Word: islamic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's now changing. A new generation of Muslim builders and designers, as well as non-Muslims designing for Muslim groups, often in Europe or North America, are updating the mosque for the 21st century, sparking not just a hugely creative period in Islamic design, but one riven by controversy. The disputes over modern mosques echo larger debates taking place in the Islamic world today about gender, power and, particularly in immigrant communities, Islam's place in Western societies. Even the simplest design decision can reflect questions that are crucial to Islam and its adherents: Should women be allowed...
...whose names they bear. Increasingly, they symbolize the struggle to marry tradition with modernity and to set down roots in the West. The most daring buildings are dreamt up by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants, who have the confidence and cash to build stone-and-glass symbols of Islam's growing strength in places like Europe. Simply importing traditional mosque architecture "doesn't express loyalty to your current surroundings," says Zulfiqar Husain, honorary secretary of an innovative new eco-mosque in Manchester, England. "It almost expresses that you want to be separate from the society you live...
Innovation also blooms in unlikely places such as southern Bavaria. In the town of Penzberg, the Islamic Forum, built in 2005, last year won a Wessobrunner Architekturpreis, an award granted every five years for outstanding Bavarian architecture. A simple block of glass and pearly stone, the Forum beckons Muslims and non-Muslims alike to enter through two doors built to resemble an open book. "It's a place of communication," explains its Bosnian-born architect, Alen Jasarevic, in an e-mail. "Vast windows and openings in the façade, even in the prayer room, invite the citizens of Penzberg...
Shaping the Skyline But mosques, and their neighbors, aren't always so quiet. Particularly in Europe, mosques have become the architectural equivalent of the veil: visible signs of Islam's presence and thus sites for tension between Muslims and non-Muslim traditionalists. A recent report from the London-based Institute of Race Relations chronicles scores of campaigns against plans to build mosques across Europe. In 2007, a petition posted on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's website calling for the government to scrap plans to build a mega-mosque on an 18-acre (7 ha) plot near the site...
...shadow of its former self - with only 13 of the 43 armed groups that once comprised it still actively engaged in violence, and with much dissent among them - it is by no means a spent force. Some groups appear to have heeded the ISI's call for unity. The Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Islam - which worked with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the U.S. invasion in 2003 - have quietly formed a new alliance, pooling their intelligence and efforts, according to sources within both the insurgency and the Sahwa. (See a brief history of the Iraq...