Dreams of an Iconic Mosque: Spatial and Temporal Entanglements of a Converted Church in Amsterdam

Beekers, Daan; Arab, Pooyan Tamimi

doi:10.1080/17432200.2016.1172760

Cited by 32 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Different situations, however, obviously inform different readings of Ahmed's book, also within one museum. As an Iranian-Dutch anthropologist of Islam myself, doing active fieldwork in the Netherlands for almost a decade (Beekers and Tamimi Arab, 2016;, I believe that Ahmed's work can be used in critical conversation with the broader social science research on culture, nationalism and citizenship.…”

Section: The International Context Of Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures

Arab

2021

Journal of Material Culture

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Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges anthropologists, Islamic Studies scholars, art historians and museum practitioners to question the theological assumptions underlying conceptions of Islamic art and material culture. This article analyses three object types key to Ahmed’s analysis – Islamic figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls – from the vantage point of the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures. Based on the author’s experience as Assistant Curator for West Asia and North Africa in 2015–2016 and on exhibition developments up until 2019, Ahmed’s framework is demonstrated as a guide for critical interpretations of exhibitions of Islamic art and material culture. This perspective lays bare a tension that contemporary museums struggle with in response to nationalist pressures to integrate Muslim citizens in Western Europe: between a diverse Islamic heritage, on the one hand, and orthodox desires to materially purify the very idea of Islam, on the other.

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Section: The International Context Of Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures

Arab

2021

Journal of Material Culture

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“…Taking up this gap in the literature, recent contributions have emphasized that religious place-making cannot be studied in an isolated manner. For example, research on the visibility and audibility of religious presences (especially in relation to Muslim 'newcomers' in Western Europe) has argued that conflicts have to be analyzed in connection to the context-specific history of religious presence and toleration (Beekers and Arab Tamini, 2016;Oosterbaan, 2014), not least the iconic dominance of Christianity (Knott et al, 2016). These studies have opened up exciting new avenues for the study of religion in urban space.…”

Section: 'The Secular' In Literature On Religious Place-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

From religious to secular place-making: How does the secular matter for religious place construction in the local?

Berg

2019

Social Compass

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The literature on religious place-making has largely prioritized an emic perspective of religious actors often reducing the secular aspect of such place-making to a mere 'emptying out' of religion from public space. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with political and religious representatives in Montreuil, one of the flagship towns of the 'red belt' of municipalities around Paris, this article looks at secular aspects of religious place construction. The discussion focusses on two practices of secular place-making: defining of religion 'worthy' of place and shifting the boundary between public and private space. Comparing the municipality's interactions with Muslim groups on the one hand, and evangelical churches on the other, I show that politics and sensibilities of the secular towards the religious vary for different religious groups over time. Locality can thus be understood as dynamic mode of secularism, enabling a constant placing and replacing of religion.

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“…Our observation converges with a growing body of research that examines the role of material culture in the study of religion (Arweck and Keenan, 2006;Houtman and Meyer, 2012;Kaell, 2015;King, 2010;Morgan, 2010Morgan, , 2017Zubrzycki, 2016a). The artifacts, imagery, and the space mediate people's encounters with the sacred (Brenneman and Miller, 2016;Orsi, 1999;Williams, 2010) and become objects of navigation, negotiation, 5 creation, and appropriation (Beekers and Arab, 2016;Engelbart and Krech, 2016;Hoover, 2014;Knott, 2005). But, material objects also become mediators of social relations.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Nativity scene in a shared religious space: The case study of Saint-Pierre’s Church in Montreal

Grigore-Dovlete

Beaman

2020

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

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Once called “the priest-ridden province,” the transformations brought about by the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s left the churches in Quebec deserted, while the idea of a secular Quebec became part of the public discourse about Quebec identity. Lacking the financial support of an active community, many Catholic churches were demolished or repurposed. They were thus transformed into residential or institutional spaces, entering what might be conceptualized as a secular order. Some churches managed to delay this major transformation by sharing their space with another religious community. This is the case of a Catholic church located in Montreal that we call Saint-Pierre’s Church. Today, the old building of Saint-Pierre’s Church accommodates two Christian communities: one is French-speaking Catholic and the other is Romanian Orthodox. At first glance, no tensions seem to trouble their coexistence. However, people’s perspectives of religious artifacts depict a slightly different image. Starting from participant observation and interviews carried out in 2016 and 2017 with members of both communities, we use the material religion framework to examine the power of materiality to invoke people’s emotions and to tell a story. The material religion framework allowed us to explore how the understanding of the shared place is linked to the dynamics and the contingencies of each community, and how the transformation of religious space happens in a rapidly changing context to which traditional majoritarian religion is attempting to adjust.

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Dreams of an Iconic Mosque: Spatial and Temporal Entanglements of a Converted Church in Amsterdam

Cited by 32 publications

References 20 publications

Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures

Islamic heritage versus orthodoxy: Figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures

From religious to secular place-making: How does the secular matter for religious place construction in the local?

The Nativity scene in a shared religious space: The case study of Saint-Pierre’s Church in Montreal

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