Europe torn over mosques, city chips in to build France’s largest

But next June, Creteil’s Muslims are scheduled to move into a new, $7.4 million mosque with room for more than 2,500 worshippers. The nearly finished building, with its 81-foot minaret, stands on a knoll overlooking the town’s picturesque lake, within sight of city hall and the local police station.

The mosque will make Creteil something of an exception in Europe. From London to Cologne to Marseille, governments and residents are fighting the rise of minarets on their skylines in campaigns that underscore cultural, religious and ethnic divides within a continent undergoing its most dramatic demographic change in half a century. Islam is now Europe’s second-largest religion after Christianity, and it’s fastest-growing.

But Creteil’s city government is helping Muslims build and finance what will be one of France’s largest new mosques. “We wanted the mosque to be built where everyone could see it,” said Mayor Laurent Cathala. “We didn’t want to hide it. Putting it under the window of the mayor and the police is the best way to eliminate underground sites and extremist ways.”

Still, the mosque did not come this far without a struggle. French authorities are attempting to deport its imam; anti-immigrant city council members are protesting the use of public funds for its adjacent cultural centre.

For European Muslims new mosques denote recognition and acceptance of their growing numbers and rising status after decades of praying in basements and abandoned buildings.

In London, proposals for a mega-mosque for 12,000 worshippers near the main park for the 2012 Olympic Games has sparked massive resistance. In the Tuscan hill town of Colle di Val d’Elsa, Italy, protesters pelted local Muslims this year with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the front gate of the construction site of a large, golden-domed mosque.

“Anti-mosque initiatives are the new mobilisers of the Right wing… The mosques are symbols of the permanent presence of Muslims. They are investing in bricks. They are going to stay,” said Riem Spielhaus, a specialist in European-Islamic issues at Berlin’s Humboldt University.