A vastly a success grassroots investment effort funded the landmark construction, which is designed to have common enchantment.
The biggest mosque in Belgium’s Wallonia area has simply opened its doorways after greater than a decade of building.
The Kanuni Sultan Süleyman mosque is located in Liège, and was once funded fully by means of its worshippers, gained no subsidies from the Belgian govt or donations from in a foreign country. The complete price of building got here to a couple €4.5 million.
Covering an outstanding 1,300 sq. meters, this modern white advanced includes a 450-square metre mosque topped with a dome, albeit with out minarets. The mosque can welcome as much as 600 worshippers.
Mehmet Aydogdu, Liège’s consultant of Culture and Interculturalism, described the imaginative and prescient in the back of the mosque’s design, “Our idea was not to make architecture related to Central Anatolia, the Middle East or North Africa. It was to reach universality – therefore a ‘Belgitude’”.
Built on a former coal web site which has noticed many generations of Turkish miners move by means of, solid by means of a 1964 settlement permitting Turkish exertions migration to Belgium.
Imam Ertugrul Yilmaz, was once born and bread in Wallonia sooner than pursuing his upper schooling in Turkey, mentioned, “It’s with nice delight for me to come back again, to be an imam, as a result of I grew up with them. I do know them, they know me. We can paintings in combination.
“We would like to welcome everyone, do activities together, show that we live together, that we are also Belgian, that we are part of this community.”
Beyond its function as a spot of worship, the mosque advanced features a cultural centre available to all, website hosting a number of occasions similar to meetings, instructional methods, and communal actions, additional selling discussion and figuring out amongst numerous communities.