"It’s just not the same to pray in a garage as it is to pray in a proper mosque," Hocine Kouitene, vice president of the Islamic Association for Union and Cooperation in Lleida, told the New York Times on Sunday, March 16.

Every Friday, a congregation of nearly 1,000 Muslims jam a garage-turned-mosque in the Spanish northeastern city.

Many worshipers lay rows on the crudely converted concrete slab outside the garage steel doors for lack of space.

"We want a place where we can pray comfortably, without bothering anybody," Kouitene said.

Muslims, now estimated at nearly 1.5of a total population of 40 million, ruled much of Spain for centuries.


After the defeat of the Muslim king by the Spanish king and queen, Muslims' mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches.

Since then, fewer than a dozen new mosques have been built to serve Spain’s Muslim population, leaving them no other option but to pray in dingy apartments, warehouses and garages.

Less Catalan

The lack of mosques is leaving Muslims in Lleida, in the western part of the autonomous province of Catalonia, feeling marginalized.

"I feel like a Catalan except when it comes to the question of the mosque," said Mohammed Halhoul, spokesman for the Catalan Islamic Council.

"A proper mosque would act as a focus, a reference point for Islam here."

But Muslims are seeing some positive signs.

The Islamic Association in Lleida has reached a pact with the town hall by which it secured a 50-year lease on a plot of government land to build a mosque.

The ruling coalition in Catalonia has submitted a bill in the regional parliament in December that would oblige local governments to set aside land for mosques and other places of worship.

Catholic Chuch Opposes

The proposal is opposed by the powerful Catholic Church.

"A church, a synagogue or a mosque are not the same thing," Cardinal Luis Martinez Sistach, archbishop of Barcelona, has said.

He claims the bill "impinges on our ability to exercise a fundamental right, that of religious liberty."

But some, including Lleida’s mayor Angel Ros, disagree.

"We used to have a dominant religion, and now we have many religions and we have to find a way of respecting that fact," he told the Times.

"Churches were the great public works of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance.

"Now I see a day when every large city in Spain will have a mosque."

Timeturk & Agencies