Browsing by Subject "Islamic"
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Item Islamic cultural center(Texas Tech University, 1986-05) Dasoo, Salim M; Thompson, A. DudleyThe center for religious life throughout the Muslim world is the Mosque. It dominates the urban landscape of every Muslim town and city and functions both as a place for daily prayers and as a community center. Every new Muslim community requires a mosque. This is true for the hundreds of muslim communities that has sprung up in many non-Islamic societies throughout the world. Lubbock, like many other western cities, also have witnessed a growing trend in its muslim population over the years. Although, this number may be smaller relative to other major western cities, it is significant to justify for such a facility that would fulfill the religions, social and cultural needs of the Islamic community. The increase in the population is due to the growing number of International students from many Islamic countries attending Texas Tech and other educational institutions in Lubbock. In addition the number of Muslim families in Lubbock has also grown in size. The local chapter of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) has shown special interest for such a facility. The small mosque in west Lubbock is a step in that direction. This project provides an excellent opportunity to apply my understanding in architecture and use it to address issues relating to Islamic architecture and its significance in a non-Islamic environment. The project is also intended as an experiment in exploring the design possibilities of Islamic architecture which is experiencing a renewed interest in recent years. One of the major goals of this project is to promote friendship and understanding among the Islamic community through interaction. It is hoped that this project would contribute to the welfare of the Islamic coramunity in Lubbock as well as to provide Lubbock with a multi-cultural character.Item Letters from the Goodwill Brothers of Basra : a medieval Islamic message of tolerance and pluralism(2012-05) Fares, Michael James; Ali, Samer M.; Spellberg, Denise“We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.”Newt Gingrich said the above words in reference to the recent “ground-zero mosque debate”, a heated media controversy which surrounded plans for the Park 51 Islamic Community Center to open in downtown Manhattan on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Assuming a necessary enmity between America and Islam, Gingrich’s claims seem rooted in the theory of a “Clash of Civilizations”. This theory envisions “the West” and “Islam” as diametrically opposed entities with no common values, and has become widely pervasive in informing much of post-9/11 America’s political and academic discourse. When chalked up against the social, cultural, and literary history of Islam, however, the Clash of Civilizations theory is a poor fit. For medieval Arabo-Islamic culture saw a vast rise of humanistic literature bearing a clear multi-civilizational influence. The Letters of the Goodwill Brothers of Basra constitute one of the most overlooked of these works. Composed by a group of 10th century Abbasid Muslim littérateurs, the 52 Letters draw parallels between the teachings of Islam and those of prior great wisdom traditions, including Indian and Ancient Greek wisdom, Judaism, and Christianity. Focusing on the way the Letters frame Islam in the context of perennial human wisdom, I show how this text is ultimately an irenic text aimed at promoting religious tolerance and cooperation in the tumultuous sectarian atmosphere of 10th century Abbasid Iraq. I argue ultimately that the irenic message of the Letters presents an alternative narrative to the Clash of Civilizations theory, a narrative of tolerance from the Islamic past by which our own society may benefit when it comes to the relationships between American Muslims and non-Muslims.