Diaspora, Nostalgia, Invention: Sharif Senbel’s British Columbia Mosques

The word masjid (mosque) means simply “place of prostration.” For Muslims, the Qur’an and Hadith serve as ultimate arbiters of value, meaning and truth, but neither says anything about the location or look of mosques. Nor have Muslim jurists. Nonetheless, certain features have come to characterize the architecture of mosques: domes and minarets; arched windows and doorways; courtyards, fountains and gardens. Inside, images of human and animal life – considered distractions from a mosque’s primary devotional purpose – yield to varieties of botanical representation, calligraphy and tessellation. Exposure to modernist and modernizing western architecture, however, has presented designers of mosques in Muslim communities in diaspora with several challenges. How may the urge to innovate accommodate the international language of modernist design to the aesthetic expectations of different immigrant Muslim groups? How may such accommodation resist subjecting modernist innovation to the dictates of Islamic convention? Conversely, how may invention avoid subverting architectural conventions associated with the mosque’s primary identity as a place of worship? Further complicating the picture, nostalgic attraction to the architectural conventions of “back then” and “over there” frequently suggests existential safeguards against the economic, social and cultural insecurities of here and now in a new land. The issue of gendered space epitomizes these tensions. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the efforts of Vancouver architect Sharif Senbel to meet such challenges with what he calls the “Canadian Islamic regionalism” of British Columbia’s Masjid al Hidayah (Port Coquitlam, 2003), Surrey Mosque (2005), Vernon Mosque (2011) and Prince George Islamic Centre (2013).