Britain’s first female Muslim cabinet minister has said that new mosques built in England should be built without traditional minarets to make them look ‘quintessentially English’ and fit in with the landscape.
According to Baroness Warsi, many of the mosques across the country are ‘ugly’ and that if new ones were built without minarets, they could look like a traditional village church.
Her remarks come as part of a new campaign to boost religious tolerance, in which a nationwide competition will be launched to design a new mosque.
“We need to debate about what British Islam will look like in ten years’ time,” she said while explaining that the aim of her idea was to develop an “authentic British Islamic brand”.
Historically, the function of the minaret on mosques was to issue the call to prayer. Now the call is generally made with a loudspeaker.
Commenting on this, the baroness said, “The need for a minaret, when someone had to go up and shout loudly from a high place to call people to prayers and be heard from a long way away, is not relevant in the UK, so you don’t really need a minaret. A lot of mosques are quite ugly – but they don’t need to be.”
Instead, she said they should “look nice: a nod to the history, heritage and culture that you find yourself in can be a good thing.”
“I would love to see a wonderful, quintessentially English-designed mosque,” she asserted.
Further, she added that “There is a saying in Islamic thinking that Islam is like a river that takes the colour from the bed over which is flows, the bed being the country in which it is found. Here, the river of Islam flows over an English river bed and so it should reflect its colour.”
Details of the competition will be announced in the spring when the Baroness Warsi Foundation will be launched to promote religious freedom and women’s rights.
None issue. They have a cross on top of every Church and the bells that ring before the prayers.
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