Mosque being shipped to Inuvik

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/04/2010 (5634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

First there was Little Mosque on the Prairie. Soon there will be a little mosque on the tundra, thanks to a Muslim charitable foundation based in Manitoba.

"We are now going to send a mosque to the North Pole," joked Hussain Guisti, spokesman for the Zubaidah Tallab Foundation.

A 1,554-square-foot mosque is being prefabricated in Winnipeg and shipped more than 4,000 kilometres to its new home in Inuvik.

The Northwest Territories town of 3,500 people that includes close to 100 Muslims is located two degrees above the Arctic Circle along the east channel of the Mackenzie River Delta.

The resource-rich town has seen an influx of tradespeople and service providers, including many of the Muslim faith.

"Every single taxi driver is a Muslim," said Guisti, who’s counted 24 cabbies in Inuvik. He said there are architects, engineers, business owners and their families getting settled there.

Instead of a mosque, the faithful in Inuvik are using a nine-by-14-foot trailer, which holds less than a fifth of them at one time.

The Inuvik Muslims purchased two lots of land for a mosque and approached other mosques and foundations for help to build one. When a mosque member told an old friend — who happened to be on the board of the Manitoba foundation — about their needs, the board agreed to help Inuvik.

The registered charity was established in memory of Zubaidah Tallab — the late mother of Guisti’s wife, Dr. Susan Ghazali. The foundation was set up to raise funds to build a mosque in Thompson.

That accomplished, the foundation grew, spread out and now helps a variety of causes, said Guisti.

"We don’t turn down any project that strives to help the poor, the needy and to serve the community," said the spokesman. For instance, the foundation sent food to Garden Hill First Nation last summer, he said.

"The foundation deals extensively with new refugees coming to town… Our range of activities are very wide because there’s a wide array of needs out there. We don’t stick to one thing."

The pre-fab construction of the mosque for Inuvik will cost close to $185,000, and the shipping another $80,000.

The mosque will be shipped 2,440 kilometres from Winnipeg to the town of Hay River, N.W.T., said Guisti. From there, it will be transferred to a barge and moved 1,850 kilometres farther on the Hay and Mackenzie rivers to Inuvik, said Guisti. They plan to ship it before the last barge of the season leaves Hay River Sept. 30, he said.

The biggest challenge right now, though, is paying for it.

"We’ve only started fundraising," said Guisti in Thompson.

He said he has "no doubt" they will raise the funds "based on hope and the assumption that God and people will come forward."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

 

>