阿布扎比的跨信仰建筑群：促进对话还是形象工程？
Rising from the pristine sands of Saadiyat Island, a stone’s throw from the Louvre Abu Dhabi, sits an architectural triptych that would seem improbable almost anywhere else: a church, a mosque and a synagogue, each of identical cubic volume, aligned along a single promenade. Inaugurated in early 2023, the Abrahamic Family House is the Emirates’ most ambitious attempt yet to position itself as a global arbiter of religious tolerance, ostensibly providing a physical forum for interfaith dialogue at a moment when the Middle East’s geopolitical geometry is being radically redrawn. Yet even before its doors opened, critics wondered whether the complex represented a sincere reckoning with pluralism or merely a photogenic prop in a broader soft-power campaign.
The architecture, designed by the celebrated Sir David Adjaye, deliberately eschews hierarchy. Each of the three worship spaces — the St. Francis Church, Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque and Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue — draws from a distinct liturgical tradition but shares a common formal vocabulary of colonnades, courtyards and filtered light, a visual metaphor of parity. The foundational charter speaks earnestly of ‘coexistence’ and ‘human fraternity’, echoing the 2019 document signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in the UAE itself. Yet for all the finely calibrated symbolism, the project rests on uneasy ground: the synagogue, the first purpose-built one in the Gulf in nearly a century, serves a minuscule local Jewish community whose presence is itself largely a by-product of the Abraham Accords, the diplomatic instruments that normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states.
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