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Introduction THE POLEMICS OF DECONSTRUCTION In the United States, the design and interpretation of Muslim religious art and architecture have been influenced by both the exclusion and the inclusion of historical fact, cultural bias, and a host of subtle contradictions. Each anomaly gives rise to a new discourse, and these discourses inform the corpus of this inquiry. Moreover, the American Muslim community has also claimed the freedom to compose and ultimately to forge a set of religious expressions apropos to the North American environment. The most obvious result of the freedom to compose is the generation of a new spatial form—the American mosque. My justification for the use of this idiom is explained in depth and at length below. However, the primary aim of this book is to explain the historical, cultural, and religious derivation of the themes that embody the brief history of the American mosque. My first point concerns the use of the word ‘‘deconstruction’’ in the title of this book. Although adequatelyexplained in laterdiscussion,what I mean by this word can be briefly summarized here. First of all, it is significantly unrelated to Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction; and second, it is not an attempt to study some transitory, postmodern, nonobjective style, an abstract or whimsical mode, or an incoherent architectural subject. My use of the term ‘‘deconstruction’’ concerns a concrete and serious study of Muslim religious aesthetics, which in the first instance is grounded in Muslim epistemology , and in the second is related to various ways of negotiating spatial relationships between tradition and modernity in the North American environment . Above all, I am concerned with the subjective and objective use of religious symbols by American Muslims and primarily with every individual Muslim’s devotion to the wisdom of the sacred text, the Qur’an. Before Derrida’s conception of deconstruction, we find a critical exposé on the art of being and doing in the philosophical writings of Ibn ‘Arabi (d.), Ibn Rushd (d.), al-Ghazali (d.), and Ibn Khaldun (d.). These scholars and many others have contemplated the meanings of space, time, and being. From among them I have selected Ibn ‘Arabi, using his theory of hermeneutics and creative imagination to advance the explanation of deconstruction that I adopt in this essay. I find Ibn ‘Arabi’s assertion about the notion of ‘‘being’’ poignantly relevant to the understanding of psychological space and the process of creating Muslim aesthetics. Therefore I rely on Ibn ‘Arabi’s thesis to decode the creative imagination of the architect and the epistemology of space, gender, and aesthetics.1 The nature of this formulation of deconstruction is retained in order to develop an understanding of the American mosque in terms of its relation to the material and the immaterial world. It also allows for a unique reading of the semiotics of Muslim aesthetics in North America. The overall notion of deconstruction suggests both the origins of a core and an outer shell. In other words, the opportunity exists to study the juxtaposition of traditional notions of the form and function of a religious edifice with a modern context. I argue below that the American mosque is a legitimate religious edifice in search of new accommodation in a modern context but not to some predetermined end. This is not to suggest that because there is no consensus on the use of the term ‘‘American mosque,’’ we can either cling to it or let it go. One way of understanding this new building type is to understand its syncretic aesthetic language, which borrows many syntactical nuances from tradition and other forms of human expression. Allowing for the integration of syntactical nuances, the American mosque, if viewed in terms of a hybrid design language, exhibits a parallel with linguistics, where we find the emergence of a similar syncretism in a modern form of Muslim English in America. In his study ‘‘Psychology of Dialect Differentiation: The Emergence of Muslim English in America,’’ Dr. S. Mohammad Syeed notes several social and linguistic features that he describes as the conscious engineering of social change based on various historical developments, diaspora, and borrowings from the Arabic language. Once again, the setting in which this development takes place allows for the generation of a new idiom, which includes syntactical nuances from history, culture, and other forms of human expression. There needs to be a theoretical account of how these correspondences operate and are to be understood. In our study of the American...

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