It is similar in spirit to some of the mosques commissioned by royal patrons in previous centuries, an extravagant display of influence and taste. Its spirit is very different from that which inspires the construction of, on average, 600 new mosques in Turkey every year, which dot the newly expanded neighborhoods of major urban centers.The majority of news mosques have modest aesthetic pretensions. They are a declaration of community -- a place to pray but also part of a strategy to convince the municipal authorities to take seriously the provisioning of basic services. Once you've built a mosque and a school, the neighborhood is there to stay. And, of course, a mosque has to look like a mosque. To build something too fancy or challenging (even if there was money to do so) would defeat the purpose. Hence the presence of mock-16th century edifices throughout the country, many of them of ill-considered proportions and most of which re-enforce rather than distract from the drab concrete of new urban landscapes.
That logic need not apply to those few mosques built by institutions which have a greater luxury in designing more innovative examples or which might respond to the challenge of creating a building which reflects a more modern theology or a contemporary Islam. I cannot, for example, look at the big mosque of the divinity faculty of Marmara University without a sense of disappointment. Its obsessive use of variegated rose and white stone is again meant to conjure up the classical age, but to me seems only to evoke the notion of an albino zebra. Not wishing to rely on my own prejudices, I put the matter in time-honored fashion to a taxi driver for adjudication. “We Turks are afraid to break the mold. People are afraid to build something different,” he said as we sped past. “Look at Kocatepe Mosque. You know what happened to the real one? They built it in Pakistan.”
I am no fonder of the design of Kocatepe -- the congregation mosque in Ankara that squats on the skyline like a dark grey bunker. It, too, is a Sinan wannabe, an attempt to move not just the capital from İstanbul but to covet its imperial history as well. I've seen it more properly described as İstanbul's revenge. My taxi driver, though a statistically inadequate sample, confirmed what I long believed to be the case, that the one thing people know about Kocatepe is that it's the wrong mosque. In 1959, Vedat Dalokay, a distinguished architect and flamboyant personality, along with Nejat Tekelioğlu won the competition to build a mosque that would more properly embody the spirit of the republic's capital. The foundations were dug, but the mosque was never completed. The reason most bandied is that it was too revolutionary a design and that people could not accept that so committed a leftist (as mayor of the city in 1972, he was famous for having cut the city's water to the Spanish embassy in protest against Franco's regime) should build a house of God. The irony, of course, is that he went on to win another architectural contest in the far more conservative city of Islamabad. The Faisal Mosque owes more to Frank Lloyd Wright than Mimar Sinan and was, at the time of its completion in 1986, the largest mosque in the world.
Another irony is that the architect of the existing Kocatepe Mosque, Hüsrev Kaya, is also the architect of the controversial Şakirin Mosque whose canopy-like dome bears more than a passing reference to the original Kocatepe Mosque which Dalokay drew all those years ago. The reason for its controversy is not this rather 1950s use of concrete but the bold, plush interiors of interior decorator, Zeynep Fadıllıoğlu. That Ms. Fadıllıoğlu is not a man is, pundits speculate, a challenge to religious orthodoxy. In fact her greater challenge is to architectural orthodoxy. Let us hope she succeeds by example in getting those who would design religious buildings to change their tedious ways.
