably Islamic in a non-Islamic society or from their architects’ individual creativity. Similarly, Wessels assumed that the Moroccan, Turkish and Surinamese mosques in the region of Utrecht had been based on the Moroccan, Turkish and Indian building styles as well. She, in turn, explained the empirical deviations from these ideal-types mainly from the rules and regulations placed upon them by municipalities, and from the inhabitants’ desire that they be made to fit their Dutch surroundings. At first sight, the identification of these authentic cultural building styles and the consequent need to explain any empirical deviations in The Netherlands in terms of modern factors seem plausible enough. Beneath the surface, however, the Dutch empirical field is much more varied than can be described, let alone explained, by any consistent typology connected to cultures to begin with. Even when only cursorily surveyed, it can be seen that the ‘Indian style’ has been combined with elements from specifically non-Hindustani buildings, whereas both the ‘Indonesian style’ and the ‘Turkish style’ have been materialized in quite conflicting ways. Strangely enough, the ‘Moroccan style’ was conspicuously rejected in several Moroccan-commissioned projects, while the ‘Mamluk style’ was used, even though none of the mosque communities involved came from a Mamluk-associated region. Meanwhile, when confronted with the media, most patrons orally classified their own chosen forms or materials as typically ‘Dutch’ in some way and someone else’s as completely ‘un-Dutch’. On the other hand, some patrons could never be bothered to explain anything in spite of heavy public speculation, leaving the observer even more confused in a matter that was initially imagined to be quite straightforward. As yet, despite the obvious precariousness of the issue for the general public, there are no in-depth, published studies on the motivations of the Muslim mosque patrons involved. Knowledge on that particular subject has been mainly produced by a small group of young, engaged Muslim architects united in the design bureau Memar Dutch. The latter was established after two of its members – under the name of Memar – graduated cum laude in 2003 with an alternative Dutch mosque proposal for a Moroccan-commissioned project in Rotterdam that had led to a great controversy among local non-Muslim communities. They called their alternative the ‘Polder Mosque’, and it was specifically aimed at ‘transparent design’ and ‘integration architecture’. (Figure 2) Since then, their perspective has been referred to in all major Dutch newspaper articles, magazine articles18 and exhibitions on the subject. Although their alternative was never executed, they may be regarded as quite influential and authoritative among a large part of the public, leading to what might be recognized as the start of a stream of prizewinning – although uncommissioned and unexecuted – modern design alternatives by architectural students in The Netherlands. In 2006, MemarDutch members Ergün Erkoçu, AbdelUahab Hammiche and Cihan Bugdaci published a printed article that summed up the argument their bureau had spread over the different public media in the years before. In this, the authors basically presented existing Dutch mosque designs as a sign of arrested development. They suggested Muslim immigrant communities in The Netherlands were emotionally stuck to copies and pastiches of their premodern cultural building styles caused by nostalgia for the mother countries or by the need to show an ostentatiously Islamic identity. Moreover, they suggested the Dutch, non-Muslim architects involved used an Orientalist perspective, resulting in the Arabian Nights architecture that had characterized the ‘make-believe’ buildings of earlier times. ‘Because mosques are built in the styles of local architectures, the variety is large. […] Therefore, it is amazing to see that mosque architecture in The Netherlands and the other Western European countries passes over any local architectural styles. […] At the end of the 1980s a style developed in The Netherlands that strongly based itself on historical examples, partly because the first generation of Muslims looked for a connection with its roots, coming from a wish to secure their own identity. Currently, […] mosque boards mainly choose Dutch architects, […] often leading to buildings that copy Oriental forms.
Eventually, Muslims in The Netherlands came to be recognized as members of individual ethnic or culture groups, with Surinamese, Moluccan, Turkish and Moroccan Muslims represented by their own architectural style characteristics while sharing a basic Islamic belief system and liturgy. In this line of thinking, when municipalities were confronted with mosque plans, some saw the conspicuous use of building elements from the Muslim countries of origin as an unwanted and unnecessary intrusion on Dutch culture. Instead, Dutch Muslims were supposed to find ways to process their basic Islamic liturgical requirements into designs that on the outside would appear largely as Dutch buildings and not as transplanted Arabian Nights palaces. On the other hand, other municipalities found that although mosques were indeed thought of as mere practical places of Islamic liturgy, the introduction of building elements from the Muslim countries of origin would be a way for Dutch Muslim immigrants to feel at home in Dutch society, as well as a way to enrich Dutch culture. Whatever the exact contents and outcomes of these discussions, the fact is that Dutch mosque design was essentially viewed as a measure of to what degree its Muslim patrons, in their expression of a singular religion, chose to refer to their original cultures. Since the patrons, whatever their design requirements, also seemed to stress that their Islam was universal, their supposed stance on the manner of inclusion of a layer of ‘cultural’ building elements beyond the basic religious necessities came to be seen by the Dutch public as a stance on the manner of their inclusion in Dutch society. Whether the architectural visibility of Islam was to be monoculturally rejected, multiculturally stimulated, or pluriculturally solved, most Dutch parties seemed to regard the issue of Dutch mosque design as an issue of the culture clash and not of some internal religious dispersion. To be sure, a number of illuminating studies of purpose-built mosques in The Netherlands have been published, but these generally aim at an analysis of the history of establishment, the political and public turmoil, or their position in discourses of the negotiation of space and place, without delving into particular motivations behind the particular architectural choices of particular Muslim patrons.11 Only two – unpublished but much-referred to – studies have treated the relation between Dutch mosque designs and their patrons in a more concrete way. Importantly, in their MA theses, both Barbara Dijker and Wendy Wessels interpreted the Dutch empirical data within the methodological framework of a popular international publication on the subject, prominently present on the bookshelves of – and heavily influencing – many Dutch architects, architectural teachers and architectural students. In this publication, Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan by and large formally assigned Islamic architectural history to a limited number of building types corresponding to a limited number of Muslim ‘regions’. In effect, their publication continued and extended the older notion of a limited number of circumscribed Muslim culture areas being characterized by their own recognizable building styles. Within Frishman’s and Khan’s overview, India and Pakistan were characterized by the Mogul style around a formal type with triple domes and a large courtyard, Malaysia and Indonesia by the Southeast-Asian style around a formal type with a pyramidal pitched roof, Anatolia by the Ottoman style around the formal type with a massive central dome supported by half-domes, and Spain and North Africa by the Almoravid/Almohad style around the formal type with a hypostyle hall with a flat roof and open courtyard.12 (Figure 1) Based on this classification, Dijker understandably assumed that in the Dutch context ‘our’ Surinamese, Moluccan, Turkish and Moroccan Muslims shared a basic liturgy but needed to architecturally circumscribe themselves as consistent culture groups towards each other. Subsequently, she showed them to have been using, in their mosques, what she saw as the Indian, Indonesian, Turkish and Moroccan building styles. Any divergences from these ideal-types were explained by the author by the relevant patrons’ need to be more recognizably Islamic in a non-Islamic society or from their architects’ individual creativity. Similarly, Wessels assumed that the Moroccan, Turkish and Surinamese mosques in the region of Utrecht had been based on the Moroccan, Turkish and Indian building styles as well. She, in turn, explained the empirical deviations from these ideal-types mainly from the rules and regulations placed upon them by municipalities, and from the inhabitants’ desire that they be made to fit their Dutch surroundings. At first sight, the identification of these authentic cultural building styles and the consequent need to explain any empirical deviations in The Netherlands in terms of modern factors seem plausible enough. Beneath the surface, however, the Dutch empirical field is much more varied than can be described, let alone explained, by any consistent typology connected to cultures to begin with. Even when only cursorily surveyed, it can be seen that the ‘Indian style’ has been combined with elements from specifically non-Hindustani buildings, whereas both the ‘Indonesian style’ and the ‘Turkish style’ have been materialized in quite conflicting ways. Strangely enough, the ‘Moroccan style’ was conspicuously rejected in several Moroccan-commissioned projects, while the ‘Mamluk style’ was used, even though none of the mosque communities involved came from a Mamluk-associated region. Meanwhile, when confronted with the media, most patrons orally classified their own chosen forms or materials as typically ‘Dutch’ in some way and someone else’s as completely ‘un-Dutch’. On the other hand, some patrons could never be bothered to explain anything in spite of heavy public speculation, leaving the observer even more confused in a matter that was initially imagined to be quite straightforward. As yet, despite the obvious precariousness of the issue for the general public, there are no in-depth, published studies on the motivations of the Muslim mosque patrons involved. Knowledge on that particular subject has been mainly produced by a small group of young, engaged Muslim architects united in the design bureau Memar Dutch. The latter was established after two of its members – under the name of Memar – graduated cum laude in 2003 with an alternative Dutch mosque proposal for a Moroccan-commissioned project in Rotterdam that had led to a great controversy among local non-Muslim communities. They called their alternative the ‘Polder Mosque’, and it was specifically aimed at ‘transparent design’ and ‘integration architecture’. (Figure 2) Since then, their perspective has been referred to in all major Dutch newspaper articles, magazine articles18 and exhibitions on the subject. Although their alternative was never executed, they may be regarded as quite influential and authoritative among a large part of the public, leading to what might be recognized as the start of a stream of prizewinning – although uncommissioned and unexecuted – modern design alternatives by architectural students in The Netherlands. In 2006, MemarDutch members Ergün Erkoçu, AbdelUahab Hammiche and Cihan Bugdaci published a printed article that summed up the argument their bureau had spread over the different public media in the years before. In this, the authors basically presented existing Dutch mosque designs as a sign of arrested development. They suggested Muslim immigrant communities in The Netherlands were emotionally stuck to copies and pastiches of their premodern cultural building styles caused by nostalgia for the mother countries or by the need to show an ostentatiously Islamic identity. Moreover, they suggested the Dutch, non-Muslim architects involved used an Orientalist perspective, resulting in the Arabian Nights architecture that had characterized the ‘make-believe’ buildings of earlier times. ‘Because mosques are built in the styles of local architectures, the variety is large. […] Therefore, it is amazing to see that mosque architecture in The Netherlands and the other Western European countries passes over any local architectural styles. […] At the end of the 1980s a style developed in The Netherlands that strongly based itself on historical examples, partly because the first generation of Muslims looked for a connection with its roots, coming from a wish to secure their own identity. Currently, […] mosque boards mainly choose Dutch architects, […] often leading to buildings that copy Oriental forms.
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