The V&A’s joyous celebration of the British mosque

“The first mosque in London,” says architect Shahed Saleem, “was a folly. Or at least the first built representation of a mosque. It was in Kew Gardens, designed by William Chambers in 1762.”

Today, the mosque-folly is long gone, but the remarkable Great Pagoda, from the same series of representations of sacred structures, has survived to become one of the park’s most familiar landmarks.

Saleem and I are standing not in Kew but in the freezing-cold courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the east London-based architect and author is showing me round his colourful new mosque-folly, which is being put in place to mark the beginning of Ramadan next week.

A series of cartoonish, radically simplified but easily recognisable architectural elements, from a minaret to a mihrab, have been assembled to create an open, inviting installation in the austerely white-tiled courtyard. The installation, which will be here through Ramadan and after, will host events, calls to prayer and fast-breaking Iftar meals at sunset (the museum stays open late on Fridays).

When Saleem was designing a mosque in Hackney a decade ago, he turned to the Islamic displays at the V&A for inspiration. There he found a set of 13th-century geometric tiles from a tomb of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed in Iran. Beside an east London wall bearing deeply incised advertising from the 19th century (for a locksmith’s business), Saleem inscribed patterns inspired by the V&A tiles into the mosque wall to create a strikingly abstract facade with hints of Islamic geometry but shorn of the usual decorative paraphernalia.

Now he has returned to the museum and, with great verve, to the paraphernalia.

The architecture of the mosque in Britain is very much self-built and it becomes a juxtaposition of various cultural memories and histories

Mining the V&A archives once more, he found the wonderful early-20th-century photographs of Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell, a British scholar of Islamic architecture and professor in Cairo who refused to leave during the 1956 Suez crisis over concerns for the university library.

“The architecture of the mosque in Britain is very much self-built and it becomes a juxtaposition of various cultural memories and histories,” Saleem says. “It’s always been a collage, an assemblage of parts. It helps people to relate to their homeland through these fragments.”

This installation is a bricolage of exactly these fragments. The original artefacts, the pierced screens and complex geometrical wood and tilework, have been flattened, reappearing after centuries as ghosts of themselves, rendered here in vivid colours.

“It is also meant to be fun,” Saleem says with a smile, “and that was important here. Each of these pieces references an image in the V&A’s collection: these were records from Europeans who went to the Islamic world and brought back images. But we’re trying not to be overburdened by that history.”

Or perhaps by subsequent tragic events and wars throughout the Middle East in which much of the material was lost or destroyed. One direct reference is the minbar, the mosque’s pulpit; with its steps and canopy, this one is a homage to the exquisitely carved minbar made for Qa’itbay, Sultan of Egypt, probably in Cairo in the late 15th century. Here it is rendered in canary yellow. The rocketship-shaped minaret is adorned with red and pink chevrons; the pierced dome is a golden Vegas pop caricature.

The installation is partly based on a series of watercolours of archetypal and elemental mosque designs Saleem had been making for years. With its dayglo colours and building-block shapes, it looks a little like something made to be built and disassembled, a playground of forms. It leavens the courtyard and seems to make the space more public — an attempt to attract new audiences and visitors.

As part of an ongoing project to reinforce the (free) museum’s status as a place of public and civic engagement, it works wonderfully. There might be a slight queasiness about such a manifestly religious pop-up — it is difficult, for instance, to imagine the curators being too enthusiastic if these were elements of Christian architecture (though there is an annual Christmas tree). But, as curator Christopher Turner tells me, “Ninety per cent of people in the UK have never visited a mosque. So this is a taste.”

This is not Saleem’s first collaboration with the V&A. At the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021, they presented together a compelling survey of the British mosque in all its ad hoc, extemporised glory, redolent of the stories of migration and constructing familiarity and a sense of home through objects. The Ramadan installation is equally vibrant, though a little more mediated, translated through design into something more toylike and approachable. That it is a space of celebration and joy comes across colourfully and clearly.

vam.ac.uk

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter