The place of return. Settlement principles of the Islamic tomb

Abstract

The Islamic concept of Maʿda as “place of return” indicates the circular nature of Muslim ritual by denying a clear separation between a “ritual that follows” and a “ritual that hands on”. In Dar al Islam, the sense of the sacred is translated to form not only through the buildings of the mosques, – the most representative spaces of Muslim collective living – but also through a large number of tombs/mausoleums. The contribution proposes to investigate the construction of the Muslim tomb in the transition from ritual to architectural form in order to infer the role that the construction of funerary spaces (especially mausoleums) covers in the settlement logic of Islamic cities, where the spaces of ordinary life often coexist with the spaces of death.

Keywords

• rito islamico
• luogo del ritorno
• tombe islamiche
• principi insediativi