"Innocent houses of worship or bulwarks of fundamentalism? We all have our own ideas about mosques, and many of those ideas go beyond the domain of architecture. In Europe, mosques are a central issue in the debates about the integration of Muslims and the potential dangers of Islam. In recent years, such debates have often edged out serious architectural discussion of European mosques, and the domes and minarets of traditional mosque architecture have come to symbolize this entire field of controversy." "The aim of this book is to bring greater depth and nuance to the debate about mosques. Amongst others politician Frits Bolkestein, architect Wilfried van Winden, sociologist Willem Schinkel, theologist/philosopher Tariq Ramadan, anthropologist Eric Roose and Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, share their interdisciplinary perspectives on the emergence of this new architectural typology and explain its narrow and broad social impact. With a visual presentation of the historical and general features of the mosque (Mosguide), as well as three intriguing pictorial essays and a range of politically and socially informed essays and opinion pieces, Erkocuen Budac rethink the meaning of mosques in the Western European context. Recent mosque designs serve to illustrate how rewarding this approach can be - in social, functional and architectural terms." --Book Jacket.