Architecture and History
The first ever mosque in England was built in Liverpool; it was opened at 8 Brougham Terrace by a solicitor and Muslim convert William Abdullah Quilliam on 25 December 1889 and the mosque he constructed was maintained until 1908. That mosque has recently been refurbished by the local community and is now called the Liverpool Muslim Society.
The Liverpool Muslim Society was set up in 1953, by the late Al-Haj Ali Hizzam, a member of Liverpool's Muslim Community, when it operated from a room in his house. The society was determined to build a place of worship to meet the spiritual needs of Liverpool's small population of about 3000 Muslims which was ever expanding. The Muslim community had been without a mosque since the mosque William Abdullah Quilliam had constructed was closed in 1908, So In 1965 the construction of the Al-Rahma mosque started, with extensions to accommodate the ever expanding community, with the main prayer hall being completed in July 1974. During the Mosque's construction, on Fridays and Muslim festivals, the Pakistan Centre opposite and the car park was used as a temporary prayer space whilst the building was being completed. The first small floor, the madrassah and the imam’s accommodation was added in 1979.
The current three-storey mosque is much more traditional in appearance with a golden dome and crescent on top, It opened in 2008 during Liverpool's tenure as European Capital of Culture.
Read more about this topic: Al-Rahma Mosque
Famous quotes containing the words architecture and/or history:
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)