The Location of Mosques wrestles with Michel Foucaults ideas on space, while weaving together local and global notions of place, as it interrogates todays public spectacles over the Great Mosque of Córdoba near Madrid alongside the Ground Zero Mosque in Manhattan. Akel Kahera expands our discussion about mosque space by assigning it a genealogy, unpacking various sites as a forensic scientist would dissect a human body to determine its birth history, traumatic relations, and lifestyle markings. It is a fresh and contemplative approach. Animating the book is the question, Who Defines place? But what makes this query so intriguing is how its answers revolve around the interlocking dimensions of space, knowledge, and power. Kahera is even cheeky enough to allow musings on the mosque from the great poet, Muhammad Iqbal, which foregrounds his point that the mosque is a ubiquitous presence in the world. And it is this fact that makes works like this one so essential to understand. -- Zain Abdullah, Author of Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem (Oxford University Press)
