Post-Islamic Classicism: A Visual Essay

by Kanan Makiya

Metamorphosing “dead” Abbasid forms into living modern architecture lies at the roots of Mohamed Makiya’s classicism as an architect. This essay charts the stages of this metamorphosis from the Khulafa Mosque (1963) and the Kuwait State Mosque (one of the largest in the world) through to the vast and visionary schemes for Iraq of the late 1980s. Makijy’s formally complex and nuanced architecture, the author argues, is continuous, harmonious, and celebratory of an Islamic past. It is there too innocent, too romantic to be post-modern in its sensibility, nor does it assume the revolution in values that modernism brought in its wake. None the less, many of modernism’s discoveries about materials and space-making are deployed in an original way. The uneven combination between what is acquired from the modern, and mythologized about the past, is what makes Makiya’s architectural vision unique, so unlike that of any of his contemporaries. In the final analysis, the architecture’s dogged consistency in this regard is the source of its beauty.

Genres: Architecture

160 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2000

About the author

is an Iraqi academic, who gained British nationality in 1982. He is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. Although he was born in Baghdad, he left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later founding Makiya Associates in order to design and build projects in the Middle East. As a former exile, he was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition, a "close friend" of Ahmed Chalabi, and an influential proponent of the 2003 Iraq War.His life is documented in British journalist Nick Cohen's book What's Left.

Reviews

[Ali Al-Lawati · Rating 3 out of 5]

حتى المتخمين من التراث والنابذين للعمارة الإسلامية ستتعبهم دقة التفاصيل وتثير إعجابهم ابداعات المهندس محمد مكية. يبدأ الكتاب بتفنيد مقولة "مكية المعماري الاسلامي" ويوضح كيف أنه استطاع إدخال الحداثة على المعمار الإسلامي فلا يصح حصره بها. الكتاب مليئ بالرسومات التي رسمها مكية وهي سيرة معمارية لمشاريعه من جامع الخلفاء إلى جامع الدولة الكبير بالكويت وجامع بغداد و مشاريع أخرى متفرقة منها البنك المركزي العماني بالحي التجاري بمسقط. تقف السيرة عند نهاية الثمانينات وتناست ان إبداعا اكبر تركة مكية في التسعينات متمثلا في جامع السلطان قابوس الأكبر. تحتاج السيرة الى تحديث خصوصا وأن مؤلفها ابن الراحل على قيدالحياة