Across much of the Muslim world today, mosque architecture has lost its intellectual and cultural depth. What once embodied knowledge, proportion, and metaphysical order is too often reduced to nostalgic imitation or commercialized ornament. The issue is not financial, it is cultural. The builders exist, but the custodians of meaning are mostly missing.

Türkiye, despite its extraordinary architectural legacy and indeed a number of truly remarkable contemporary mosque designs, has not yet produced this shift at a systemic or intellectual level. The dominant tendency remains one of visual conservatism without conceptual renewal, preserving the familiar image rather than reviving the intelligence that once generated it. The result is often repetition, not evolution.

Interestingly, countries like the UAE, Qatar, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are designing more boldly and technically with mosque architecture; yet even in these examples, cultural depth is not always present. Innovation is not synonymous with meaning. In many cases, the architectural language is new, but the metaphysical intelligence is still absent.

Tradition does not survive through imitation, it survives through understanding and renewal with intelligence.

Thanks,
Ahmed İlyas BİLGİN