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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...
...going ahead, and Böhm hopes his design will foster an openness that will one day silence the critics. His plan for the complex, due to be completed in 2010, calls for a piazza with a fountain and a cafe, designed to draw non-Muslims to the site. The local Muslim elders hope that, once there, visitors will browse in the library, check out the art gallery or spend in the shopping mall, which Böhm envisions as "a modern souk with the quality of the traditional souk." The mosque's prayer hall consists of shells of textured...
Unsurprisingly, it's immigrant Muslim communities that are pushing the biggest changes. "The Western mosque is fast becoming the site of contestation between the kind of Muslims who espouse the traditional mosque, and those who want to win proportionate space for women," says MIT's Khalidi. "The second generation are the ones demanding, and often getting, that kind of space." Architectural historian Khan estimates that until recently, North American mosques gave only about 15% of their space to women. Over the past five years or so, the space women have access to has increased to at least...
...Theatre. Green is the new Crimson, baby. But although Harvard is digging that Chu is a passionate advocate for renewable energy, his passion for academics went somewhat...unappreciated by the Ivy Leagues in an earlier go-round. In his autobiography on the Nobel Prize web site, he writes of how he was rejected by all the Ivy League schools he applied to--including, FlyByBlog presumes, Harvard, where two cousins were attending. The relevant passage after the jump...
That the “University of Our Lady” should be a site of contention over a woman’s right to legislate control over her own body seems almost too perfect a coincidence. For many of us, the words that the protesters use to describe the university’s decision in their online petition—“outrage,” “scandal,” and “travesty”—would better connote the curtailing of federal funding for safe abortion procedures, the outlawing...