An ethnography of a long-unbuilt mosque in Greece that explores government operations and contemporary democracy
Why Not Build the Mosque? tells the story of the Greek state-s centuries-long attempt to build a central mosque. After the fall of Ottoman Empire, Greek Orthodoxy entwined with Greek nationalism, and by the twentieth century, the state came to imagine Islam as incompatible with a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian identity. And so as late as 2020, the contemporary Greek state did not have a mosque, even as its Islamic population grew and increasingly required a place of worship.
Focusing on the failed effort in the early 2000s to build a mosque in a suburb of Athens and on the subsequent, successful realization of the project in 2020, Dimitris Antoniou investigates the roles that the Orthodox Church, politicians concerned about the -political cost- of supporting a mosque, and the community played in the project-s delays, failures, and its bitterswee
