Centuries in Ruins: Gaza’s Vanished Mosque Heritage

May 24, 2024 Taha Suhrawardy

In April 2019, a structural fire broke out at the roof of the 850-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. While the church was extensively damaged - its wood lattice roof collapsed, its spire and high altar completely destroyed - most of the iconic structure and nearly all its artefacts have been spared with a successful 15-hour-long mission to extinguish the fire. Yet the damages were extremely costly, still, and hundreds of millions of Euros were pledged to restore it, although the restoration would never return the iconic structure to its original form.

Now, consider this as a juxtaposition: 300 mosques in the besieged Gaza Strip were bombed out of recognition, reduced to rubble and ash by the brutal Israeli State’s ongoing genocide, including several centuries-old heritage sites that held religious, cultural and architectural significance.

Gaza is not just the besieged strip that Israel is incessantly destroying, killing and starving its people. Even besieged and reduced to a de-facto concentration camp, Gaza long stood a place of significant, irreplaceably valuable, centuries-old history and culture, recognizable by the architectural heritage that is now being destroyed before us.

The American Society for Muslims in Architecture (ASMA) collaborated with the Detroit Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) to highlight a fragment of that heritage. We come together to showcase several pieces of Islamic architecture that were reduced to rubble in Gaza since October 2023, so they may be preserved in our collective memory.

SOURCES

Mosque of Shihab al-Din Ibn ‘Uthman | Explore with MWNF (museumwnf.org)

Explore with MWNF (museumwnf.org)

Introduction to mosque architecture (article) | Khan Academy

Gaza Historical Database (rub.de)

A ‘cultural genocide’: Which of Gaza’s heritage sites have been destroyed? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

The Great Mosque of Gaza | Sacred Footsteps

Where We're Working: Gaza (hmml.org)

Gaza’s oldest mosque, destroyed in an airstrike, was once a temple to Philistine and Roman gods, a Byzantine and Catholic church, and had engravings of Jewish ritual objects (theconversation.com)

Great Mosque of Gaza - Wikipedia

Archnet > Site > Jami' Gaza al-Kabir

‘Everything beautiful has been destroyed’: Palestinians mourn a city in tatters | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian