Dreams of an iconic mosque

31 March, 2017

How did a monumental Catholic church in Amsterdam become the ‘hidden mosque’ of a Turkish-Dutch community and how does this mosque community try to increase its visible presence in the urban public space? Read about these questions in the article ‘Dreams of an iconic mosque’, which Daan Beekers and Pooyan Tamimi Arab published in the – open access! – special issue on Iconic Religion in the journal Material Religion. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, as is commonly done in studies of mosques in the West, Daan and Pooyan draw attention to the entanglement of this mosque with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. They introduce the notion of ‘iconic field’ to describe this entanglement in time and space.