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  5. Volume 11, Issue 2, 2022

International Journal of Islamic Architecture - Hinterland Forces: Architectural Responses at the Margins, Jul 2022

Hinterland Forces: Architectural Responses at the Margins

Hinterland Forces: Architectural Responses at the Margins, Jul 2022

Language: English
  • Editorial

      • Hinterland Forces: Architectural Responses at the Margins

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00078_2

        Marginalized communities use, adapt, and produce architectures in hinterland spaces in response to geographical, environmental, social, nationalist, and other political forces. Scholarly discourse and approaches to architectural practice may likewise be formed and coerced through marginalization. The hinterland, as the outlying territory beyond the urban or geographical centre, is the physical manifestation of these forces that shape the social margins. At times, architecture is itself a marginalizing actor, and at others, it becomes the site of resistance and negotiation, providing spatial agency and autonomy, and facilitating distributive justice in regard to services and resources. In the hinterland, new architectures are created, pre-existing spaces are destroyed and re-made, and movement, change, and adaptation are given momentum. This article introduces the special issue on hinterland forces. I categorize architectural responses, both in architecture made and used by those in power to control marginal populations, and created by and for marginalized people. This is followed by a summary of the multi-field perspectives and scholarly methods of the contributing authors. The discussion focuses on architectural matters relevant to Islamic societies in several global regions, but the socio-spatial questions and associated responsibilities are relevant to practitioners and scholars in all architectural fields.

  • Design in Theory Articles

      • Hinterland of a Hinterland: The Changing Capital Cities of Sultanate and Mughal Bengal

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00079_1

        Urban research on Bengal has emphasized colonial Calcutta (postcolonial Kolkata) and its hinterland, paying less attention to precolonial centres and processes of urbanization. Between the thirteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, the trading village of Kalikata lay on the coastal margin of Bengal. The regional capitals of the Sultanate and Mughal periods were located further inland at Gour, Pandua, Rajmahal, Dhaka, and Murshidabad, in the hinterlands of imperial capitals in the Delhi region. Bengal capitals changed frequently with fluvial and geopolitical conditions, which had implications for their economic and architectural development. Coastal trading settlements competed with one another in commercial and military matters, which established a new hinterland by the late eighteenth century, with ‘hinterland’ defined as the economic catchment region of the maritime port of Calcutta. This article retraces these processes from chronicles, revenue records, and archaeological surveys. Our examination concludes with the national eclipse of Calcutta by New Delhi in the early twentieth century, and the prospect of climate-driven retreat to inland capitals in Bengal in a twenty-first-century shift that would resemble urban patterns of the precolonial era.

    • ‘A Place of Our Own’: Puerto Rican Muslims and Their Architectural Responses as Quadruple Minorities

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00080_1

      This article adopts a horizontally integrative approach to understanding Islamic architecture in the traditionally excluded geography of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is literally and figuratively left off the map of the so-called ‘Muslim world’ and there is very little about its (mosques) or the Andalusian legacy in its built environment in the published record of Islamic architectures, sites, and responses. I argue, based on my ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in 2015–17 and 2019–21, that Puerto Rican Muslims counter their multiple marginalizations – identifying as Muslim in the Puerto Rican community, Puerto Rican in the Muslim community, and both Muslim and Puerto Rican in the context of the American empire – through various architectural responses. To make this argument, I discuss the physical landscape of Islamic architecture in Puerto Rico, including innovative and adaptive spaces constructed in protest of the elitism found in certain , and locales where Andalusian architectural influence is readily visible. This leads to my critical examination of how the diverse, dynamic, and vernacular architectural responses of Puerto Rican Muslims speak to each of their minoritizations.

    • Islamic Art and Architecture in a Contested Region: Negotiating the Muslim Heritage in Meskheti, Georgia

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00081_1

      This article draws upon fieldwork carried out in the Meskheti (Ahıska) region of modern Georgia to introduce, analyse, and discuss local mosque architecture. The region’s Islamic art and architecture is largely unknown to the international scholarly community due to a turbulent history, especially in the twentieth century. However, as I show, these mosques shed light on trans-regional and trans-imperial artisan and patronage networks and architectural and aesthetic currents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also of interest is the story of how local Muslim communities navigated the complex process of maintaining their religious identity and visible material culture amid the shifting political and social tides in the region during that time, and the fate of the edifices they built after they were forced to leave the region in the mid-twentieth century. Today, much of the Islamic material heritage of Meskheti, Georgia remains under threat. I conclude by considering the current situation of the preservation of historical edifices and offer thoughts on the problems that must be overcome.

    • Ideology, Nationalism, and Architecture: Representations of Kurdish Sites in Turkish Art Historiography

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00082_1

      This article discusses how the narrative of Turkish national historiography, crafted by Turkish elites in the 1930s in light of the official doctrine of the Turkish History Thesis and the Sun Language Thesis, attempted to Turkify the patronage of historical buildings constructed by diverse ethnic and religious communities of the country’s eastern region. I focus on the architectural production of the seven Kurdish dynasties that ruled a large area in the Middle East from the tenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Kurdish rulers constructed a large number of urban monuments bearing their names. These sites were appropriated into the Turkish national historiography in a denial of their Kurdish origins. This approach to history has rendered Kurdish material culture all but invisible, pushing the understanding of Kurdish architectural patronage and identity to the academic margins. This study aims to develop an alternative approach to the history of urban and architectural production in eastern and south-eastern Turkey, and opens a discussion for a definition of Kurdish art and architecture.

    • The Right to the Suburb: The ‘American Dream’ of Palestinian Citizens of Israel

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00083_1

      This article analyses the suburbanization efforts of Palestinian Citizens of Israel (PCI) as a simultaneous act of individualistic self-fulfilment and decolonization. The local suburban turn of the 1980s was an integral part of the Israeli state’s geopolitical project, intended to enhance the Jewish presence in areas of national importance; the PCI’s presence in this process was thus restricted. Nevertheless, the desire of middle-class PCIs for better living standards resulted in increasing aspirations to take part in the national suburban turn while challenging its settler-colonial aspects. One of these efforts was Neve-Shalom/Wahat-al-Salam, a joint Jewish-Arab community that emerged in the 1980s as an attempt to produce an inclusive alternative to the ethnicity-based and territorially-minded Israeli spatial production mechanism. In my examination of this case study, I first explain its innovative perspective and how it defied local settlement patterns. Analysing its development over the past four decades, I show how Neve-Shalom/Wahat-al-Salam began as an alternative ex-urban community, which later turned into an exclusive, binational suburban environment, thereby challenging ethnicity-oriented spatial practices on the one hand, while recreating class-based seclusion on the other.

    • [There is something new coming from Africa]: Herman Haan and Aldo van Eyck’s Journeys in a Pseudo-Ethnographic Vein

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00084_1

      To the field of professional architecture in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, the deserts of Western Africa were a margin that was viewed as an exterior to the modern metropolis and as a realm of escapism. However, to the ethnographic practices that had developed since the late 1800s, the notion of a desert hinterland supposed a primordial land, reflected in forms of habitation. For architects Herman Haan (1914–96) and Aldo van Eyck (1918–99), the desert was a tense geography that moved between being outside and at home. Revisiting the diaries from Haan and van Eyck’s journeys and their mediation of ethnographic methodologies alongside their engagement with modernist design, this article proposes that Haan’s impressions connect two seemingly opposite contexts: the Dogon lands on the Niger River, and Rotterdam. I argue that, in the architectural and ethnographic amateurism of Haan, the modernist metropolis and its exteriors were not delimited, distinct realms, but were rather engaged in a fluctuating relationship reflective of the contemporary fascination with post-Eurocentric landscapes in the discipline of architecture. I assert that this process of immersion was in fact a process of internalization of spatial experience.

  • Design in Practice Article

      • Ibb’s Grand Mosque: Heritage at Risk in Yemen’s Hinterland

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia_00085_1

        The Grand Mosque of Ibb, Yemen, also called the ʻUmar Caliph Mosque, is a critically endangered structure that has been a seat of the Shafiʽi school of Islamic jurisprudence since the twelfth century. From the sixteenth century through the present, this identity became marginalized due to the changing political conditions of Lower Yemen. The present state of the mosque testifies to multiple phases of neglect, and the destruction of a complex that served as both a house of worship and a university; collapses and modern interventions have obscured much of its earlier grandeur. This study analyses the Grand Mosque’s destruction and deterioration through its distinct historic periods. For the Grand Mosque’s most recent history, photographs and interviews conducted by geographer Mohamed Saleh Al-Haj, a local resident of Ibb, are presented in collaboration with art historian Lily Filson, a colleague in the United States. The necessity of this international scholarly teamwork underscores the difficulties and challenges of conservation and fieldwork in Ibb. The Grand Mosque faces imminent risk because of its central location within Yemen, a hinterland within Islamic architectural scholarship and the site of a civil war that has claimed irreplaceable monuments and a staggering human toll since 2014.

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