I wrote about this in 2018. The argument was that, for Islamists, mosques, security dams, and military fortresses aren’t separate projects — they share one logic: domination. Read it here: “Vicious Infrastructure
Security dams, military fortresses, and mosques in the “new” Turkey” >> https://publicseminar.org/2018/04/vicious-infrastructure/
The Erdoğan regime wants to build another mosque at the center of one of Istanbul’s secular neighborhoods, Kadikoy. A city of 16 million people. Thousands of mosques are already serving, with no shortage of places to pray.
The building has a sinister function.
This is how Islamist statecraft operates. Religious architecture is territorial infrastructure. The building goes up, and what follows is pressure on the cultural fabric of a neighborhood that didn’t ask for any of this.
The structure makes the argument. It says: this space is ours now.
Islamism has little to do with Anatolian Islam as a lived tradition. It is a political project — neoconservative, authoritarian, self-serving.
The younger generation sees this. They want functioning cities, open streets, and accountable institutions. Young Muslims are doing what young Jewish people are doing with Zionism — refusing to let a political Islamist project speak for their identity, their history, or their conscience.
The mosque in a secular neighborhood is a declaration of supremacy dressed in piety. Muslims deserve better. Most of them already know it.
The Israeli state uses similar governmental technologies. Highways built to connect settlements and bypass Palestinian towns. National parks planted over demolished villages. Archaeological sites mobilized as historical claims to land. The separation wall is carving up agricultural land.
The logic is identical: control the space, reshape the population, make the facts on the ground.
If you oppose Zionism — its territorial ambitions, its use of state power to dispossess and contain — then the architecture of Islamist domination should look familiar, in Istanbul, in Ankara, in Diyarbakir, Sirnak, Batman, or Hakkari. The tools and desire for domination are the same. The targets differ.