Within the sublime absence of light: toward an architecture of formlessness

ABSTRACT The presence of light – an opening out from us; its absence – an opening out into us. Light, although fetishized as an iconography of revelation, is an element of visual obscurity considering the absorbed praying eye. In the quiet solitude of my prayers within the modest mosque of my hometown, I experienced God not in an illumination, but in an inward descent. And now standing inside the contemporary mosques of Bangladesh, I challenge the platitude that light is the spiritual route to God. Focusing on the microscopic nature of the praying man as the structural basis of mosques, I aim to draw a subliminal line between the fetishizing and forsaking of light in mosques; deploring architecture’s deliberation for creating visual effects, and affirming that any worldly terrain is not a gateway significant enough to comprehend the Godlike. Rather, the sublime gateway unfolds inward, into the absorbed mind, where God resides in a silent, formless presence.