In Egypt, there are more mosques and fewer imams than in previous years. Meet the freelance imams filling the gaps, and navigating the challenges to being part-time religious leaders.
Tag: mosque
The first mosque in East Germany to have visible Islamic architecture is soon to open in Erfurt, in the State of Thuringia. But it’s already become a target for Islamophobic attacks, including pig heads and wooden crosses tossed on the premises.
There’s the obvious stops. And then there’s the off-the-beaten path venues and activities — all recommended by an Istanbulite travel journalist!
New York Mayor Eric Adams has for the first time allowed the city’s mosques to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer over loudspeakers. A Turkish correspondent living in New York listens in to the sound of the call (“cleaner” than in Turkey), and the voices of local Muslims marking this watershed in their relationship with the city.
In Belize, San Pedro’s Muslim community revolves around the Harmouches, a Lebanese family who immigrated in the 1980s and whose hardware business is at the heart of the town.
From France to China, these female worship leaders not only provide spiritual guidance but also encourage diversity and dispel stereotypes, from both within and outside of their community.
Our new OneShot proves that ghosts are real: Moe Zorayi has photographic evidence from Afghanistan … Listen to the award-winning Iranian-American photographer tell the story behind this powerful photograph. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/8eZ73EKGRyE expand=1] Burqa Women in White (© Moe Zorayi/OneShot) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
The Mevlana mausoleum in Konya, central Turkey, is considered a staple of Islamic architecture — and rightly so: I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many minarets!
BIR AL-ABED — “For 20 minutes, they kept firing at us. We couldn’t hear anything else because of the sounds of the gunfire. Everybody was running. Some were trying to escape and others were looking for their children — no one was spared, young or old. When the militants were done firing, one of them […]
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Model Mosque
The Great Mosque of Kairouan, in Tunisia, is considered a model of Islamic art. Its minaret, one of the oldest in the world, served as a template for how many minarets were later built in neighboring North African countries, as well as Spain’s Andalusia region. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
LUCKNOW — It’s Friday afternoon at the Ambar mosque in the northern Indian city of Lucknow. The call to prayer, or Azan, rings out in the afternoon heat. Women start to gather. They wash their hands, face and feet as part of a ritual purification. In India, women aren’t typically encouraged at mosques. But Ambar mosque is doing quite the opposite — the second floor of the mosque is reserved for women to offer Namaaz or prayer. Rabia, a local resident, says she visits the mosque most Fridays. For her, the Ambar mosque is more than a place to pray. […]
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Shadow Of A Prayer
Like elsewhere in Syria’s largest city, parts of the Great Mosque of Aleppo, where this man was praying peacefully more than 20 years ago, have since been destroyed.
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Making Space For Islam In Catholic Italy
Competing Muslim groups are vying for official recognition from the Italian state — and a share of the country’s “8 per 1,000” taxpayer pie.
TURKEY DETAINS THREE RUSSIANS AFTER ISTANBUL BLAST In the wake of a deadly terrorist attack in Istanbul, Turkish authorities have detained three Russian nationals suspected of being linked to ISIS, Hürriyet reports. The arrests in the provinces of Antalya and Izmir follow a suspected suicide attack on Tuesday morning that killed 10 people, all German, […]
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Pigeon Square
BašÄaršija square is one of the landmarks of Sarajevo’s old town, where everybody comes to sit around and talk and drink. But we tourists know it as “the Pigeon Square”.
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Mecca Stampede, FARC Handshake, Exhumed Tsar
MORE THAN 300 DEAD IN MECCA STAMPEDE Photo: Omar Chatriwala At least 310 people taking part in the annual Hajj pilgrimage were killed in a stampede Thursday morning in Mina, near the Islamic holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, Al Jazeera quotes Saudi officials as saying. Thursday is the first day of the Muslim […]
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My Grandson’s Treasure Hunts
However neatly and methodically organized my 20,000 slides may be, in more than 60 years of travels I am bound to draw some blanks here and there. So whenever I can’t remember where I snapped this windmill or that mosque, my grandson puts his Internet detective hat on and helps me track it down. In […]
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Checkered Mosque
Perched on the summit of Cairo’s Saladin Citadel is the Great Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha, also known as the Alabaster Mosque because of its white courtyard. It’s one of the first features of Cairo visitors see when they travel into the city.
ISTANBUL — In our divided existences, everyone lives their own reality, with their own priorities. Right now, the demand that this city’s Hagia Sophia museum be transformed into a mosque has suddenly become the singular issue for a certain segment of the Turkish population. The Anatolia Youth Association announced a gathering at the iconic location […]
CORDOBA — Back in 1984, UNESCO included Spain’s Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba on its World Heritage list. Thirty years later, the site that tourist guides describe as one of Andalusia’s architectural masterpieces — a symbol of the golden age of the Umayyad civilization and of the “concord” between religions — now represents conflict. Though the exceptional […]
Morsi accused of “espionage”Mohamed Morsi, the former Egyptian president deposed in a military-backed coup this past summer, is facing charges alongside 35 other defendants. The charges? Espionage and aiding terrorism. Morsi was specifically accused of collaborating with the Palestinian political organization Hamas, in an alleged attempt to orchestrate what prosecutors characterize as an Islamist takeover. […]
AL JAZEERA (Qatar), AFP Worldcrunch QUETTA — An attack on a Sunni Muslim mosque in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta has left at least 10 people dead and another 30 wounded, just one day after a suicide bomber killed at least 37 people in the same city. Friday’s attack in the capital of Balochistan […]
Authorities worry for the safety of the mostly young sign-ups, but also the risk that they return home radicalized — and set on striking targets in Europe.
AP, BBC, THE IRRAWADDY (Burma); REUTERS Worldcrunch RANGOON – Thirteen children were killed in a fire at an Islamic building housing orphans in Burma’s biggest city early Tuesday morning. Sectarian violence has shaken Burma, also known as Myanmar, during the past week and the authorities were quick to blame the blaze on an accidental electrical […]
AFP, BBC (UK), VOICE OF AMERICA (USA) Worldcrunch KARACHI – The death toll has reached at least 45, with 150 wounded from a powerful blast in a mainly Shiite Muslim area of Karachi. There are reports that the explosion was set off by Sunni terrorists, although by midday Monday no group had claimed responsibility for […]
ASSOCIATED PRESS (U.S.), KHAAMA PRESS (Afghanistan) Worldcrunch The Associated press reports that three grenades were thrown into a mosque in the eastern Afghan Khost province, injuring nine on Wednesday, a day after a string of suicide bombings killed at least 46 people in southwestern and northern Afghanistan. The Taliban did not acknowledge the attack, even […]