SHORTLY after 10 a.m. Muhammad O'Curnain opens the door of the Islamic Foundation in Dublin's South Circular Road. There is confusion for a few moments. "Do you speak French?" the caller asks. Muhammad says no. In broken English the caller explains that he is looking for money to get back to France. "Are you a Muslim?" Muhammad asks. "Yes," the man says. Muhammad tells him to come back at lunchtime when the community leader will be around.
For most Muslims arriving in Ireland, the foundation is their first port of call. In a month's time, however, new arrivals may head for Dublin 4 instead: the foundation is about to open a new purpose built mosque in Clonskeagh.
Locals joke that it looks like a drive in eastern takeaway. It would probably do a good trade, they say, since it's opposite a petrol station and backs on to the ground of UCD. But this £5 million development has been built to cater for spiritual hunger.
The move out of student land to the leafy suburban estates of Clonskeagh marks the coming of age of a group that now considers itself an ethnic minority of considerable size. "We're not leaving the area," Muhammad says, "we're expanding into another area."
It is almost 40 years since the Dublin Islamic Society set up its first mosque in a terraced house in Harrington Street, near the South Circular That building has reverted to flats. "The problem is that up until the 1980s the Muslims were just itinerants, thinking temporary all the time," Muhammad explains.
Then in 1983, the foundation bought the former Presbyterian church on the SCR. As luck would have it, one of the side walls was perfectly aligned towards Mecca. So they pulled out the altar at the top of the church and put the pulpit along the wall. Muhammad doesn't believe it was luck, "because everything comes from God".
The new purpose built mosque has been designed to face Mecca and will hold more than 1,700 people. A yellow and charcoal coloured brick building it adds a dome and minaret to the skyline previously dominated by the Belfield water tower.
The development houses a mosque, eight apartments, meeting rooms, five extra classrooms and a library. "It's not just a mosque," Muhammad says. "It's not just a place to pray. There will be an office there to administer to the community."
On Tuesday the builders removed the scaffolding around the Clonskeagh dome, revealing its dull copper gleam to the sunshine. The contractors are finishing the outer wall, a low brick affair with fencing, "so that you can look in as you walk by ... or they can look out," one bricklayer said.
Muhammad O'Curnain, the foundation's secretary, is the son of Irish Catholics who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s. In 1989 he converted to Islam, moved to Ireland and changed his name from Mark to Muhammad.
Muhammad is expecting his community to grow, and he predicts it will double in the next decade from a figure of 9,000 Muslims, north and south. More than half of that number live in the Dublin area. The 1991 census recorded a total Muslim/Islamic population in the State of 3,875.
France, with its Muslim population of between three and four million, has only eight mosques of similar size to the Clonskeagh development. More than 900 of the 1,000 mosques in France are located in converted rooms or garages.
Clonskeagh will be the sixth mosque in the Republic, including Ballyhaunis, Galway, Limerick, Cork and the existing SCR mosque. There is also a mosque in Belfast. According to the foundation, all are too small for the number of worshippers. Muslim leaders suggest that all these communities will need purpose built mosques by the end of the decade.
Most of the money for the Islamic centre has come from a wealthy family from the United Arab Emirates. The builders on site in Clonskeagh refer to them as the oilmen. The Al Maktoum family includes three government ministers in the UAE. The money is coming from their own private fortune, Muhammad says the three Al Maktoum brothers already have property interests in Ireland. Sheikh Hamdan owns Derrinstown Stud near Maynooth and his brothers Sheikh Mohammad and Sheikh Maktoum own Kildangan Stud in Kildare and Woodpark in Meath. The brothers are noted for their wealth and their generosity. About 10 years ago, one of the three brothers famously donated his Derby winnings to charity.
It is understood that they paid £950,000 for the site in 1990. In today's market, it would fetch up to £3 million. The Al Maktoums will hand over the deeds to the Islamic Foundation of Ireland once the building is finished, Muhammad says. Their reward for the investment will be in the after life.
A 15 minute walk away from the Clonskeagh site, another purpose built Muslim centre is also nearly ready. The building, overlooking Milltown Bridge, will house two apartments and a meeting room. It has been funded by "charitable donations" and is organised by the Ahlul-bait Association, registered as a charity. The association is run by Muhammad Al Kamali, a Muslim who has been living in Ireland for some time. The Milltown apartments have been earmarked as a base for Muslim students.
In the 13 years since the South Circular Road mosque opened and expanded, Catholic and Protestant congregations have dwindled. The Christian churches are more likely to be selling off - rather than developing - property. St Kevin's Church, not far from the mosque on the South Circular, is now a 31 unit apartment development.
In Clonskeagh, a field of cows separates the mosque from an enclosed orders of Carmelite nuns next door. The De La Salle order built a school on the site many years ago later, the State used it as a CERT training centre and in 1990 the Islamic Foundation bought the school building - which now houses the national school - and the site for the mosque.
They renovated the CERT building and turned it into the Muslim National School. The school is State funded, with a £40 per head grant per student's There are no Muslim state funded schools in Britain, although it has a Muslim community estimated at around 1.2 million. The Department of Education grants funding on the basis of need, and proof that there are enough children to avail of it.
When she opened the school three years ago, the President, Mrs Robinson, said the Muslim community was a "witness to the openness and pluralism in Irish society".
In the small bright building, the children's drawings of Mr Men jostle for space with laminated posters describing the Five Pillars of Islam. In the centre of the assembly area, where the children pray to Mecca, letters coloured in with children's markers read: "Cead Mile Failte".
The school principal, Colm McGlade, says the school is a normal national school, teaching all the usual subjects, including Irish. The teachers are mostly non Muslims and religion, Arabic and Qur'an studies are taught by four Islamic teachers.
He has 162 pupils. Some of them travel from the other side of the city to attend classes. "For the majority of parents it's not just a religion, it's a way of life. They put such importance on religious beliefs and their religious practices," Mr McGlade says. They send their children from Finglas or Castleknock because of their commitment to giving them an Islamic education, he says.
Some of the children at the school fasted during Ramadan, when Muslims are forbidden to eat or drink during daylight, even though fasting is not compulsory for children. A sign in the grounds of South Cricular Road mosque advises parents not to bring children under seven to the mosque, although there is an area in the grounds for mothers and babies.
The sign goes on to quote the prophet: "Order your children to pray when they are seven years old and hit them if they do not perform it when they are 10 years old."
The washrooms in the Clonskeagh school were specially designed to allow for the ritual washing, or wudu, which has to be done before each of the five daily prayer sessions. The children must wash their hands three times, heir arms up to the elbow three times the right arm before the left, wipe the top of their heads with wet hands and wash their feet three times, right foot first. They rinse their mouths and nostrils three times and then they pray.
Mr McGlade is asking the Department of Education to grant the school special status, like an all Irish school, giving it a lower pupil teacher ratio. In a survey before Christmas he found that 60 per cent of pupils did not have English as a first language. One hundred per cent had one parent for whom English was not a first language.
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