Google – AFP, 14 Sep 2013
 |
Leaders lay
the first stone of what will be the first mosque in Ljubljana,
Slovenia on
September 14, 2013 (AFP, Jure Makovec)
|
LJUBLJANA —
Slovenia's prime minister, Alenka Bratusek, on Saturday laid the foundation
stone for what will be the country's first mosque -- 44 years after the initial
request to build it was made.
The laying
of the stone, in the presence of a government minister from Qatar which is
helping to fund the project, was a "symbolic victory against all forms of
religious intolerance", said Bratusek, adding that Europe would not be as
culturally rich without Islam.
About
10,000 attended the ceremony in Ljubljana, according to an AFP photographer at
the event.
Building
will begin in November and should be finished by the end of autumn 2016. The
cost of the project, which includes a Muslim cultural centre, is 12 million
euros ($16 million), 70 percent of which will be met by the Qataris.
The first
request to build a mosque in Slovenia was filed in 1969. In recent years the
project has run into difficulty over the issue of land, but was eventually
solved when the council in Ljubljana sold an area ready for construction to the
Muslim community.
However,
opponents of the mosque have twice tried to halt the project, once in 2004 and
again in 2009, by asking for a referendum. The requests were denied each time
by the constitutional court.
Some 47,000
Slovenians declare themselves Muslim, in a country of two million people. A
2002 census found that it was the second largest religion in the country behind
Catholicism, which has 1.1 million followers. Muslim groups claim there are
around 80,000 Muslims in the country.
There was a
previous mosque in Slovenia, before it was an independent country, but it was
abandoned and destroyed after World War One.
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