ABSTRACT:
The history of Islam in Ghana has long been framed as a story rooted in the Sahel, whose iconic earth and timber mosques have been positioned as platforms from which Ghana’s own earth and timber mosques would spring. Such histories have merit; yet they, nonetheless, potentially circumvent the unique social contexts that shaped Ghana’s own local mosque forms, dismissing the relevance of other mosque spaces that rebuff the primacy of these original Sahelian architectural templates in favor of alternate design sources. Such narratives have continued even into the contemporary period. Thus, this essay takes the newly constructed Accra Furqan congregational mosque, located in the capital city of Accra, as a case study towards parsing out the complex, unique, and fundamentally intersectional reality of Ghanaian Islam as it has existed over time and space. The Accra Furqan is able to keep a finger on the pulse of Muslim realities within the context of the Ghanaian Islamicate by accommodating a spectrum of functions beyond just the spiritual. Further, built as it is in a style that derives symbolic capital from Ottoman origins, the mosque affirms Ghana’s participation within larger contemporary conversations not only through an engagement with global architectural legacies, but also Islamic practice and ideology throughout the global ummah. In doing so, the structure has enabled Ghanaian Muslims to further navigate the murky waters of their current socio-spiritual condition while also reaffirming their past and present agency as authors of their own social, cultural, and spiritual reality.
The history of Islam in Ghana is a story that has long been framed by the Sahel, whose iconic earth and timber mosques are often interpreted as the platforms from which Ghana’s originary mosque-building traditions would spring. Such histories have merit; yet they potentially circumvent local narratives that have also shaped the particular character of Ghana’s Islamic spaces—narratives that speak not only to the complex and fundamentally intersectional reality of Islam in Ghana, but also to the fact that Muslims in Ghana have always maintained authorship over their own spiritual reality, particularly through the medium of built form. Thus, this essay will focus on one of Ghana’s newest Islamic spaces—the Accra Furqan congregational mosque, located in the capital city of Accra—as a space that capitalizes on the cultural and socio-political ebbs and flows of Ghana’s contemporary Muslim society in ways well established within Ghanaian Islamic architectural and spiritual practice. Further, through its reality as an Ottoman simulacrum—a template imbued with the spiritual capital of its religio-cultural associations—the mosque not only contributes to contemporary conversations going on within the country with regard to Islamic space and practice, but also gestures toward broader currents of Islamic representation and engagement within the global Islamicate.
To begin this conversation, however, it is important to understand why the Accra Furqan is able to function in this capacity as a representative of Ghana’s current Islamic landscape. Located in the neighborhood of Kanda on a major thoroughfare within Accra, the structure stands on the former site of the city’s Central Mosque, and was first proposed as a gift from the Republic of Turkey to the Ghanaian public in 2012 (Figure 1).1 The project began with a donation of ten million dollars from the Turkish government, which was subsequently supplemented with additional funds from partnerships with organizations like the Turkish Hudai Foundation and other non-governmental organizations such as the Ghana Friendship and Solidarity Association (GANADER) and Human Development International (HUDAI) (GhanaWeb 2014). The complex was eventually completed in 2016. Constructed out of 4,000 cubic meters of concrete and 700 tons of steel, the exterior of the mosque is defined by 50 domes that cascade down from the central dome—a massive structure that rests thirty-three meters above the ground. The mosque also combines a mix of open courtyards, arcades, and porticos, complimented by a large prayer hall that is punctuated by window spaces which allow light to play across the interior mosaic tiles and epigraphic programs. This provides a contrast to the exterior surface, which is clad in marble imported from Turkey. The mosque itself contains three entrances and can accommodate a total of 10,000 congregants inside and out.
Outer View of the Accra Furqan, Accra, Ghana. Photo by Fquasie—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106294677.
The general design scheme of the mosque was pulled from two iconic architectural templates located in present-day Istanbul: the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque, which was built by Sedefkar Mehmed Agha in 1616, and the slightly earlier Ottoman-era Selimiye Mosque, built by famed Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, the teacher of Agha, between 1568 and 1575. These two historical structures and their influence on contemporary mosque designs like Accra Furqan are seen as being part of a broader Turkish movement currently ongoing, known as Neo-Ottomanism. As a trend, Neo-Ottomanism is emerging not only in the context of various architectural forms and design schemes, but also within culture and politics as a gesture to imaginaries of past Ottoman power and its all-encompassing globalist approach to ethnicity, culture, and particularly, religion (Koureas, Prosser, and Wilson 2019, 484). This somewhat nostalgic, contemporary movement also has decidedly political connotations, with curated imaginaries such as these being used to buttress both Turkish populism and various foreign policy initiatives (Koureas, Prosser, and Wilson 2019, 485).2
To this point, one such initiative has been the construction of so-called Neo-Ottoman mosques, funded by the Turkish government, around the world. The Turkish Republic has constructed over fifty mosques in twenty-five foreign nations in the past three decades (Bird and Şentek 2015). This is a move that has led many to see these mosques as a tool of cultural imperialism and, perhaps even more troubling, a type of neo-colonial frontier structure whose ambassadorial role as a symbol of Turkish “global” Islamic identity may in fact be hiding its reality as a “Turkish Trojan Horse,” to quote Professor Nii-Adziri Wellington (2017). These elements, coupled with the fact that this particular mosque type has come to act as an aesthetic and religious fetish object that capitalizes on Ottoman stylistic iconicity, has caused many to see the Accra Furqan as the latest loss of Ghanaian identity in the face of foreign influence, despite a series of rather awkward governmental claims that the mosque represents a “symbol of a country’s history and its ideology” as well as “links to its Islamic past” (Rizvi 2015, 13, 16).
However, such interpretations also have the potential to unproductively incarcerate a structure like the Accra Furqan within a series of fossilized categorizations that defy the reality of architecture itself as a dynamic contemporary medium and one inordinately prone to subversive types of appropriation and reclamation. As both space and object, built form exists as a layered artifact, whose form, materials, and design encode multiple narratives and registers of knowledge that reflect the value systems and frameworks operating within a society at a particular moment. This reality enables architecture, as a medium, not only to push back against and even elide stakeholder strategies that would seek to control its message (Jones 2011, 551), but also to resist the idea of architecture as having an innate identity and/or meaning, be it “Ghanaian” or “Ottoman” or “global.” Architecture thus has the ability to both articulate and manipulate the conversations, tensions, and, importantly, transformations that define society as it engages in its own evolution of identity, and thus, to quote architectural historian Paul Jones (2011, 558), it “continues to have a vital role in shaping the collective social imagination” precisely because of its “capacity to articulate the many tensions within global and local identity projects.”
To consider the Accra Furqan for a moment through this lens, one must consider the idea that rarely does the use of iconic mosque styles like the Ottoman reflect a mere impulse to mindlessly reproduce nostalgic form. The design process itself is a semiotic political practice in which signs, forms, and architectural components are actively and often strategically deployed toward making a specific statement. Likewise, in interpreting this structure from an imperial standpoint, i.e., viewing the Accra Furqan as a strict symbol of Turkish identity, one continues to engage in a problematic view of formerly colonized communities and spaces as passive recipients of influence—powerless victims who are unable (or unwilling) to control or articulate their own narrative and thus are open to being silenced by the arrival of structures such as this one, which subsequently stand as symbols of their abdication. Thus, in positioning the Accra Furqan merely as an iconic form associated with an illustrious Turkish Islamic legacy and an exercise of Turkish ‘soft power,’ the Ghanaian Muslims who use it are effectively removed from full and equal participation in a global modern Islamic community, which is, to quote Ferguson (2002, 557), “a membership hinged on a real, and not pretended, mastery of modern social and cultural forms….”
I would now offer an alternate reading of the Accra Furqan that situates it instead as a point of reference for Ghana’s contemporary engagement with the broader global Islamicate, and a representation of the international relationships and dialogues currently occurring in Ghanaian airspace. And importantly, this reading is made possible by the ways in which the Accra Furqan is able to represent and accommodate contemporary visions of Ghanaian Islamic identity, specifically through the provision of numerous public-facing goods and services for its local stakeholders. As is often the case with large congregational mosque complexes, the Accra Furqan is not just a mosque, but a sprawling campus that contains religious spaces as well as a medical clinic, auditorium, conference center, school complex, library, car park, and the residence of the National Chief Imam (Ghana Friendship and Solidarity Association 2017). In addition, the comprehensive nature of these spaces and the spectrum of contemporary functions they accommodate beyond just the religious—from education and spiritual leadership to health care and spiritual guidance—become an important mode of keeping a finger on the pulse of local Muslim conditions of being within the context of Accra’s larger community.
Beyond this, however, the Accra Furqan is also in dialogue with the growth and increasing popularity of hybrid mosque spaces in Ghana as a general functional type. Ranging from gas station/mosque complexes to commercial/mosque complexes such as the Masjid Jama Al-Firdaus in Accra (Figure 2), these spaces speak to contemporary modes of life in Ghana that are defined by mobility, technology, and consumerism. Such conditions inevitably require religious spaces to merge or collaborate in some capacity with the secular spaces of everyday life as a key component of their continued existence.
The half mosque / half commercial space of Masjid Jama Al-Firdaus, Accra, Ghana. Photo by Michelle Apotsos, 2017.
In other words, mosques like the Accra Furqan and others must “cope and adapt to serve the human needs and development” (Mansour 2015) for their very survival, and thus such structures must not only maintain a capacity to evolve toward accommodating the dynamic realities of contemporary Muslim life, but must do so in a way that converses with multiple stakeholders on a variety of levels. Following this, the fact that the Accra Furqan not only exists in conversation with contemporary mosque spaces in Ghana, but with other larger global mosque trends as well, creates a multi-tiered network of engagement and dialogue between national and international stakeholders on numerous social, political, and cultural levels. This demonstrates how different spheres of Islamic identity and agency can engage and intersect within the global ummah.
Adding to this element is the fact that West African Neo-Ottoman mosques have been notably multiplying at the regional level in the past decades, generating what might be more appropriately called an Afro-Ottoman mosque landscape rather than a Neo-Ottoman one. The Abuja National Mosque, also known as the Nigerian National Mosque and located in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city (Figure 3), was commissioned by the Nigerian government in 1984 when the capital of the country moved from Lagos to Abuja. Designed by Kano-based AIM Consultants, the mosque is meant to reflect a mix of both Iranian and Ottoman influences, while also speaking to the long and distinguished history of Islamic architecture and identity within Nigeria (Abuja National Mosque n.d.).3 Further, the Eyoub mosque, completed in 2013 and located in the capital city of Bamako, Mali, was funded by Turkey’s Religious Affairs Ministry (as was Accra Furqan) in conjunction with the High Islamic Council of Mali. Coming in at a cost of two billion CFA francs (roughly four million dollars), the mosque was part of a general charitable effort by the Turkish government to support the struggling nation in the wake of a 2012 coup that allowed Islamic militants linked to al-Qaeda, in conjunction with Tuareg rebels, to seize control of the northern part of the country. Following the ouster of these groups, Turkish authorities, among others, have increased cooperative efforts with Mali in the form of aid for displaced persons and infrastructural growth, which has included the building of schools and, of course, mosques (Anadolu Agency News Broadcasting 2015).
The Abuja National Mosque, AIM Architects, Abuja, Nigeria. Photo by Shiraz Chakera—Abuja’s Central Mosque, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2877072.
This collection of “transnational mosques,” as Kishwar Rizvi would call them, are increasingly coming to be viewed as “neither indigenous nor international, belonging neither to Islamic cultural history nor to the history of global modernism” (Rivzi 2015, 6). Thus, structures like the Accra Furqan, particularly when viewed as part of Ghana’s larger contemporary mosque-scape,4 not only represent the landscape of Islam in the region, but also speak to precedents that have long existed in this space with regard to religious and architectural histories and legacies. The conversation between the singular/specific and the global/collective has always been a part of Islamic identity and practice within Ghana. The spaces that have emerged from this dialogue have always been able to articulate narratives that are not homogenous, but instead represent alternate “geographies” and terrains of being as a mode of asserting agency and even making claims on space (Luz and Stadlerb 2019, 285). Thus, contemporary mosques like Accra Furqan continue, in many ways, to establish regional mosque-making practices. They underscore the fundamentally progressive condition of Islamic faith through their ability to maintain an identity rooted in a physical point of origin but also to respond to evolving sociopolitical, cultural, and religious realities. In providing a key architectural space for thinking through Islamic architecture as a spatial document of the Ghanaian Muslim condition, structures like the Accra Furqan also present the possibilities of a space that can accommodate mobility, interaction, and global exchange at a national level and moving into the future.
Footnotes
↵1. The following description appears in The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa (Apotsos 2021). The author wishes to thank the editors at Cambridge University Press for their invaluable feedback for this work.
↵2. Some would argue that these Ottoman mosques are serving nationalistic functions abroad, as a way to continually express the existence, or at least appearance, of a unified state expressed via the architectural platform of an illustrious past.
↵3. The mosque itself is an ultra-modern architectural construct whose style speaks to a growing architecture of statecraft created from combining and borrowing a number of architectural and symbolic elements from alternative traditions. The aim is to create an architectural landscape unique to the Abuja identity as the capital of Nigeria, one of the most powerful nation-states in West Africa.
↵4. Mosque traditions in Ghana are extensive and reflect the long, diverse history of Islam in the West African forest region. For a longer discussion, see Apotsos (2016).
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