The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries face the most severe water shortages in the world today yet exhibit the highest global water consumption (500 litres per capita per day) combined with minimal efforts or measures to manage or conserve water use. While the literatu…
In the past few years mosques in London are moving away from their primary function and are becoming more than just religious buildings. They take up other community orientated roles, becoming important centres for local Muslims, through the provision of services, such as recrea…
The decades-long struggle to define German multicultural society takes place in relationship to state and popular assumptions about the nature of German and Western secularism. Expressions of this struggle include the "mosque debate," in which opponents sought to prevent new mos…
This dissertation examines the production of transnational Turkish-Muslim identities and ethno-religious spaces in the Netherlands by focusing on the contested construction, meanings, and operations of mosques controlled by immigrants and citizens of Turkish background. The Turk…
This dissertation examines four twelfth-century Almohad congregational mosques located in centers of spiritual or political power. Previous analyses of Almohad religious architecture are overwhelmingly stylistic and tend to simply attribute the buildings’ markedly austere aesthe…
Sex segregation, particularly one that is reinforced in the name of religion, is often blamed for fortifying gender discrimination in society as a whole. This dissertation examines this assumption in Islamic society and investigates how such segregation may actually benefit Musl…