It ran into much opposition, and not just because an even larger number of people thought it was a poor way of honoring the Almighty -- pouring concrete into one İstanbul’s rare inner city parks. What I found off-putting about the proposal was that it bespoke of a certain triumphalism. May 29, the day the Ottoman armies finally stormed Byzantium, was much celebrated in the RP ranks with huge costumed re-enactments and rallies in soccer stadiums. The mosque seemed less to do with faith than confrontation. It was as if they felt the need to express their sense of exclusion by conquering the city again and again. The other reason I was against the idea was that the design was bound to be some concrete parody of the golden age of Süleyman -- classical just as Victorian churches in the new London suburbs were Gothick. The huge Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara has few admirers. Rather than reinterpret a sense of faith for a contemporary world, it imposes the spirit of Ankara’s bureaucracy upon religion. “This is what mosques looked like then, and what they should look like now,” it says. And just as the great imperial edifices of the 16th century were supported by commercial buildings around it, the grey concrete domes of Kocatepe have a supermarket as their foundation. The large and gangly proportioned mosque of the divinity faculty of Marmara University on the Asian side of İstanbul is a building that fares badly even in comparison to the brutalist next-door Capitol Shopping Center.
All of this explains the pleasure I took in attending the opening of a new mosque not far from that mosque, beside the entrance of Üsküdar’s Karacaahmet Cemetery. The building, unusual although not unique in Republican Turkey, is the result of a family donation -- the Şakir family in honor of their parents. The notion of a mosque having patrons is different from many of the post-war Turkish mosques, which were the result of local subscription but also of an urban strategy. First there was a green hill, then the squatting housing, then the multi-story apartments. Many new mosques were a celebration not just of God, but of a quasi-legal community’s right to remain. The Şakirin Mosque, however, is a return to a golden age of a rich benefactor not cutting corners.
Happily, it is not a return to the disproportioned Mimar Sinan wannabes that now litter the highways. İstanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş, who attended midday prayers, gave a sigh of relief in his public remarks. The mosque has already attracted a lot of international attention because, alongside architect Hüsrev Tayla, it owes much to its designer, Zeynep Fadıllıoğlu. The notion that a woman should be responsible for the appearance of a mosque should not take us by surprise, cautioned the prime minister’s wife, Emine Erdoğan, who was also at the ceremony. The two classical mosques that greet passengers at the Üsküdar ferry station had women patrons. Yet it is novel, if not unique, that a woman should be so involved in determining a mosque’s appearance.
The result is not a radical departure from classic Ottoman design, but a re-interpretation. The structure is contained within a tent-like dome that is made from aluminum sections. There are arabesques not on tiles, but cut into the large metal grills that both protect the windows and give a sense of space. Ribbons of calligraphy streak around the inside of the dome with a sense of abandon.
Ms. Fadıllıoğlu is better known for her work on hotels and the residences of an international clientele -- some of whom were also in attendance at the mosque’s inauguration and many of whom, I suspect, are more used to appearing in the society magazine Alem than at Friday prayers. Yet it strikes me as a good thing that this part of Turkish society should be asserting their right to reconstruct Turkey’s heritage and impose their own aesthetic on an often all too dull orthodoxy. It is evidence of one nation in dialogue with itself, and in that sense, an answer to a prayer.
