AN ISLAMIC LEADER in Dublin 15 has called for greater interaction between local authorities and Muslim communities in Ireland.
Sheikh Dr Umar Al-Qadri, who is head imam at Al-Mustafa Islamic centre in Blanchardstown, told Metro Éireann that some Muslim communities around the country are staging services in houses and need local authority guidance on appropriate venues and procedures.
He said Muslim immigrants to Ireland “want to keep practicing their own religion and keep their own identity” and “need a platform” to do so.
He recounted one incident whereby a mosque operating out of a house received a letter from the local county council that noted there was no planning permission to use the dwelling in such a manner.
Sheikh Al-Qadri said the county council was “absolutely right” but that it “never discussed an alternative option”. He said that in such instances the Muslim communities need “moral support” from local authorities on a way forward.
“County council officials need to realise they [Muslims] are working and living in this country, a lot of them are already naturalised, and they want to have their own religious activities,” he said.
Another challenge facing Muslims is the lack of a second-level school with an Islamic ethos, said Sheikh Al-Qadri, while some communities are being preached to by unqualified imams.
He said some such imams are young scholars from England who await qualification and come on a temporary basis, a situation which is “not catering for the future”, while others may be completely untrained.
He remarked: “There are people [in Muslim communities] who are for isolation, and they could be preaching somewhere. ”
The imam said that to date, the Muslim community in Ireland had not succeeded in uniting under a “unanimous platform” but that most recently a Union of Muslim Organisations in Ireland has formed, comprising 25 mosques including the Islamic Cultural Centre at Clonskeagh and the Dublin Mosque on the South Circular Road.
He said the union offers an opportunity to highlight issues of integration, racism, and education “from a unified platform” and help ensure better regulation of Islamic teaching in Ireland.
According to Sheikh Al-Qadri – who was born in the Netherlands but received Islamic training in his parental country of Pakistan – he leads a congregation of up to 500 cumulative members at the mosque in Coolmine Industrial Estate, although not all attend at any one time.
The imam said he trained for seven years under well-known moderate Sheikh Dr Tahir Ul-Qadri, who in 2010 issued a fatwa on terrorism that refuted any Islamic pretext for terrorist acts.
