In his 1979 theorization of Mediology, Régis Debray defines mediasphere as a system of cultural transmission associated with a technical medium.1 At the conjunction of the symbolic world of meaning-making and the technological domain of image-making, mediaspheres not only exhibit distinct styles of representation but also wield political power. Put succinctly, power is in the hands of those who represent. Scholars in Media Studies have mapped various genres in which representations of Muslims have been linked to themes of violence, intolerance, and terrorism.2 This paper focuses on (ostensibly) positive images of Muslims, especially Muslim cultural production, in the Global North media. How do neoliberal art establishments represent Muslim modernities? The Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 exhibition, “Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking,” featured the work of the MENA artists such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Jananne Al-Ani, and Shahzia Sikander.3 What cuts through the work of these women artists are themes of oppression, displacement, exile, melancholia, fragmentation, and a sense of loss. Despite sharing some cultural heritage of the MENA regions, these artists are trained in North American and European schools (écoles), and as such immersed in the epistemologies of the Global North. What has rendered their work appealing to the Western audience, as Iris Gilad has observed, is the theme of suffering and resistance—much of which has nothing to do with the personal experience of the artists.4 The mediasphere, in other words, features Muslim modernities only when it is political, ethnic, and religious—a point already suggested by Olivier Roy, Hamid Dabashi, and Miriam Cook. There is an exception, however. Established in 1977, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture is a platform that has escaped the ethnicization of cultural productions of Muslims. By demonstrating that architecture built by and for Muslims is the same as architecture designed and built for other people, the Award undermines claims about alterity and Otherness of Muslim architecture. This paper historicizes the emergence of the Award in the late 1970s within and against the bourgeois architectural mediasphere. Building upon archival research and oral histories, this paper maps discursive shifts, stylistic reorientations, and representational techniques espoused by the Aga Khan Award over the past 47 years.