The Anticipated Mosque: The Political Affect of a Planned Building.

The construction of new, purpose‐built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members' views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests against the new mosque. Although the latter kind of conflicts have attracted some scholarly attention, most of this work treats these conflicts as discursive controversies and gives little attention to the material form. On the other hand, there is a new kind of literature on creativity and architectural design that emphasizes material processes but fails to analyze how these processes are related to larger political issues. By focusing on the temporal aspects of material processes, particularly the attention to form, I seek to merge these two approaches in order to analyze the mosque controversies as at once material and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]