Cologne, Berlin, London, Marseille – and now Italy, too. The debate on the construction of mosques has now ignited Italian politics and public opinion. The Mayor of Bologna, Sergio Cofferati, after weeks of heated discussions and a three-way stand-off between Council, Church and Casa delle Libertà (the right wing opposition coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi – Ed.), has decided to call a referendum at the end of October; he reassures the interested parties, however, that “It is our intention to build the mosque and to build it in that area” (in the San Donato neighbourhood, on the outskirts of the city – Ed.) The controversy in the city has disturbed the sensibilities of the Lega Nord politician Calderoni, who had threatened to declare a ‘Pork Day’, by taking his pig – an animal which is the epitome of impurity, whose meat is expressly forbidden by the laws of Islam, as it is for the Jewish religion – for a walk over the proposed site in order to infect it, and in doing so block the construction to prevent “the Islamicisation of the Bologna plain”.

In Genoa, too, the mood is inflammatory. The Mayor of the city, Marta Vincenzi of the Democratici di Sinistra – the ‘Left wing Democrats’ – has taken something of a u-turn with regards to the plans for the construction of a mosque at Cornigliano, in the west of the region; appealing directly to the Minister of the Interior in Rome to clarify the project, she has declared that the mosque is “not under discussion and will not be until we receive indications from the national and European debate which is currently in progress.” This is a reference to the study conducted by the European Commission to assess the number of mosques currently in existence and to investigate their funding, which will be published on the 15th October. One supporter of Cofferati’s decision to announce popular consultation is the journalist Magdi Allam, who, in an editorial in Il Corriere della Sera on the 14th September, after having bitterly criticised the proposal for ‘Pork Day’, wrote that “Mosques cannot be imposed on the people without giving the people the opportunity to express their view via referendum, since, wherever a mosque is erected, social degradation is sure to follow, and the value of property is certain to fall.”

But how many mosques are there in Italy? The statistics are far from clear, and the only sources at present are the security services. According to a report by CESIS (the Executive Committee of Security and Information Services) published in May 2007, there are 735 mosques and places of worship in Italy, whereas at the end of 2006 there were 696 for around 50,000 Muslims who, according to certain estimations, represent the 5% of practising Muslims, out of a total of 1,000,000 who live in Italy. It is necessary to make a distinction, however. There are in fact only three real mosques – that of Rome, on Monte Antenne, the largest in Europe, which was built in 1995 by the Arab nations; that of Catania, donated to Sicily by Libya in 1980; and, finally, that of Segrate, built in 1988 and controlled by the UCOII – the Union of Islamic Organisations and communities in Italy, which is alleged by some to have links with the Muslim Brothers. The mosque currently under construction in Colle Val D’Elsa, close to Siena, is also linked to the UCOII. The remaining 732 sites are ‘places of worship’, that is, at best apartments, or otherwise garages, former barns or disused factories. And probably, as the then French Interior Minster Nicolas Sarkozy once said “It is not minarets which are dangerous, but the basements and garages which hide secrets.”

The debate over the construction of European mosques concerns not only Italian politics, but also that of other European nations. Germany, with 3.3 million Muslims, of which 70% are of Turkish origin, is that which seems to have the most difficulty in managing the issue. First there was Berlin, where the neo-Nazi NPD party led a protest against the building of the first mosque in the old Eastern part of the city. Then there was Munich, where work on a new Muslim place of worship has been blocked for some time pending the ruling of the local justice court. And in Cologne, too, the “Rome of the north” as it was baptised by Pope Benedict XVI, the attention of the German mass media and political world has been focused, when, in July, dozens of right wing extremists, coming equally from Austria and Belgium, demonstrated against the building of a mosque measuring 4,400 squared metres, designed to serve the 120,000 Muslims of Cologne and its surrounding areas. A notable figure amongst those opposed is Joachim Meisner, the Archbishop of Cologne, who, in certain interviews, declared that the construction of the mosque would make him “feel uneasy” and that “the immigration of Muslims has created a split not only in German culture, but also in that of Europe”.

Nor has the UK remained immune from the controversy.“We the Christian population of this great country England would like the proposed plan to build a Mega Mosque in East London scrapped. This will only cause terrible violence and suffering and more money should go into the NHS”. This is the text of the petition signed by 225,000 people in mid-July on the Downing Street website, opposing the project to build the country’s biggest mosque in West Ham, in the East End of London. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has defended the project, stating to the British press that such public demands are part of a ‘vicious’ campaign of disinformation against the mosque which would serve 12,000 worshippers and would cost between 50 and 75 million pounds for which, according to one of the project’s supporters, public funding has never been requested. But aside such petitions, which have a decidedly racist tone, the doubts raised against the project also concern those who are behind the proposals – the Tablighi Jamaat group, which French intelligence has described as ‘the antechamber of fundamentalism’.

In France, on the other hand, the climate seems to have become rather more relaxed. Or at least according to Bernard Godard, a councillor for the Department for Religious Affairs within the Ministry of the Interior. “There have been no problems in our country over the construction of mosques for the past six years. In fact, mayors often support these projects,” he says, adding that there are over 300 proper mosques, and around 1,800 places of worship for around 5 million Muslims, although “the number of those practising is around 8%”. Despite the 2005 riots in the Parisian suburbs which brought the smouldering tensions between North African immigrants and the French Government to light, Godard claims that the problems only really trouble a couple of cities, notably Marseille, which has always been a bastion of the extreme right, and has a high percentage of Arab immigrants coming mainly from Algeria. “Part of the municipal council of Marseille had contested the decision to rent a plot of land, on which a mosque was to be built, for too low a price,” he explains. “The problem was recently resolved after the Mayor raised the value of the rental agreement.”

Translation by Liz Longden