In the summer of 2000 Maysam Makhmalbaf proceeded with the photography of the minarets in Dubai. More than 1000 photographs of minarets in Dubai, which a selection of them could be seen here, belong to 24 mosques located only in a Street (Aljumeira) in Dubai.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf explains about Maysam Makhmalbaf's photographs as follows:
" Although architecture belongs to the history of a nation but it reveals the spiritual character of a nation at the same time. Islamic minarets originally belong to the Islamic culture of countries that have minarets but their form reveals other things. For example the minarets of Iranian mosques have been constantly repeated as if during the protracted centuries so little has been exchanged between this kind of architecture and the architecture of other cultures. Iran has closed its political doors to the world, which has concluded to closeness of cultural exchanges, limitations and boycotts. But the newly made minarets of the mosques of Dubai consist of a wide variety (Although Dubai Minarets have less spirit compared to Iranian Minarets), which reveals Dubai more like a Bazaar that has had the chance to exchange forms and cultures with the world along with other trades. On one hand the minarets in Dubai show the connection of this Bazaar-Country to its traditional and Islamic culture and on the other hand the variety of minarets reveal a kind of modernism that effects the tradition of Arabic-Islamic architecture."
In Dubai stable religious tradition and daily changeable living connected to the Western world shows itself in the formats of all buildings, especially the minarets.
Traditional critics consider new innovations in the art of religious architecture a kind of innovation and blasphemy and consider devotion to the religion not only in permanency of the religion spirit but permanency in the religious forms.
The modern critics of this traditional point of view have announced that the mosques of the early period of Islam have had very simple shapes and we could not mention them as architecture styles. For example the architecture of “Sofeh Mosque” in the early periods of Islam, consisted of a few date trees as columns and a shade made of weaved straw as a roof. What has become famous now days as Islamic architecture, is only a remembrance of the influence of the culture of the Islamic societies after the primary victories of Islam over non-Islamic conquered Countries. Which means the current form of most religious Islamic locations has been borrowed from other cultures and somehow it has been given Islamic spirit and direction and the architecture of Dubai minarets is only an example of one of these cultural trades with the difference that over here instead of conquer, business has been effective."
