The Roman Catholics have Holy Redeemer, the Anglicans have St. John’s, and the Methodists have the Wesley Cathedral. And now the Muslims in Belize have their own central place of worship. It’s called the Masjid Al-Falah and it located at the corner of Central American Boulevard and Faber's Road. It is an impressively designed mosque – built out of locally made bricks – and when completed will cover 12,000 thousand square feet. Construction started a year ago and the work on first phase – the prayer hall has been completed. In keeping with Muslim practice, it will be an open prayer hall – air conditioned and accessible to the public virtually the entire day. It was officially opened to the public at a ceremony this morning where the guest list included the Chief Justice and the Iranian Ambassador.

Imams Kaleem El-Amin and Ismail Omar Shabazz told us having a place for the 3,000 Muslims in Belize is important.

Imam Kaleem El-Amin,
“We open it to the Belizean people, to the Muslims, to the Christians, to anyone who wants a place where they can come and pray. The first house that we had, a prayer house, they were small and as the Muslim community continues to grow, we need to expand. We had the school and masjid was in the Islamic center but now it is separated and it is being solely a place for prayer.

This center will give us the opportunity to not only make the prayers but to call to prayer. And so in the morning some people will be hearing at 5:15 the Muslim call to prayer, they will hear it at midday, in the evening, and the latest prayer is at 7 in the night.”

Imam Ismail Omar Shabazz
“It is an educational center. If somebody has to sleep in there, sometimes we sleep in there like during the month of Ramadan, when we have the night of prayer – everyone comes to the masjid and spend that night and go until the morning. It is important because everyone Muslim community, whether it is Belize or elsewhere, always try to have a center and from there you stretch out in other parts of the community. So this is very important.”

Imam Kaleem El-Amin,
“There is a concept in the Muslim community that the whole world is a prayer house for God but having a special place where we people can meet and congregate and sometimes be out of rain, out of the elements, you can have quietness, you don’t have traffic through it. So in that sense it is significant. And then in the religion, we are encouraged to beautify God’s house so the Muslim is told don’t spare any expense when it comes to building something for God because God is beautiful and he loves beauty. So we have presented a type of building that will show some of the cultural aspects of the Muslim world in its design and its appearance.

This building is turned directly towards Mecca. The other building we had wasn’t turned directly to Mecca. When we were praying inside we had to make the lines of the prayer rows twist. But now this building is oriented so the significance for Muslims is that a person can come in here, they know they are turning towards Mecca, and all the traditional things of a masjid have been taken into consideration.”

Dr. Ghadiri Abyaneh, Iranian Ambassador to Mexico
“It is better to praise God in a mosque. It is called a kind of house of God for Muslims and it is really good that they have this mosque and I hope they can have more because in Islam it is recommended they pray five times a day in a mosque. And because of this in every Islamic country in every region, every place, they have mosques to be easy for them to go and to come back.”

The prayer hall can hold 300 people. It was built at an estimated cost of half a million dollars. The Muslim community is now raising funds to finish the mosque. They plan to add meeting rooms, a library, kitchen, home for the imam, a boardroom and classrooms.