MUKHTARA, LEBANON // From a distance, there is little to suggest that the building at the entrance of Mukhtara, in the Chouf mountains of Lebanon, is a mosque.
After all. the village is in the Druze heartland and though they are an offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Druze do not worship at mosques and the building looks very different to traditional rendering of a Muslim prayer house.
But the Amir Shakib Arslan mosque is intended to make visitors reflect on religion and modernity — and on the symbolic gesture of constructing a mosque in a village whose residents worship elsewhere.
It is named after the grandfather of Walid Jumblatt, the head of Lebanon’s Druze community, who commissioned and funded the project, and replaces a mosque that once stood in Mukhtara but was destroyed decades ago in a feud.
Walid Jumblatt had two aims for the project: to emphasise the ties between the Druze faith and other branches of Islam, but also to promote religious tolerance.
Lebanon still bears the scars of its 1975-1990 civil war, in which all factions and sects committed abuses, and it has been rocked by the consequences of the conflict in neighbouring Syria.
“I think the message that we have to say again and again, always in Lebanon, is that it’s a place of diversity and coexistence,” Mr Jumblatt said. “Lebanon cannot survive but through its diversity.”
The Chouf area where Mukhtara is located witnessed some of the bloodiest massacres of the civil war, committed both by and against the Druze. More recently, the Druze have been among the religious minorities targeted for forced conversions and expulsions by extremists in Syria who consider them to be apostates.
Mr Jumblatt gave architect Makram El Kadi a free hand. So, instead of the traditional domed roof beside a minaret tower, a cage-like structure of white steel beams sits over an existing traditional Lebanese stone building like a “veil”, Mr Kadi says.
At one corner, the white blades of the structure bend upwards in a form suggestive of a minaret.
The spaces between the blades are arranged so that the words “Allah” and “Al Insan’, or “human being” are perceptible — but only from a distance.
“There’s nothing scripted, neither in the Quran nor in the hadith (words and practices of the Prophet Mohammed) that tells you what a mosque should be,” Mr Kadi said. Yet despite the lack of religious constraints and the young demographics of Islam, the design of mosques has remained largely static.
“Given this big number of young people in the religion, you don’t see as much experimentation in the architecture of the mosque as you would expect,” Mr Kadi said.
Inside, the walls of the Mukhtara mosque are largely bare and white. The sun streams in from a skylight cut into the vaulted roof. At the back of the room, where religious texts are traditionally stored, the word “Iqra” or “read” appears in wooden latticework, a nod to the first word of the Quran and a reminder, Mr Kadi says, of the religious imperative to read, not merely recite.
The interior is dominated by a striking carpet with an abstract black-and-white pattern, a unique reproduction of soundwaves taken from a recording of Quranic recitation.
Moments in the soundwaves where the word “God” appeared were removed, in part to avoid the possibility of visitors stepping on the word. but also to convey “that God is both concealed and ultimately very present,” says artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who conceived the piece.
For all its innovativeness, the mosque retains certain elemental features, including an orientation towards Mecca, and, for now, a traditional athan, or call to prayer. A spoken rather than sung athan was deemed a little too avant-garde..
For Mukhtara residents, the mosque is a curiosity, more of a gesture towards outsiders rather than a potential prayer house for themselves.
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“It’s something very lovely, promoting pluralism and acceptance of the other,” said Sabah Abdel Samad, whose pharmacy is opposite the mosque. “Many of our Muslim brothers pass through here, it’s a good thing for them to have a place to pray.”
Mr Kadi sees the mosque an “act of bridging” between the different branches of Islam at a time “when such gestures ... are rarely being made”.
“The fact that it’s done in this way, that it’s done at this time specifically, sends a strong message: that there’s an alternative, you can be religious without being close-minded.”
* Agence France-Presse
