The Adhan will be heard in the four corners of Granada

GRANADA, Spain, July 8 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – After an absence of almost 500 years, the Adhan (call to prayer) and the muezzin’s cry of 'Allahu akbar' (God is greatest) will ring out Thursday, July 10, from the minaret of the Great Mosque of Granada, a leading British newspaper reported Tuesday, July 8.

"This will be a political act, because it is the first mosque to be opened by Spanish Muslims in over 500 years," Abdul Haqq Salaberria, a spokesman for the Islamic community in Spain, told The Times.

Aljazeera television and other Arab satellite channels will broadcast the Dhuhur (noon) prayers live at 2.30pm on Thursday, the daily said. 

The new Great Mosque of Granada is a building of subtle beauty, with design references to the Cordoba mosque and al-Aqsa Mosque of Al-Quds (occupied Jerusalem). 

The site of the mosque was bought 22 years ago, when it was still a small plot of farmland squeezed between a convent and a church on the crest of the Albaicin, the last Muslim quarter of Granada before the Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel reneged on their treaty with King Boabdil of Granada to guarantee religious freedom in Spain.

According to Salaberria, when the city council realized that Muslims intended to build a mosque, the land was redefined for residential use only, blocking construction of a public or religious building.

There followed a nine-year legal battle, which finally led to the erection of a life-sized model of the proposed minaret on the site in order to assess its visual impact and invite comment from the public.

Catholics Complain

However, the minaret prompted complaints from conservative Catholics nationwide and tensions grew in Granada, leading to further delays. Graffiti appeared, urging the city’s estimated 15,000 Muslims to "go home," but defenders of Spain’s new Constitution came out in favor of the project

"I was born a Muslim, it’s just that I wasn’t conscious of it until I was in my late twenties," Salaberria said.

"The period of Catholic Spain is actually very brief over the long view of history. When the first Muslims arrived here from Africa via Gibraltar they were few. The majority of Muslims in Spain were natives who converted freely and naturally.

Cordoba mosque

"After 800 years there was an ethnic cleansing which erased Islam from the face of Spain. Only the beauty of the Alhambra and the Mosque of Cordoba saved them from destruction," Salaberria said.

Building finally got under way in 1998, immediately after the Muslim fast of Ramadan.

"The design went through ten revisions. All this time there was an empty church standing unused right next to our site and we said: ‘Okay, let us convert that back into the mosque which it originally was,’" Said Salaberria 

"All of a sudden the church was restored and it is now used for weddings at weekends, so we Muslims saved it!"

The Convent of Saint Thomas, home to a cloistered order of nuns, has increased the height of the dividing wall, studding the top with broken glass and crowning it with a fence.

Putting the final touches to the mosque yesterday, Salaberria said that the minaret had been tested already.

"It was very emotional, some Muslim tourists came running, they could not believe that here was a mosque, in Granada of all places!

"The call to prayer is undoubtedly going to be a tourist attraction, because even though it is so normal in the rest of the Muslim world it will have a special sound here.

"We hope that Spaniards will understand when we say that this will be a new centre for Islamic Europe, that we do not want to re-conquer al- Andalus but we do want recognition," he added.