Difference and architectural history : an introduction to Iranian mosques

• Main Author: Khaghani, Saeid
• Published: University of Manchester 2009
• Subjects: 726.20955
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.501951

How can we approach the architectural history of Iran in such a way that it can become a site for gaining cultural consciousness? To lay the ground for this, this architecture must first be drawn out of the closed semantic space created by the frameworks of 'Islam' and 'Iran'. In the case of the former, rather than being an effort to find a proper answer to the question of 'what is Islamic?', the conceptual effort should be directed to the consequences of the differences created by the transformation of Islam as a way of life to Islam as defined narrations. To articulate Islam through the different narrations which explain its formative factors, is to create a space between them - something conceptually absent in traditional Islam. The same method should undertake to construct the national space. The move Iranism or Persianate as an ethnic definition with its intrinsic qualities to Iranism as specific patterns of regulating time and space (a transfer from the space of the ethnic to the universal) is a conceptual leap which the lineal narration of history cannot undertake. In both cases, difference as a tool to relativise the space of these definitions is used to open room for the following questions: In what sense is the mosque a public space? What are the possible historical categorisations? What form does the relationship between particular cases and these genera categories take?