This is a mosque.You can see the minnarets and the crescents.
Judging by the enormous fence and the trees, it is huge.
You judged wrong.
The houses in the background are the famous 'back-to-backs' of industrial England, small houses with a couple of rooms on each floor.
The tree is a bush.
The fence is five feet high.
Apparently they built a 'mini-me' among mosques, a clone of the Middle Eastern giants, and like Mini Me, the mosque in the photo is neither imposing nor frightening.
What is puzzling, however, is why it is so small.
There is enough ground to build an imposing structure along traditional lines, but the local community must have been short of money. There are several large churches close by.
If this faith had any desire to possess relevance to real life, they would have hired an architect to build something different, like the Jews and Christians of various sorts, with their many, different types of god-box.
Look at any number of 1960's churches, built in many styles(not unlike the church in the Simpsons), but look at mosques and you see this nonsensical, sentimental adherence to a culture which was close to alien in its own land only thirty years ago.
Perhaps this is a conscious 'renaissance', a mirror image of the Doric absurdity of so much Western architecture a hundred years ago.
If so, the Moslems are certainly making a statement.
Perhaps a statement of intent. Perhaps only a statement of intent to live in this way wherever they are, although some definitely proclaim sedition.
Architecture speaks too.
2 comments:
Thirty years ago;make that forty.
Egypt, was then known as the Socialist Arab Republic, part of a wider grouping that was intended to become a USSR of the Middle East.
Egypt also contained the largest mosque in the world.
Interesting point about the victory of Israel in 1967;the Arabs(Egypt, Syria and Jordan)had unified command as a prelude to SAR unification.
Victory in the Six-Day-War put an end to that political union, so achieving a very great victory against socialism, despite the somewhat pink nature of manyt Israeli institutions.
This is worth remembering when considering the liberation of territory in the West Bank, Golan and Sinai.
On second thoughts, this little building could be a school.
So where are the windows, then?
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