Muslim art and architecture in the West

Architecture-historical studies have come to argue that, during the early dissemination of Islamic buildings throughout the non-Islamic territories, mosques were not intended to represent a generalized Islam towards a non-Islamic environment. Instead, they consisted of creative iconographies that strategically reshuffled a selected number of prototypes in order to support the sectarian-Islamic hierarchies in which the rivalling Muslim patrons positioned themselves. By contrast, the formalist assumption is still upheld that the majority of modern Western mosques are estranging hybridities that manifest an Orientalist resurgence of displaced Muslim minorities. This chapter shows that a more iconological perspective could also make these objects more intelligible.