Zabiha News

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“A Muslim community was opening the first mosque in Germany’s formerly communist east on Thursday despite a steady stream of protests from local residents and far-right demonstrators.

The Khadija Mosque — built by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community — is a two-story white structure capped with a 13-meter (42-foot) silver dome in Berlin’s Pankow district.

Most of Germany’s more than 3 million Muslims come from Turkey and live in the west. Berlin has some 70 mosques, mostly tucked away in old warehouses or other nondescript buildings in western parts of the city.

“This one is special,” said Fazlur Rehman Anwar, a member of the Ahmadiyya community in Hamburg, who was in Berlin for the opening. “It is in the capital. It is the first one in (the former) East Germany.”

The city’s top security official welcomed the new Muslim house of worship and expressed hope it would help in the integration of the city’s roughly 220,000 Muslims.

“I find that an open mosque is much better in view of immigration over that which we often see a mosque that is in the back courtyard of a converted warehouse,” Ehrhart Koerting told the Berliner Morgenpost daily.

Ahmadis follow the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, but also consider their community’s founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, born in Qadian, India in 1835 to be the messiah and a “humble servant of Islam” who sought to reform Islamic practice.”