Set to be the biggest mosque in the country with a capacity to accommodate 9,000 worshippers, Masjid Muhammad Bin Abdullah’s foundation will be laid soon.The first brick for the mosque, to come up on a five-acre site at Daanipur, 25 km from Ayodhya, was gifted on Thursday at an event in Mumbai.
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In its verdict on the decades-long dispute, the SC on November 9, 2019 awarded the disputed 2.77-acre land to the Ram Janmabhoomi Trust and asked the government to give an alternative 5 acres of land for building a mosque.
Thursday’s event saw unveiling of the design and gifting of the first brick to senior clerics belonging to different sects in Islam. UP Sunni Central Waqf Board and Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation chairman Zufar Ahmed Faruqui, former chairman of Maharashtra minority commission and BJP leader Haji Arafat, the architect Imran Shaikh, actors Raza Murad and Shahzad Khan, heads and khadims of several dargahs in the country attended the event at Rangsharda Hall in Bandra.
The event, said Shaikh, was the culmination of months of discussions among top ulema (religious leaders) regarding the name of the mosque.
The mosque’s five gates will be named after Prophet Muhammad and the four Caliphs who succeeded him, namely Hazrat Abu Bakar, Hazrat Umar, Hazrat Usman and Hazrat Ali.
Calling upon the community to come forward and donate money, labour and skills, Shaikh said an additional plot of six acres is being bought to build a cancer hospital (to be managed by Wockhardt), a maternity hospital, colleges of engineering, medicine and law, library, museum, conference hall and information centre in the masjid complex. The hospital and colleges will serve the poor from all communities.