Senegal: every mosque tells a story in modern Dakar
Guardian Weekly reader Cleo Cantone reports from Dakar on the materialistic expressions of wealth that are even evident in the building of new mosques in the city
Cleo Cantone
Guardian Weekly,
Cheikh Oumar Foutiyou Tall mosque in Dakar. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
Five years in the life of a child is a long time: from mewing and puking infant to child crawling like snail unwillingly to school. Dakar, too, has experienced tremendous change – originally a fishing village, the French transformed it into the capital not only of Senegal but of the whole of their part of west Africa.
Now Dakar is a sprawling and multi-ethnic metropolis that is steadily borrowing from western culture: western fashion is more prevalent and the "international" style dominates the skyscrapers built by foreign companies. Greater wealth seems to always have a materialistic expression.
Many of the mosques I visited in 2005 were cement enclosures covered with a flat roof. Now they sport a second storey for a Qur'anic school and a tiered minaret signalling the building's formal status as a Friday mosque rather than a local jakka for the five daily prayers.
One mosque in particular, whose evolution I have witnessed since 1999, has been completely covered in white tiles and the square minaret proudly perched on the second storey is the icing on the cake.
The tiled surfaces of the mosque echo other modern buildings similarly bedecked in tiles, and like them it is keeping pace with current aesthetic trends. When I asked a friend what she thought of the latest transformation, she said that there was still much to do but that she was impressed. It may also be a cheaper way to express opulence – the Great Mosque of Touba, spiritual capital of the Mourid brotherhood, is clad in pink marble from Massa-Carrara in Italy.
The Great Mosque of Dakar, by contrast, uses traditional Moroccan glazed tiles and its towering square minaret houses eight floors of classrooms in the belfry.
Yet vestiges of the village past survive and some of the tiniest mosques you find in the so-called quartiers populaires in the outskirts of Dakar bear witness to this phenomenon: these buildings cannot easily be distinguished as their minarets (if any) are shrunken, as are their domes. One that was once a shack now has a purple dome to signal its transformation.
Each mosque evolves according to its means, but I wonder if in the future Senegalese archi tec ture will attempt to find its own identity, one that is less reliant on western materialism and more true to its cultural roots.
http://islaamdoon.blogspot.com/
Guardian Weekly reader Cleo Cantone reports from Dakar on the materialistic expressions of wealth that are even evident in the building of new mosques in the city
Cleo Cantone
Guardian Weekly,
Cheikh Oumar Foutiyou Tall mosque in Dakar. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
Five years in the life of a child is a long time: from mewing and puking infant to child crawling like snail unwillingly to school. Dakar, too, has experienced tremendous change – originally a fishing village, the French transformed it into the capital not only of Senegal but of the whole of their part of west Africa.
Now Dakar is a sprawling and multi-ethnic metropolis that is steadily borrowing from western culture: western fashion is more prevalent and the "international" style dominates the skyscrapers built by foreign companies. Greater wealth seems to always have a materialistic expression.
Many of the mosques I visited in 2005 were cement enclosures covered with a flat roof. Now they sport a second storey for a Qur'anic school and a tiered minaret signalling the building's formal status as a Friday mosque rather than a local jakka for the five daily prayers.
One mosque in particular, whose evolution I have witnessed since 1999, has been completely covered in white tiles and the square minaret proudly perched on the second storey is the icing on the cake.
The tiled surfaces of the mosque echo other modern buildings similarly bedecked in tiles, and like them it is keeping pace with current aesthetic trends. When I asked a friend what she thought of the latest transformation, she said that there was still much to do but that she was impressed. It may also be a cheaper way to express opulence – the Great Mosque of Touba, spiritual capital of the Mourid brotherhood, is clad in pink marble from Massa-Carrara in Italy.
The Great Mosque of Dakar, by contrast, uses traditional Moroccan glazed tiles and its towering square minaret houses eight floors of classrooms in the belfry.
Yet vestiges of the village past survive and some of the tiniest mosques you find in the so-called quartiers populaires in the outskirts of Dakar bear witness to this phenomenon: these buildings cannot easily be distinguished as their minarets (if any) are shrunken, as are their domes. One that was once a shack now has a purple dome to signal its transformation.
Each mosque evolves according to its means, but I wonder if in the future Senegalese archi tec ture will attempt to find its own identity, one that is less reliant on western materialism and more true to its cultural roots.
http://islaamdoon.blogspot.com/
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