Finsbury Park Mosque, Islamic center in Finsbury Park, London, United Kingdom
Finsbury Park Mosque is an Islamic house of worship in the London Borough of Islington. The building comprises a two-story complex with ablution rooms on the ground floor and a main prayer hall on the upper level, whose carpeted floor marks rows for worshippers.
The congregation acquired the building in the early 1990s and converted it from an Anglican church into a mosque. After prolonged disputes over its leadership, the site received new management from the mid-2000s onward and opened up more actively to exchanges with the neighborhood.
The name honors Thomas of Canterbury, whose medieval chapel once occupied the same site. Today, neighborhood families use the courtyard as a meeting point after Friday prayers and exchange conversation in small groups.
Visitors should remove their shoes at the entrance on St Thomas's Road and can prepare themselves at the washbasins on the ground floor. The rooms are divided by gender, with women using a separate area.
In the basement, the administration keeps a small collection of handwritten Qurans that congregation members brought from their home countries. Some copies bear dedications in Urdu, Arabic or Somali and thus document the origins of the families.
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