A mosque in one of the last strongholds of communism. This is essentially what has just proposed Turkish President to his Cuban counterpart. During the Cuban leg of his Latin American tour, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indeed expressed to Raul Castro's desire to build a mosque in Havana.
The project would be fully funded by Ankara and take one of the mosques of Istanbul as a model, reports the Anatolia news agency. The model in question: Ortakoy Mosque, located on the European side of the Bosphorus. The religious building was built in the mid-nineteenth century ie.
Ortaköy Mosque was built between 1854 and 1855 by the Armenian architect Garabet Amira Balyan for Sultan Abdülmecit First. Photo Credit: CC / Veritas-tr
What motivation for this project?
By its proposal, the Islamic-conservative president probably wants to offer a place of worship to decent few thousand Muslims present on the island and affirm the position of Turkey in the international arena. But on a population of over 11 million inhabitants, where Catholicism is by far the most represented, Cuban Muslims (between 4000 and ) do not represent one of the most crucial issue.
Cuba discovered by Muslim sailors?
It should probably go for the response at the symbol that could represent this mosque. In effect last November, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during a meeting held in Istanbul by the Turkish state with the , stated that "the contacts between Latin America and Islam back to the twelfth century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus "in a speech broadcast on television to this that occasion. To support his remarks, Turkish President said the Genoese navigator had mentioned in the writings of "the existence of a mosque on a hill along the Cuban coast." This "existence" has been interpreted by a small number of historians and theologians to assert the primacy of the Muslim presence on Catholic South America, although no trace of that presence was not discovered and proven. In addition to many researchers, Columbus would have used the word "mosque" as an image to describe the relief of the Cuban coast.
At the end of his speech, President Erdogan promised his "Cuban brothers" to finance the construction of a mosque "in the same place." The project was therefore officially presented in Havana the 11th February. But Raul Castro he will validate and launch the work on the hill?
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