Gardens of the righteous: sacred space in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Akel Ismail Kahera

The Lamp of Obedience: Knowing and Being

In this ever-changing world of things, man is in need of relating himself to some fixed point of reference to get out of chaos into cosmos. He has ever been seeking to situate himself in space, time and the world of the spirit and the mind....In the world of the spirit and the mind, he has been looking for what is immutable within change beyond the material form of truth, having recourse to the three tributaries of knowledge, intuition and faith, philosophy and science....The revealed knowledge of the sage is now replaced with the modern analytical sciences, while the skill of the craftsman's hand has been replaced by the machine....The architect has to remember that wisdom does not belong to a unique epoch, it belongs to all times. It is present today as it was yesterday, and can be realized by anyone who desires it and who deserves it....Nowadays the procedure and methods of design and building have changed from Sufi master craftsman to the architect-contractor system in which design and execution of the wo rk are split, and the canons of sacred art are lost. --Hassan Fathy

In 1980, the late Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy was commissioned to design and build a masjid and prepare the master plan for a "traditional" Muslim village, Dar Al-Islam, at Abiquiu, New Mexico. The mesa site is framed by surrounding arid hills and several snow-capped mountains that are visible in the distance. Abiquiu, the Charma Valley and its immediate surrounding has a long history, which was populated before the arrival of the Spanish by several native Indian peoples. Spanish settlers arrived in 1598. The harsh environmental conditions at Abiquiu provided an ideal setting for the widespread "Los Hermanos de la Luz," the Penitente Brotherhood, which was embraced by the Spanish settlers. (40)

The original idea was to establish an American Muslim village, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind. The Abiquiu site shares an empathic relationship with the Fathy's theory of creativity: human orientation, inward and outward correlation of intimate spaces, and above all a natural form that blends with the landscape. Fathy's balanced spiritual awareness of a sense of unity between building, landscape, and user imposes an intangible order on the building and the site. His reasoning for the masjid and the Abiquiu site is a re-affirmation of Nubian building traditions. Tradition in this sense invokes knowledge of the past which transcends spatio-tempo categories or labels. Architecture is a discipline that engages in place making, it engages public memory and a sense of being, it acquaints us with our temporal existence. (41)

Claude Levi-Strauss defines this relationship as "reversible space and linear time." I believe that Fathy's architecture is embodied in the interpretation of being and it is for this reason that it informs the question of existence and the understanding of place. What Fathy's architecture enables us to do is to realize our nature; simply, it reminds us of the divine and pure and unadulterated sense of being, because his architecture is in harmony with the environment. In the same sense Muslim calligraphy gives us a spiritual charge, and geometric tessellation have a sense of tashbih, or the infinite reflected in that which is finite. His architecture allows us to experience the being of things as they are naturally; it is not an artificial or abstract. It is not the false consciousness, which is reflected in much of architecture today.