Barn Turned Mosque Wins User-Friendly Mosque Award

November 5, 2005

Source: The Globe and Mail

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/blog-mel-and-the-mayans/article22507824/

On November 5, 2005 The Globe and Mail reported, "The three-day festival of Eid al-Fitr began yesterday. Think eight or nine thousand people gathered to pray in a onetime dilapidated horse barn and riding school. You've got Canada's most user-friendly mosque of 2005. Which was the title bestowed on the Islamic Centre of York Region this week by the Canadian Islamic Congress: fourth winner of the annual User-Friendly Mosque Award on the basis of architectural design, inclusiveness and multigenerational programs focused on women, adolescents and children. Architectural design? A former horse barn? Well, what you have to see is what the congregation sees. This is a mosque of big dreamers, said Abdul Hamid Lachporia, one of the centre's three imams. Its members raised $1-million in six weeks in 1999 to launch the congregation's dreams for the future on 33 acres of pastured gentle hills at the edge of the Oak Ridges Moraine."