Analysis Of The Prayer Room At The Ulu Mosque

In the center of Utrecht, nearly visible from the central train station, stands the biggest mosque of the Netherlands: the Ulu Mosque. Due to its central location, around 400.000 people see it every day and with this in mind, a lot of attention has been paid to how the outside of the building, which is almost entirely brick, looks. This use of brick had a purpose, many Dutch mosques use brick in their design in order to have the building look more “Dutch”. This in the hope that they would be more accepted by the non-Muslim community. (Tamimi Arab, 2015: 150) However these non-Muslims are not the main users of the mosque and to the users the interior design of the mosque is of greater importance. In his article, Tamimi Arab stresses the importance of a feeling of spirituality in regards to the light-azan. (Tamimi Arab, 2015: 158) In this essay I will look at the aesthetic of the prayer room and how this same spirituality Tamimi Arab mentions,
This same concept of enabling a spiritual experience with light, but also through other visual and even tactile attributes, is what can be observed in the prayer room at the Ulu Mosque. What has become clear to me that this way of combining information from different types of sources is essential to doing ethnography. The preparatory reading of the article helped me give context to what I would observe at the mosque. During the visit it was important to listen to what the guide was saying as well as pay attention to the surroundings. This significance became especially apparent while writing this essay because I noticed that I needed the reading, the explanations of the guide and my own observations to get my point across. Therefore, if any of these sources of information had been missing, I would not have been able to argue how various details of the prayer room can combine to make a visit a spiritual