The Making of the Mosque as Religious Monument: Notes from the post-war reconstruction of the ʿUmari Mosque

Please join us on JUNE 8, 2020 at 05:00 PM EST for the first of 2 virtual lectures by AKPIA Post-Doctoral fellows (next on 6/15)

The Making of the Mosque as Religious Monument: Notes from the post-war reconstruction of the ʿUmari Mosque

Nada Moumtaz

2019-20 AKPIA@MIT Post-Doctoral Fellow

Today, in Beirut’s city-center, the historic and centuries-old ʿUmari mosque is overshadowed by the new neo-Ottoman al-Amin mosque. Sitting across from the majestic municipality, Al-ʿUmari is a very humble mosque compared to al-Amin. Yet, al-ʿUmari’s presence as an architectural object and especially as a “religious” building only dates to its current postwar renovation in the 1990s and early 2000s. Anchored in this renovation and the tensions between different visions of the mosque among various protagonists, this talk invites us to an architectural history of the mosque beyond typology and to historicize contemporary approaches to mosque design as religious monuments.

Nada Moumtaz is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion & in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. After a Bachelor of Architecture at the American University of Beirut, she received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research stands at the intersection of Islamic legal studies, the anthropology of Islam, studies of capitalism, and urban studies and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant. Her book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State will be out in March 2021.

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