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Mosques as monuments: An inter-Asian perspective on monumentality and religious landscapes
Abstract
This article examines monumental mosques and particularly those that are built to be and function more as monuments than as places for worship. We consider the role of monumentality in religious landscapes by way of six exemplary mosques in three different world regions – Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Tracing their unique histories and the identity narratives inscribed in their built form, we stress three broader commonalities among these mosques-as-monuments: (1) each is the result of top-down, state-funded planning infused with strong nationalist or ideological symbolism, (2) each was designed to be an iconic architectural showpiece in the country’s capital city, and (3) each represents a stark contrast to other places of worship within that national or regional context. In this unique comparative study, we use an interpretive approach designed to push the research on monuments and monumentality into new directions and new empirical contexts, and specifically to ask why and with what effect some religious sites are primarily monuments and only secondarily places of worship.
... 52 m (171 ft) yüksekliğindeki kubbe, şehrin hemen her yerinden görülebilmektedir [44]. Kubbe, İtalyan mermerinden yapılmış duvarlar ve sütunlarla desteklenmektedir [45]. Kubbenin tasarımı, geleneksel Babür İslam mimarisi ile İtalyan mimarisini, modern malzeme ve tekniklerle birleştirerek, Güneydoğu Asya'daki İslam mimarisinin şaheserlerinden biri haline gelmiştir. ...
Tarihsel süreç içinde Müslümanlar için en önemli mimari yapılardan olan camilerin geliştirilmesine, işlevine uygun hale getirilmesine ve çevredeki diğer yapılardan estetik olarak ayırt edilmesine büyük önem verilmiştir. İlk camiler mevcut inşaat malzemeleriyle inşa edilirken ve basit unsurlar içerirken, zamanla yapı malzemeleri ve teknolojisinin gelişmesiyle yeni unsurlar eklenmiştir. Bununla birlikte, çoğu cami geleneksel şeklini, özellikle kubbe veya bir grup kubbenin varlığını korumuştur. Bu bağlamda çalışmada, cami kubbelerinin formlarının gelişimi, manevi önemi, işlevsel ve yapısal rolü ele alınmakta, kubbenin mimari bir unsur olarak benimsenmesinin tarihi anlatılmaktadır. Ardından modern dönemde inşa yöntemlerinin ve malzemelerinin gelişmesine bağlı olarak camilerdeki kubbe formlarının gelişimi incelenecektir. Modernlik ve gelenek arasındaki kubbenin şekli konusundaki çatışma sadece estetik kompozisyona bağlı olmayıp, işlevsel özelliklere de dayanmaktadır. Genel olarak mimarların geleneksel mimari formlardan uzaklaşması, tasarımda daha fazla özgürlük ve esnekliğin önünü açmakta, böylece çağdaş malzeme ya da inşaat tekniklerinin en iyi şekilde kullanılmasına ve modern teknolojinin binalara dahil edilmesine olanak tanımaktadır. Dolayısıyla geleneksel kubbenin önceki dönemlerde sağladığı işlevler, çağın olanaklarına daha uygun yeni form ve teknolojilerle telafi edilebilmektedir.
... Ahmed also points out that on one hand, Islam was a factor that promoted stability, on the other conflict. Koch, Valiyev, and Zaini (2018) investigate the symbolic significance of mosques as memorials to authority and state or legitimized power constructs through architecture. Last of all, Ulrichsen (2021) and Rabi and Mueller (2018) show how states like Saudi Arabia attempt to respond to globalization while maintaining the Islamic nature of political authority in governance. ...
Regional and religious factors in the Arabian Peninsula have long received scholarly research from several scholars. But the interaction of both regional dimensions and religion on the politics, social and economic fabric of Arabia has not received ample research. This research aims to examine the impact of regional power politics and religious rivalry on local political processes and foreign politics of Arabian Peninsula states. A critical analysis of historical, political and religious literature is then undertaken the purposes of understanding the roles of regional and religious factors for state governance, security issues and international policies within the region. It is assumed that regional competition and religious factor plays an important role in the political behaviors and affiliations of Arabian Peninsula states. The identified dynamics are expected to give an insight on how these have transpired over time and how they shape socio-political context. This study contributes to a gap in prior research by examining the relationship between regional structures of power and religious sectarianism while the latter is seen as independent in other works. The contributions of the study are expected to increase the awareness of the dynamics of regional and religious factors within the Middle East with focus on the impact of the KSA Vision 2030 and the emerging role of the kingdom in the region. These findings are expected to be useful to policy makers and academics studying the geopolitical and socio-religious changes in the Arabian Peninsula.
... Signifikansi sejarahnya, keindahan arsitektur, dan perwujudan keberagaman budaya menjadikannya sebagai landmark ikonik di Indonesia. Dibangunnya Masjid Istiqlal yang berdekatan dengan Katedral Jakarta merupakan bagian narasi pluralistik untuk menjadikan Masjid Istiqlal sebagai simbol nasional yang menghargai keragaman agama (Koch, Valiyev dan Zaini, 2018). ...
The Istiqlal Mosque is a monumental architectural masterpiece that embodies Indonesia's national identity within the religious context. The design process of the Istiqlal Mosque was strategically situated, employing collaborative design principles to establish it as the national mosque. This research aims to explore the implementation of a tourism approach in the design process of Jakarta's Istiqlal Mosque. The research methodology utilized is qualitative narrative. The research process commences with the collection of data concerning the history and design process of the Istiqlal Mosque. Field data is gathered through informant interviews and field observations, serving as the final stage to validate the acquired information. The analysis encompasses four areas, namely the selection of the initial construction site, the architectural narrative conveyed in the design process, the incorporation of monumental forms, and the application of an eclectic style in the design. One of the most influential factors contributing to the Istiqlal Mosque's current status as a religious tourism destination is its strategic location and monumental form. The findings of this research affirm the impact of the design process in establishing the Istiqlal Mosque as a prominent religious tourism destination in Indonesia. Subsequent studies should include an analysis of tourists' perceptions regarding the location of the Istiqlal Mosque and its role as a religious tourism site.
... Actively supporting the construction and restoration of mosques in 'traditional' architectural styles with financial assistance from the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, is one manifestation of TI. 11 In particular, the 2014 opening of the Heydar Mosque-also named after the former president, as a 'monument to his vision of a unified religious community under strong state supervision' (Koch et al. 2018, p. 6)-has played an important role in the establishment of TI. As pointed out by Koch et al. (2018), it was opened at a time when the state was actively closing down other mosques. Moreover, while in the 1990s some mosques were being built or restored by different individuals with the support of governments or organisations from Iran, Turkey or the Arab countries, during the last two decades it has become increasingly difficult to get official permission for the construction of mosques in Azerbaijan. ...
The article contributes to a better understanding of ‘Traditional Islam’ (TI), a state-led project in Azerbaijan to establish an alternative narrative promoting a specific local understanding of Islam that builds on its non-political, non-sectarian and national features to prevent ‘non-traditional’ religious variants from gaining popular traction. The phenomenon has not appeared in a vacuum. First, its features and functions stem from Soviet-era anti-religious and nationalities policies. Second, many aspects of TI resemble counter-radicalisation initiatives worldwide. Finally, while introduced as a means of blocking radicalisation in order to protect Azerbaijan’s national identity as a secular state, Traditional Islam in fact works to extend state control over the religious domain and thus to prevent the development of any religiously grounded dissent against the authoritarian regime.
... Extending research on nationalism to urban monumentality, scholars have more recently built on the limited work of a few earlier studies (Harvey 1979;Sidorov 2000) to explore religious sites as monuments themselves, as well as places more generally coded and developed as special places for the articulation of national identity, heritage and memory (e.g. Kinossian 2008;Rizvi 2015;Batuman 2016Batuman , 2018Bissenova 2016;Koch 2016;Rollason 2016;Hamdan 2017;Long 2017;Ali and Hassan 2018;Koch et al. 2018;Sheline 2019). As this work illustrates, religious landscapes have long been important for materially narrating national and political visions of identity -as well as contesting those narratives, either from the bottom-up or the top-down, as regimes change and new ideological scripts are adopted. ...
... 67 This one-way relationship is also one of inequality as "religion must be under (dövl e t n e zar e ti)." 68 Koch, Valiyev, and Kaini argue that this state control extends to the state authorities determining which mosques will be crowded and which ones will be closed down, as the recent favoring of the Heydar Mosque demonstrates. 69 To emphasize this unequal relationship between religion and state, a theologian states that "religion should never be situated on a horizontal plane with the state but it must be placed on a vertical axis," quoting Heydar Aliyev's statement that "Religion is above us. We must move it down to where it belongs." ...
... National mosques have not typically been studied as a category. Instead analysis has tended to focus on a single national mosque as a case study (Baram 2014, Rogan 1986, Wainscott 2017) with a few notable exceptions (Hassner 2009;Koch, Valiyev, and Zaini 2017;Rizvi 2015). Mosques, within the broader category of gathering places, received some attention in the wake of the Arab Spring protests as scholars emphasized the importance of appropriate physical space in overcoming collective action problems (Butt 2016, Schwedler 2013) as well as how regimes often responded to mass collective action by destroying the spaces in which it had occurred (Ehsani 2014, Hasso andSalime 2016). ...
A majority of national mosques were built in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Why did national mosque construction become important to Islamic states during this period, when it had not been a priority in earlier decades when many of these states achieved independence? This article suggests that national mosque construction was the result of political elites’ anxieties regarding the threat to regime stability posed by Islamist activists. Drawing on a medium N dataset of all 25 states that recognized Islam as their official religion, the article shows that mosque construction increased after 1979 when political elites adopted a strategy of Islamic nation-building, with one expression of this strategy taking the form of national mosque-building in order to visually manifest the regime’s religious authority. In addition to medium N analysis, the article uses process tracing to examine national mosque building in three case studies, as well as interview data, to evaluate whether mosque construction achieved the desired effect of bolstering regimes’ religious legitimacy in these contexts. The findings have implications for understanding the use of symbolic religious structures as tools for nation-building that have often been overlooked due to the tendency to associate nationalism with secular visions of modernity.
This article attempts to illustrate current approaches to the study of religious phenomena using the landscape framework. The authors identify similarities and differences in the interpretations of the most common terms used in foreign research to describe religion. The article shows that their semantic difference is mainly determined by their use as tools of either cultural geography or social anthropology. In particular, cultural geography focuses on the material objects of cultural landscapes and their geographical distribution, while social anthropology highlights specific features of people’s religious discourse and practices and analyses social processes that shape the modern world landscape. The term religious landscape can be used in the following ways, depending on how it is operationalized. First, it refers to the totality of material objects associated with religion. Secondly, it refers to the places where rituals take place. Finally, it refers to the territory in which followers of particular religious traditions live. The term religioscape implies a situation of conflict or complementary interaction between followers of different religions sharing the same space. Sacred landscape is sometimes applied as a synonym for the term religious landscape meaning a set of religious material objects. Sometimes it means a complex of natural places or objects of worship (mountains, hills, swamps, and others) that provides a general framework for various individual religious landscapes within it. The term sacro-scape refers to the historically formed material manifestations of religiosity influencing both contemporary people and earth’s surface. The term spiritual landscape has several basic meanings. On the one hand, it is used as a synonym for religious landscape or sacred landscape. Secondly, it serves as a broader, generalizing term to describe all aspects of human interaction (ideas, objects, practices) with the supersensible world. Finally, the term spiritual landscape refers to spaces of not only ritual but also everyday practices.
В статье характеризуются актуальные подходы, применяемые при исследовании религиозных явлений в контексте ландшафтной концепции. Авторы выявляют сходства и различия трактовок наиболее распространенных в зарубежных исследованиях терминов описания религии. Показано, что их смысловое различие задается, главным образом, использованием в качестве инструментария либо культурной географии, сфокусированной на материальности и географическом распределении объектов культурного ландшафта, либо социальной антропологии, в оптике которой оказываются специфика дискурсов и практик населяющих его религиозных групп, понимание социальных процессов, формирующих современный мировой ландшафт. Термин “религиозный ландшафт” (religious landscape), в зависимости от дисциплинарной операционализации, используется в трех основных значениях. Во-первых, под ним понимается совокупность материальных объектов, связанных с религией. Во-вторых, совокупность мест, где проводятся ритуалы. В-третьих, территория проживания приверженцев тех или иных религиозных традиций. Под термином religioscape чаще всего понимается конфликтная или комплементарная ситуация взаимодействия приверженцев разных религий, разделяющих одно и то же пространство. Понятие “сакральный ландшафт” (sacred landscape) иногда выступает в качестве синонимичного термину religious landscape, и тогда под ним понимается совокупность религиозных материальных объектов, иногда означает совокупность мест или объектов поклонения природного характера (гора, холм, болото и т.д.), общую основу разнообразных частных “религиозных ландшафтов”, вырастающих на этой почве. Под термином sacroscape понимается историческая совокупность материальных проявлений религиозности, влияющая как на современных людей, так и на современную земную поверхность. Термин “духовный ландшафт” (spiritual landscape), во-первых, используется в качестве синонима religious landscape и sacred landscape. Во-вторых, под ним понимается более широкий, обобщающий термин, описывающий все аспекты взаимодействия человека (идеи, объекты, практики) со сверхчувственным миром. В-третьих, используя этот термин, имеют в виду пространства, включающие в себя не только ритуальные, но и повседневные практики.
Post-socialist urban dynamics in the Caucasus have been characterized by uneven processes of rebuilding and reclaiming of sacred spaces. Exploring re-emerging Shia Muslim lifestyles in post-conflict Armenia around Yerevan's Blue Mosque, I examine how a religious place is perceived and used in everyday life. Built at the end of the eighteenth century in a multi-religious environment, today the Blue Mosque is associated with the political body symbolizing the recent Iranian–Armenian friendship and with Iran's soft-power policy in the Caucasus. The ethnographic research reveals that the mosque complex is not an isolated sacred site emphasizing differences between Iranian migrants and Armenian locals, worshippers, and non-worshippers, but a spatial expression of the coming together of groups from different backgrounds and of the vernacular hybridity that existed in Yerevan in the past. In spite of the invisibility and the silence of the Blue Mosque's past from the point of view of government officials, the physical restoration of the mosque is triggering unembodied memories of people in conscious and unconscious reconstructions of the multi-religious past. The question, is to what extent does the Blue Mosque contribute to a visible rediversification of religious and ethnic life in Armenia?
This paper examines the ways that Turkish immigrants create places of belonging in a German city. I suggest that transnational ties enable immigrants to forge local attachments through the production of place. Drawing on a neighbourhood case-study of Duisburg-Marxloh, I show how immigrants' transnational ties and practices visibly transform their current place of residence through transnational consumption, mass media, and the establishment of communal places such as mosques and teahouses that also contribute to conflicts between groups. Their placing of identities also forms an engagement with the receiving society, as immigrants are actively carving out belonging in the face of often hostile attitudes from German residents. Viewing immigrants' attachments from the perspective of places they create teases out the complexities of multiple and sometimes conflicting attachments of contemporary migrants, and allows for an understanding of transnational ties and engagement with the host society as complementary rather than contradictory.
This paper examines how growing conservatism among Muslims in Malaysia has been manifested in the architecture and urban design of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s new capital. Rather than drawing on vernacular design traditions or developing a design idiom that recognises a religiously and ethnically diverse population, the state has recently adopted a fantasy Middle Eastern style for secular national buildings in Putrajaya. In this paper, recent architectural change is examined as a manifestation of social, political and religious trends as well as a demonstration of how Putrajaya’s design can reinforce existing social hierarchies and legitimise the ideological agenda of the state. It is suggested that there are various reasons for the adoption of ‘High Islam’ that relate to broader transnational religious change, Malaysian identity politics and nation-building, and lingering influences of the colonial occupation.
This article analyzes the role of mosques dedicated to the "father of the nation" under two personalistic authoritarian systems: Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan and Sheikh Zayed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Critiquing "cult of personality" narratives as Orientalist and analytically weak, I emphasize the constructed nature of charisma, asking how such personalistic regimes produce the image of a coherent figurehead—and to what end. As a discursive device, the personalistic leader-as-icon appears in a range of authoritarian regimes, and it is materially inscribed in the symbolic landscapes to create the impression of unity among elites and the masses. To illustrate how this works, I draw on research in Turkmenistan and the UAE from 2012 through 2014, including landscape analysis of two mosques memorializing the countries' founding fathers: the Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque in the outskirts of Ashgabat, and the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, in the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.
We introduce the following set of essays on reformatting the relationship between area studies and geography and reflect on our individual and collective negotiation of this relationship. This leads us to revisit some key area studies’ controversies and agendas, notably strategies for comparison. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and other comparatively minded scholars, we advocate staging comparisons in terms of difference/similarity, expectancy/surprise, present/past and familiarity/strangeness.
This paper presents a case study of urban boosterism in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – three resource-rich states around the Caspian Sea. Boosterist projects are typically justified through the injunction of, “build it and they will come.” This cliché is a staple of how urban planners and elites seek to justify development schemes that lack an obvious demand. And while the logic underpinning urban boosterism hinges on a high degree of openness and freedom of movement – both for capital and people – it is a tactic increasingly being used in closed and otherwise illiberal states. Understanding the effects of this development is an important task as a growing number of urban planners in nondemocratic but resource-rich countries seek to develop spectacular new urban landscapes and position their cities as “world class” hubs for international mega-events – even if these are smaller, second-tier events. Exploring event-oriented urban development in Astana, Ashgabat, and Baku, we show how boosterist narratives are being re-deployed in closed contexts to promote the image of a benevolent and “magical state,” as well as solidifying authoritarian political configurations and a selective engagement with market capitalism.
Low’s essay introduces the five essays in this roundtable in volume 34, number 3, which explore theoretical and practical connections between the fields of Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean studies. At least part of the exercise suggested by this forum, Low writes, involves a slight decentering of India in order to contemplate a rebalanced Indian Ocean as narrated from the peninsular Middle East outward. As a result, the points of departure and return suggested here move along a more heterogeneous set of oceanic axes running from Mecca to Calcutta, Singapore to Jidda, Hadhramawt to Java, Zanzibar to Oman, Awadh to Karbala and Najaf, and the Zanj to Shiraz.
Interrogating the concept of ‘legality’ and how it relates to local citizenship regimes, this article shows how a focus on cross-regional divergences can offer theoretical insights into the political implications of projects that, on the surface, appear to be strikingly similar. Taking the case of apparently similar spectacular capital city development schemes in the resource-rich states of Central Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), I show that there are significant differences in the underlying political geographic and political economic factors that makes them possible, as well as the political relations they sustain and produce. Like most states around the world, foreigners represent a minority of the overall population of the Central Asian states, but in the GCC, citizens are in the minority of the population in most countries. Because of this political configuration, the capital city development schemes are broadly coded as legal and legitimate in the Gulf, but illegal and corrupt in Central Asia. By honing in on these two different regions, this study shows how the state's power to define citizenship, and thus who is entitled to its resources, is a tremendously powerful technology of government, which hinges on actively constructing a binary between the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’.
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Religion and nationalism were often assumed to be opposed belief-systems. But the recent spate of religious nationalisms has led some to see them as strategic allies. Neither view does justice to the complexity of their relations. A more functional approach, harking back to Emile Durkheim's analysis, sees in nationalism a form of 'political religion' whose tensions with traditional religions has led to the politicisation of religion, the messianisation of politics, and the elevation of the 'people'. By distinguishing different levels of analysis-official, popular, and underlying-we can grasp the nation elevated by nationalism as a sacred communion of citizens, a willed and felt communion of those who assert a moral faith and feel an ancestral affinity. The foundational elements or sacred properties of the nation include: the myth of ethnic election, both missionary and covenantal: the attachment to a sacred territory through the territorialisation of memory and the sanctification of land; the memory of one or more 'golden ages' as the high points of communal ethno-history; and the cult of the 'glorious dead' and of national self-sacrifice. In these ways, religion and the sacred re-enter the frame of international politics in new guises, creating a sense of cohesion through sacrifice, engendering a sense of national self-confidence and exclusivity, and often intensifying conflicts over disputed territories. Above all, nationalism through its promotion of national rituals and symbols, by contributing to the 'normalisation' of nations, has been as much a force for international stability as for disruption.
During the early nineteenth century, Bavarian King Ludwig I embarked on an ambitious building program aimed at transforming his capital city Munich into a material expression of his authority. Ludwig commissioned a series of museums, palaces, and monuments in an attempt to associate his reign with the greatness of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. Although Ludwig championed these projects as providing cultural enrichment for his subjects, political calculations played a paramount role. Ludwig's new Munich was framed around monumental buildings, squares, and boulevards meant to position the monarchy as an unassailable cultural and political authority.
This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as a discursive trope employed in legitimating the Nazarbayev government, and one that has various material manifestations in the urban landscape of Astana. The research is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan in Summer 2009, and examines architecture, monuments, and the 2009 Astana Day celebrations. Through a focus on the monumental and the miniature, it highlights their similar roles in transforming symbols of Kazakhstani independence and identity into objects of reverie outside the field of political contestation.
This article aims to analyse the birth of a new ideological movement called 'Tengrism'. According to its theoreticians, Tengrism represents a key element in the identity renewal of Turkic-Mongol peoples and should be adopted as the official religion by the new states of the region. This paper enquires into the ways in which Tengrism is being politically deployed in the service of post-Soviet nationalisms in Kyrgyzstan and Tatarstan and to a lesser extent, in Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan and Buryatia. Although the ideologues of Tengrism may be marginal to the political mainstream, it is nonetheless important to analyse the role of 'ethnicized' forms of religious expression and their relationship with the search for post-Soviet national identities.
Political geographers have been surprisingly slow to engage with the importance of religion in contemporary international relations. Informed by theories of critical geopolitics, this paper addresses this failure by considering the Church of England's immediate response to the Al-Qaeda attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001. Focusing on a national service of remembrance held at St. Paul's Cathedral on September 14, it argues that the service was both an expression of grief at a shocking tragedy, and a (geo)political commentary. Occurring at a crucial moment of public debate about how to understand and respond to '9/11', the service scripted a geopolitical text that resonated with voices that were advocating a military response. The article undertakes a discursive reading of the service and its coverage by journalists, and uses interviews with key organisers to analyse its production. It concludes that although the organisers of the service strove to create what they considered to be an apolitical event, the service became part of a process of geopolitical scripting that made the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq more likely, and alternative peaceful responses to the crisis of 9/11 less likely. It calls on the Church of England to reconsider this aspect of its engagement with international affairs, by listening to non-Western Anglican perspectives, and political geographers to interrogate more system-atically the intersections of religion and the 'war on terror'.
This paper reviews research on deathscapes, particularly by geographers in the last decade, and argues that many of the issues addressed reflect the concerns that have engaged cultural geographers during the same period. In particular, necrogeographical research reveals the relevance of deathscapes to theoretical arguments about the social constructedness of race, class, gender, nation and nature; the ideological underpinnings of landscapes, the contestation of space, the centrality of place and the multiplicity of meanings. This paper therefore highlights how the focus on one particular form of landscape reveals macro-cultural geographical research interests and trends.
This essay examines the monument constructed by the Italian state in the center of Rome to commemorate Vittorio-Emanuele II, first king of united Italy. Opened in 1911 and constructed in the Beaux-Arts architectural style popular at that time as appropriately “imperial” for urban monuments throughout the West, the Vittoriano's symbolism and iconography produce a “memory theater” through which the official rhetoric of a united and imperial Italy was intended to be conveyed to the nation.Yet despite attempts by succeeding governments to promote it as a dignified and sacred center of the city, the nation, and the short-lived Italian empire, the monument has been derided throughout its history. Concentrating on “official culture,” we analyze the form and iconography of the monument, trace the various planning interventions made by both Liberal and Fascist governments between the wars that emphasized the Vittoriano's centrality within urban space and Italian territory, and comment on its use by the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, to promote an imperial spatiality through his performative rhetoric, which often unfolded while facing the monument in the Piazza Venezia. While urbanistic and territorial interventions emphasized horizontal axialities, burial and construction of a crypt for Italy's Unknown Soldier at the monument produced a vertical axis that linked military sacrifice and past heroism to aerial flight and future victory within the Fascist cult of male youth.
This paper analyzes the link between the changing geographical scale of dominant ideologies in Russian society and the architectural scales of different versions of the preeminent national monument, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The history of this process of national monumentalization in Russia is profiled by focusing on mutual influences between processes at these two scales, and the interplay between the state, society, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Within the context of the new Cathedral, ongoing but nevertheless underestimated pre-Soviet and post-Soviet antireligious practices are revealed through an analysis of the politics of scale that shaped the monumentos meanings at different historical periods. Thus, the paper also attempts to contribute to the understanding of the importance of scale in politicogeographical studies.
Civil Religion in America', Daedalus, 96 1-21; M.Laruelle, 'Religious Revival, Nationalism and the 'Invention of Tradition': Political Tengrism in Central Asia and TatarstanGod on Our Side? The Church of England and the Geopolitics of Mourning 9
- J See
- R Agnew
- Bellah
See J.Agnew, 'Religion and Geopolitics', Geopolitics, 11, 2006, pp. 183-91; R.Bellah, 'Civil Religion in
America', Daedalus, 96, 1967, pp. 1-21; M.Laruelle, 'Religious Revival, Nationalism and the 'Invention
of Tradition': Political Tengrism in Central Asia and Tatarstan', Central Asia Survey, 26, 2007, pp. 20316; N.Megoran, 'God on Our Side? The Church of England and the Geopolitics of Mourning 9/11',
Geopolitics, 11, 2006, pp. 561-79.
182; see also T.Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity The Construction of Nationhood
- A Juergensmeyer
- Hastings
Juergensmeyer, 'Nationalism and Religion', p. 182; see also T.Asad, Formations of the Secular:
Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); A.Hastings, The Construction
of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Nationalism and Religion
- M Juergensmeyer
M.Juergensmeyer, 'Nationalism and Religion', in G.Delanty and K.Kumar (eds), The SAGE Handbook
of Nations and Nationalism (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2006), pp. 295-306.
These everyday religious spaces and practices are not our focus in this article, but for important contributions to the research on the spatial and symbolic politics of mosques, see especially B.Batuman, 'Minarets without Mosques: Limits to the Urban Politics of Neo-Liberal Islamism
These everyday religious spaces and practices are not our focus in this article, but for important contributions to the research on the spatial and symbolic politics of mosques, see especially B.Batuman,
'Minarets without Mosques: Limits to the Urban Politics of Neo-Liberal Islamism', Urban Studies,
50, 2013, pp. 1097-113;
Nationalism and Religion', p. 182; see also T.Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam
- Juergensmeyer
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National Monumentalization
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Sidorov, 'National Monumentalization', pp. 564-67.
Baku Mosque Demolitions Undermine Tolerance Claims
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L.Amirova, 'Baku Mosque Demolitions Undermine Tolerance Claims', 29 May 2009, Institute for War
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Opening of Heydar Mosque in Baku', Official Web-site of President of Azerbaijan Republic
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Bouygues Building Canada
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Exploring Divergences
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Koch, 'Exploring Divergences', pp. 436-42;
The 'Personality Cult' Problematic
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Koch, 'The 'Personality Cult' Problematic', pp. 330-59.
The Year of Demolished Mosques', Forum 18 News
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F.Corley, 'Turkmenistan: 2004, The Year of Demolished Mosques', Forum 18 News, 2005, <http://
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Turkmenistan Keeps Lid On All Things Islam
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C.Recknagel and T.Muhammad,
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Building a Muslim Nation: The Role of the Central Mosque in Astana
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A.Bissenova, 'Building a Muslim Nation: The Role of the Central Mosque in Astana', in M.Laruelle
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Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque
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Translating 'Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa': An Amenable Religious Ideology
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S.Hidayah, 'Translating 'Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa': An Amenable Religious Ideology', in F.Dhont
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The State and the Politics of Religious (In)Tolerance: Understanding Contemporary Religious Life Through Past Debates on the State-Religion Relationship
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- ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa
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