Tarih: -
Associate Prof. Dr. Bülent Batuman will give a presentation titled "Architectural Production as Ideological Simulacrum: Mosque Archtiecture from Nationalist-Conservatism to New Islamism" on November 1st 2018 at 18:30 at TEDU Multipurpose Hall.
This talk discusses the politics of mosque architecture in Turkey, which should be related to the crisis of representation marked by a continuous struggle between the nation-state and Islam to absorb each other. For a good part of the twentieth century, the major strategy for architecture to ease the tension between these two forces was mimicry. Architectural mimicry of classical Ottoman mosque form prevailed throughout the century despite the hostility of the nation-state towards the Ottoman past. This particular idiom produced distinct ideological meanings within different political contexts. While it served for the absorption of Islam(ism) by the nation-state through its assimilation under a larger rubric of “nationalist-conservatism” as a local strain of anti-communism during the Cold War, it has recently become operational for the exact opposite. Now it serves the absorption of nationalism and the remolding of the nation-state by Islamism and the making of an Islamic nation. Significantly, it is also the major instrument in the outward dissemination of the new national identity utilizing the global currency of Islam beyond the conventional limits of the nation. What is at stake here is the export of a transnational Turkish Islam, which is spread through mosques funded by the Turkish government.