ATHENS, 31 August 2003 — In the very center of crumbling, Ottoman Athens, there is an unassuming blue door with Allah written on it. It opens into a cramped basement where assorted Arab, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Muslims crowd in every Friday for the weekly prayer. The al-Rahim mosque, as the door announces, is one of 22 unofficial places of Muslim worship that exist around the Greek capital, the only European Union member without an official mosque.
These dirty and restricted basements — rented out from suspicious Greek tenants at often extortionate prices — are the only places available for worship to the estimated 130,000 Muslim immigrants living in the Greek capital. Bizarrely, Athens boasted arguably the most elevated mosque in Europe until the mid-1980s. Located on the roof of the 10th-floor, five-star Caravel Hotel — the residence of choice for wealthy Muslim businessmen traveling to Athens — the mosque commanded sweeping 360 degree views over the whole of central Athens. Built by an eccentric shipping tycoon in the 1970s to rival the Athens Hilton down the road, the hotel’s mosque was built for his Arab clientele. Today, under new management, a swimming pool occupies the area where the mosque originally was. Bare bodies have replaced bodies prostrated in prayer. A member of staff says that the building was destroyed by an earthquake in 1983.
A quarter of a century after the idea was first floated, a mosque for Athens’ Muslim community is almost a reality — a 30,000m2 parcel of land has been leased out, Saudi Arabia has stumped up a limitless budget, and even the conservative Greek church has given its cautious blessing to the project.
The news ought to come as relief for Athens’ large Muslim community whose life in this Mediterranean country is made doubly frustrating by its proximity to the Muslim world. Some Greeks say that it is exactly this proximity — and the four centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire, during which time the Parthenon was turned into a mosque — that makes the issue of an official Muslim place of worship for Athens a sensitive issue.
“Most of my religious friends find it difficult to celebrate big feasts such as Ramadan without a religious center to congregate in,” says Majid, a Muslim who converted to Greek Orthodoxy and now lives with a solidly middle-class Greek family and their daughter.
“I had a very devout Muslim friend who came to Greece from Jordan for study,” Majid says. “He stuck it out only for three weeks before returning to Amman. He could not cope without having a mosque to go to. He also couldn’t bear to walk in the street and watch the scantily-clad Greek girls. He left the country with the worst impressions about its peoples’ morality.”
If the new mosque is to provide relief to Muslims such as Majid’s friend, one problem still remains: the site the mosque is to be built on — leased out by the Greek government for a nominal sum — is a full 20km outside Athens’ town center, making it inaccessible to the constituency of Muslims it is ostensibly being built for who lack the time or means of transportation to make the trek for Friday prayers.
The Greek press has speculated that the choice of location was decided after the influential Greek Orthodox Church demanded that the mosque be placed nowhere near the town center. Others argue that the Greek government is looking to curry favor with its Arab trade partners at a time when Greek companies are moving out of the saturated Balkans market and into the relatively untapped countries of the Middle East.
“This land that we chose was offered by the Mitsotakis government in 1992,” says Abdullah Abdullah, the dean of Arab ambassadors and the man in charge of the project. “At that time, we thought it was too far away ... but when a consultant of ours told us of a new route to the airport (that would shorten the distance), we told the government we’ll take this piece of land.
Then, the Saudi Government contacted us and said that they would like to finance the construction of the site.”
“We are very practical people,” Abdallah adds, answering why a mosque cannot be built in the center of town. “If we say that we have this number of Muslims in the city, a mosque will not fit in a hundred people. We have to be practical and look to solutions, not symbolism. We want something that can accommodate people, teach them Arabic, Greek.”
In Athens’ oldest Arabic coffee-shop, Al-Nil, regulars criticize Abdallah’s explanations, that the location for the mosque was purposely chosen for its good transport links.
“In fifty years maybe, there will be people going out there to pray. But no-one I know will pray there now,” says a customer. Inside the dimly-lit, Sudanese-owned qahwa in the city center, the exclusively male clientele smoke shisha and drink tea and coffee.
“They want to have Muslims praying outside the city,” the customer continues, in between card-playing bouts.
“I’ve heard that there’ll be a mosque,” the owner concedes, “but no-one has announced anything to us. We have no influence, so we can’t express our opinion,” he shrugs resignedly.
“This is done on purpose,” he adds. “They don’t want to have Muslims in Athens, especially in the center.”
“If they put the mosque in the center, we would willingly pay for it out of our own pockets,” ventures an Egyptian regular who earns his living as a night-time security guard. But they want to build it for purely prestige reasons and because the Olympic committee leaned on them to build a mosque for Muslim athletes. As for us, the Muslims who live here, no-one thought of us.”
Even so, the disgruntled Muslims of Athens have found an unlikely ally in the shape of the colorful mayor of Peania, the city on the outskirts of Athens where the mosque is to be built, Paraskevas Papakostopoulos. He argues that building a mosque in his town, which lacks a Muslim community, is senseless and worries about the image it will give first-time arrivals to Athens, who will see its tall minaret from the nearby airport.
“We aren’t against the building of an Islamic center in Athens, but the choice made by the authorities does not help Muslims who live far away from Paiania,” he said.
“The center should be built in the western suburbs, where most of the Muslim immigrants live,” he added.
But what may worry Papakostopoulos even more is that the mosque’s placing ensures that it will be one of the first sights that incoming passengers to Athens airport see. The mayor has criticized the fact that “the first impression visitors will have will be something not representative of Greek culture. They will feel they have arrived in a Muslim country.”
“How many minarets are there in Istanbul?” replies Abdallah Abdallah with a rhetorical flourish. “But they don’t call Turkey an Islamist country — it’s called secular.” Abdallah believes that, rather than the sight of a minaret giving out the wrong idea about the country’s predominant religion, it will send out a message of peaceful coexistence at a time when civilizations are seen to be clashing more often than they harmonies.
“This (the mosque) will show the tolerance of the Greeks. It’s the Greek and Arab civilization that brought renaissance to Europe after the dark ages. The convergence of both cultures will bring about a positive outcome for future generations,” says Abdallah.
Abdullah believes that the project will start by the autumn. “The Greek Government gave its approval, the Arab side is ready for the construction (to start) and the Greek (Orthodox) Church has even given its blessing,” he said.
The Church, a formidable opponent in a country indissolubly linked since its founding to religious identity, appears privately split over the plan.
Father Chrysostomos Eustratiou, a priest who has spent time in Egypt’s Greek Orthodox monasteries, welcomes the idea: “When we have our churches in Cairo, why can’t they have their mosque here? Where will they find to pray to God? In the streets?” he asks dramatically.
“The Egyptian government allows us to take care of and maintain our churches and archbishopric in Cairo and Alexandria. Isn’t it fair that our government do the same?”
But others are less open to the idea, particularly to the cultural center that will be attached to the mosque and will teach Arabic and religious education. One ecclesiastical source said that a cultural centre would “serve other aims” than a mosque, apparently reflecting fears of political agitation by Muslims.
In the meanwhile, Athens’ Muslims are still awaiting the end of more than 170 years of no official Muslim worship in Greece.
