Berlin Mosque

About

Standing at Brienner Straße 7–8 in the Wilmersdorf borough of the German capital, the Berlin Mosque — officially the Wilmersdorfer Moschee — was designed by the architect K. A. Hermann and built between 1923 and 1925. The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement (Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishāʿat-i-Islām Lahore) owns and manages the mosque.

On 6 August 1923 the foundation stone was set in place, and on 26 April 1925 the completed mosque was officially inaugurated. Hermann shaped the mosque in a Neo-Mughal idiom — onion dome, pastel surfaces, and a symmetrical front recalling the tombs of the Mughal Empire and most famously the Taj Mahal. Two slim minarets, each 27 metres (90 feet) high, rise on either side of the prayer hall, and a two-storey imam's residence stands beside the mosque.

The minarets and dome were heavily damaged by Soviet shelling during the Second World War. The mosque was reopened in 1952 after a grant from the Berlin Monuments Department made initial repairs possible, and the two minarets themselves were finally rebuilt between 1999 and 2001.

History

The mosque grew out of the early-1920s effort of the Indian Muslim activists known as the Kheri Brothers — Abdul Jabbar and Abdus Sattar Kheri — to establish an Islamic centre in Berlin. Their initial conversations with the German Muslim Dr Khalid Banning led, through correspondence with the Shah Jehan Mosque at Woking in England, to the involvement of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, which agreed to take on the project. Construction began in 1923 and was completed in 1925. Earlier modest Muslim prayer structures had existed near Berlin, but they did not survive; the Wilmersdorf mosque is the oldest mosque still standing in Germany.

Significance

As the longest-standing mosque in the country, the Berlin Mosque is a key landmark in the history of Islam in Germany and in early twentieth-century European Islam more broadly. Its Neo-Mughal architecture also stands as an early example of South Asian Muslim sacred design transplanted to the heart of Europe.