Rooted Transience: Co-Editor

Co-edited the “Rooted Transience” book, accompanying the AlMusalla Prize 2025, and which was launched during the pre-opening days of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

Rooted Transience explores the form and philosophy of a musalla as a temporary prayer space within Islamic cultures. Arising wherever and whenever the need for prayer emerges, a musalla reimagines fixed spatial practices by fluidly adapting to its immediate environment. The elusive typology of a musalla embodies design principles that are deeply rooted both in transience and adaptability. Rooted Transience is an effort to highlight the multivalent natures of musalla spaces by exploring the entangled relationships between the historical, material, and contemporary registers within which they emerge. It brings together essays, reflections, and intimate transcribed conversations between creatives who together try to reveal the multilayered potential meanings behind this transient form.

The Rooted Transience publication accompanies the AlMusalla Prize 2025, first presented at the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in January 2025. Titled On Weaving, the winning design of the inaugural AlMusalla Prize by EAST Architecture Studio, featured a central courtyard surrounded by a prayer hall which celebrates the local date palm tree by utilizing its waste as the primary building material. Palm fronds are introduced as alternatives to a column-and-beam structure, and palm fibers form a facade inspired by traditional techniques of weaving that envelops the entire pavilion.

The book is co-edited with Faysal Tabbarah, and features contributions from Khaled Azzam, Nasser Rabbat, Ziad Jamaleddine, Wesam AlAsali, Noura AlSayeh Holtrop, Hanif Kara, Farrokh Derakshani, Azra Aksamija, Lina Ghotmeh, Ali Malkawi, Yousef and Elias Anastas, Sahel AlHiyari, Sumaya Dabbagh, Asif Khan, Nicolas Fayyad, Rayyane Tabet, Christopher Blust, Moath AlOafi and Jood AlThukair. The Rooted Transience book is published by Kaph and designed by ByTwo.