Dreams of an iconic mosque: Spatial and temporal entanglements of a converted Church in Amsterdam

Abstract

This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Examining the Fatih Mosque housed in a former Catholic church in the city center, we show in what ways the efforts at making this mosque iconic are shaped by the building’s iconic field, by which we denote its entanglement with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. This iconic field is characterized by the conversion chains that preceded the mosque, material and discursive legacies of “hiddenness” and contemporary symbolic interactions with nearby sites such as the Western Church. By developing an analysis of the mosque’s temporal and spatial entanglements in Amsterdam’s urban space, we seek to revitalize a relational and diachronic approach that has suffered from neglect, particularly in social-scientific studies of mosques in the West. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, we draw attention to the relations between Islamic and other religious architecture and to the ways in which this mosque intersects with broader genealogies and geographies of religion, not only by association but also by actual links in relationships, politics or material culture.