No Mega-Mosque for Århus

From Europe News today comes word that a large mosque is not going to be built near Århus after all. Here’s the story:

Danish mosque plans abandoned

Århus: The proposed construction of a great mosque west of Denmarks second largest city Århus has been abandoned. The reason for dropping the project is lack of interest among the local Muslim population.

In spite of significant help from native Danes, the organisation behind the project managed to collect only a bit over €100,000, vastly short of the estimated € 10 million construction cost, reports Metin Eidin, chairman of the fundraising committee.

This, in turn, has caused the city council spokesman Peter Thyssen to drop plans to incorporate the mosque project into the city planning, citing the improbability that the required funds will ever materialize.

It is noteworthy that neither Saudi Arabia nor Turkey has contributed economically to the project. It is widely known that Saudi funding usually is tied to the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam, but the Turkish state, which has funded construction of many ‘Conqueror mosques’ in Europe, has not been involved here.

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Brabrand Boligforening, who administers the housing project in the area and owns the desired construction place, has long resisted the idea of constructing a real mosque, citing concerns about religious fanaticism poisoning integration and the risk of creating a Muslim ‘parallel society’ in the area. The danger of radicalization, as seen on Channel 4: Undercover Mosque, has contributed to reluctance against the project.

One of the small existing mosques on nearby Grimhøjvej had parts of its public funding revoked, as the funding was to be given to education, not worship, and the mosque, known for its fundamentalist attitudes, was found to be in violation of this condition.

Commentators have largely praised the abandoning, stating that stronger integration, education and teaching the use of democratic tools to empower immigrants are more relevant than increasing religiousness in the area, which already suffers high crime rates and rampant unemployment.