Cities are there to give form to social and cultural trends. Does this also mean that mosques are part of this as a physical testimony?
Does it belong to Germany or not? Opinions are more divided than ever about the role of Islam in our country. When the then Federal President Christian Wulff propagated his demonstrative “yes” a few years ago, the tenor was unanimously negative. I believe this had to do not only with the thesis itself, but also with the sender. People simply didn’t believe that the new Hanoverian president really cared about defending Muslims. It smelled very much like vote-catching or thesis-seeking. A pale president had supposedly found “his” topic.
Now statements by CDU-CSU parliamentary group leader Volker Kauder have reignited the debate. The politician used the ambitiously subtle differentiation between “Islam” and “the Muslims”. The latter belong “to us”, the former do not. A distinction that already points to the tenacity of the whole debate. In essence, the question arises as to who this confounded “us” or “we” actually is. In a migration society, as the German one undeniably is, and not just since the last wave of refugees, this can no longer be said so clearly. The excitement of the discussion stems not least from a profound identity crisis among Germans. This society is spatially and culturally porous.
Of course we have certain values. But Volker Kauder’s contribution to Islam only defends them to a limited extent. Defining a society ex negativo is not very convincing. Defining everything that doesn’t suit you for political reasons by exclusion is difficult – and doesn’t lead to more identification or identity. A very courageous editorial in the feature section of the FAZ am Sonntag recently argued along these lines.
When the attitude of Berlin politicians towards Islam is discussed, one quickly ends up with architectural and urban development issues. That’s good news at first. It’s about – you guessed it – the provocative power, the urban spikiness so to speak, of minarets. Do we want to have mosques in our cities as a physical testimony to the faith of Muslim citizens or not? If so, then where and how prominently? So far, they have been the exception. Paul Böhm’s central mosque in Cologne-Ehrenfeld is probably the most architecturally relevant. Unfortunately, it is still not finished.
So: more mosques in our centers? The answer depends on what role you assign to cities. Are they primarily there to recreate their own cultural history? Then you would probably have to say: mosques out of the city centers. And if you believe that urban planning is a way of flanking social aspirations, the verdict would probably also be “mosque no”. But is it?
Let me try a different approach. Cities are there to give form to all important social and cultural trends. Islam is one such trend. From this I conclude: Yes, mosques belong in our cities. Because they make the religious and cultural constitution of our society visible. The mosque as a visible and visitable centralization point of Muslim faith and Islamic culture gives us the opportunity to engage with precisely this culture. This can also be done critically. Society is not a construct of harmony. There are conflicts. But you have to allow them.
The architectural forms that we will then see prominently are also open to (architectural) criticism. This would give the architectural discourse the chance to be more than just formalistic navel-gazing. Cultural criticism could thus demand precisely the constructive dialog from Islam that it allegedly often lacks. This would create an architectural testing ground for the question to which we have not yet found a satisfactory answer, despite all the heated debates: To what extent Islamic life (and building) can really fit into a Western, complex, enlightened society. Driven by urban discourse, we would get an answer to what extent – and in what form – Islam actually “belongs to us”.
Photo: Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
