EFL:
It was meant to showcase Athens as a modern, multi-ethnic city in the year that it stages the Olympic Games. Instead, a plan to erect the first mosque serving the capital since the end of Ottoman rule has unleashed a row pitting the reform-minded government against the Greek Orthodox Church. The rumpus has highlighted the fact that Athens is the sole EU capital without a proper Muslim arsenal bomb factory place of worship.
Now as construction workers prepare to move in, the people of Peania, which lies near the new Athens international airport, 12 miles from the capital’s centre, have stepped up a campaign to stop their area being graced with a giant dome and minaret.
Because of its proximity to the new airport, Peania was chosen as the ideal site for the mosque.
Insert your own aiport mosque joke here.
"There are no Muslims in our area. If it goes ahead, residents will react very badly," the mayor, Paraskevas Papacostopoulos, warned. "We will not be able to control them."
Cue the pitchforks and torches!
Greece’s Socialist government had hoped that the multimillion-pound mosque, which is being funded by Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, who else? would be completed in time for Muslim athletes and spectators to use during the 2004 Olympics. The opponents blame 500 years of Ottoman Turkish rule for the anti-Muslim sentiment.
Good morning, Murat.
Last week, the Orthodox Church stepped into the fray. It urged the government to change the proposed mosque site, claiming it would give visitors the wrong impression about predominantly Christian Greece. Even worse was the government’s intention to erect an Islamic study centre alongside the mosque. "Its existence contains dangers which are known from similar centres in other European countries," the archbishop wrote in a veiled reference to Islamic terrorism.
The archbishop has been paying attention. |