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Why should the Ismaili Imamat become so deeply involved in the world of professional architecture?
Mawlana Hazar Imam, in his speech, delivered at The Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2019 Ceremony in Russia on 13 September 2019 said:
The simple answer lies in my conviction that Architecture - more than any other art form - has a profound impact on the quality of human life. As it has often been said, we shape our built environment - and then our buildings shape us.
This close relationship of architecture to the quality of human experience has a particularly profound resonance in the developing world. I believe that we all have a responsibility to improve the quality of life whenever and wherever that opportunity arises. Our commitment to influencing the quality of architecture - intellectually and materially - grows directly out of our commitment to improving the quality of human life.
In his speech at the Asia Society in New York, USA on 25 September 1979, Mawlana Hazar Imam said:
In my own commitment to the well-being of the Ismaili community, I have come to be ever more concerned with the physical form that the Islamic world of the future will take. The houses we live in, our places of work, the institutions that serve us, the gardens and parks where we rest, the markets and, of course, the mosques.
How will they look? And how will they affect our perceptions of the world and of ourselves? As descendants of the magnificent builders of Islam's golden age, how will we build the Islamic world of the future? Indeed, will the Islamic environment of tomorrow be identifiably ours?
Islam does not deal in dichotomies but in all-encompassing unity. Spirit and body are one, man and nature are one. What is more, man is answerable to God for what man has created. Many of our greatest architectural achievements were designed to reflect the promises of life hereafter, to represent in this world what we are told of the next. Since all that we see and do resonates on the faith, the aesthetics of the environment we build and the quality of the social interactions that take place within those environments, reverberate on our spiritual life. The physical structure of Islam is therefore an important concern for me, charged as I am with the leadership of a Muslim community.
...Our reports tell us that the new structural symbols of power in our world have not sprung from our spirit, from our understanding of who we are, or what we believe, but have been merely copied from foreign images of political and commercial power.
Can this be the world of the people who built the mosque of Cordoba? Of the people whose marvelous urban systems in Isfahan are still studied by city planners? The people who created the Mughal gardens of Kashmir? The people who have fashioned the remarkable town architecture of Yemen?
Changes are coming upon Islam faster now than in the age of our greatest territorial expansion. Today the changes have to do not with military conquest or the conservation of new peoples to the faith but with the impact upon us of economic social and technical change, urbanization, population explosions, skyscrapers, automobiles, hotels and airports. Further shock is upon us.
...The treasures of our past are being destroyed and an ever-quickening construction boom is bringing us too many buildings that I think we will live to despise. Should we allow future generations of Muslims to live without the self-respect of our own cultural and spiritual symbols of power, to practice their faith without also being reminded of that sense of scale in relation to the universe around us which is so particularly ours?
Reference: https://www.akdn.org/speech/his-highness-aga-khan/asia-society-islamic-architecture-revival
In his speech at Harvard University on 12 November 2015, Mawlana Hazar Imam said:
My concern for the future of Islamic architecture grew out of my travels between 1957 and 1977 in countries with large Muslim populations. What I observed was a near total disconnect between the new built environment I encountered and Islam’s rich architectural legacy. There was no process of renewal, no teaching in architectural schools, no practices that were rooted in our own traditions. Except for the occasional minaret or dome, one of the world’s great cultural inheritances was largely confined to coffee-table books. It seemed to me that this state of affairs represented a monumental menace to our world’s cultural pluralism, as well as a dangerous loss of identity for Muslim communities.
The Aga Khan Programme for Islamic Architecture was one response to this situation, as was the creation of the Aga Khan architectural award, which also continues today.
Bringing the art and architecture of the Islamic world to be understood and admired in the West, as it had been in the past, was a goal that also inspired the creation, just one year ago, of the Ismaili Centre and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto — the only museum in the western hemisphere devoted entirely to Islamic culture.
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