More than 60 people filled the ARCE Grand Salon on January 9, to hear a presentation on History as Identity: A Critique of Modern Islamic Architecture given by Dr. Nasser Rabbat, ARCE fellow and Agha Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to working on several books during his fellowship, Dr. Rabbat serves as the Scholar-in-Residence, a position made possible for a senior scholar through CAORC funding.

Dr. Rabbat provided a myriad of examples during his lecture illustrating that architecture in the Islamic World has gone through a series of ontological phases in the last two centuries. He explained how colonial rule during the nineteenth century brought European-trained architects and scholars who developed eclectic styles that borrowed freely from the diverse architectural repertoires of the past and blended them with various European forms. Continuing, Dr. Rabbat demonstrated that independence in the middle of the twentieth century gave rise to the more outspoken categories of modernity and nationalism as framers of architecture in the recently constituted states. The new framework engendered some important modernist projects but also occasioned the revival of vernacular architecture. The last three decades, he noted, have witnessed the resurgence of the discourse on Islam as cultural identity. Many architects responded by engaging in the design of various historicist styles, all dubbed "Islamic," which range from romantic mélanges to grand postmodern projects.

Rabbat argued that neither Islamist nor nationalist architects actually eluded the Orientalist conceptual substratum of Islamic architecture. The Orientalists constructed a narrative that ran parallel to the Western architectural tradition but almost never intersected with it until it dissolved in it with the onset of modernity. He contended that nationalists and Islamists absorbed that paradigm of cultural autonomy, but chose to emphasize different historical segments. The nationalists stressed the time when a putative Islamic state was dominant, and postulated some latent continuity between it and their modern nation. The Islamists focused on a Golden Islamic Age as the fountainhead from which their architecture emerged, and jumped right to the present where they hoped to rebuild that remembered utopia, leaving behind all that they considered decadent. The result, Rabbat concluded, was that both conceived "their" architecture from an exclusionary perspective, which they unwittingly inherited from their Orientalist predecessors.

A lively discussion ensued during the final 20 minutes of Dr. Rabbat’s presentation as he opened the floor to questions. Scholars and students from various institutions in Cairo posed interesting and thought provoking questions and entered into dialogue with the ARCE fellow and scholar-in-residence.