By Naseem Khan
The Guardian UK

I saw a big yellow crane had gone up outside the Brick Lane mosque when I walked past there the other day, and my heart sank.

Is this – finally – the start of the minaret project?

Let me remind you, the building is a handsome, understated 18th century one. It was built first of all by refugee Huguenots as their place of worship and then – 100 years or so later – taken over by refugee Jews as theirs. And now, another 100 years on, it’s become a mosque used largely by Bengali Muslims.

Each time a new community has moved in, all they have done, effectively, is change the wallpaper. It is the best example of a shared multicultural space (the sharing separated, of course, by many decades) that I can think of. And I can only regret that I won’t be alive 100 years hence to see who the new tenants will be.

Except that they’ll have the problem of what to do with that identifiably Muslim item, a minaret, or at least a structure that is meant to symbolise one.

My borough of Tower Hamlets, which is responsible for the minaret scheme, does many excellent things and I know from my own time on its Conservation Design Advisory Group how meticulous and searching it is. But the minaret raises a number of questions.

Why does a mosque have to look as if it had been transported directly in from the Middle East? There is no specific directive in the Qur’an about minarets. The building simply has to face in the direction of Mecca. Just that. But over time we have come to stereotype the mosque. The traditional has become the conventional, and convention has become thoroughly identified with sanctity. Cupolas, domes and minarets are it.

The result is the exoticisation of a faith that tries hard to stress – especially nowadays – its desire for openness and links. Instead of proclaiming commonality, the orientalised mosque immediately announces foreignness. The larger East London mosque, a few hundred metres from Brick Lane, makes a point of facing outwards. It runs courses, and guided tours, and contains a gym that is open to all, Muslims and non-Muslims.

“The typology of the mosque is a myth,” said architect Ali Mangera at a debate hosted by the mosque last week. Run as part of the “This Is Not A Gateway” festival – and supported by the Arts Council’s useful Arts and Islam initiative – the session focussed on the social and spatial role of faith buildings in European cities. But it proved more an introduction than the last word, leaving open many questions about the visual “message” of a faith building. Should it present a clear sense of difference and of sanctuary from the material world, or should it tacitly make the point that the mundane is spiritual too? How does the average punter having lunch in the pleasant crypt of St Martin in the Fields come to realise the church does sterling work with the homeless and operates a night shelter?

So what is the message for the mosque? Mangera’s presentation showed what could be done if the mosque is reconfigured in the light of contemporary society. His images of lovely curved buildings looking like folds of white cloth made the conventional mosque look chunky and retrograde. Some existing mosques overseas mosques do the same. The splendid Grand National Assembly mosque in Ankara (no minaret) has, instead of a wall on its prayer or qibla side, a huge glass window that gives worshippers a view over a serene body of water.

Now more than ever, our faith buildings – mosques and all the others – should avoid presenting themselves as places that seem to hold up a “keep out” sign to the world. It’s of course not surprising, given the current climate, that mosques stick to the safe and familiar. A sizeable body of opinion calls strongly for the retention of tradition and heritage. But devotion is created by use. Minarets are extraneous. Indeed, the most memorable mosque I have encountered was simply an outline of rocks made by nomads on the bare earth in the midst of the Hoggar desert in Algeria.

Naseem Khan is a journalist, broadcaster and former head of diversity for the Arts Council