CRETEIL, France - On a recent Friday, 200 Muslim worshipers crowded into a former carpentry workshop in Creteil for noon prayers. The men knelt on red carpets in a first-floor hall, the women squeezed into the tiny administrative office upstairs.
Outside the makeshift mosque, Karim Benaissa watched other men lay rows of rainbow-colored carpets on a damp concrete slab. "Even when it's cold, there are more faithful outside than inside," said Benaissa, an Algerian with a tightly trimmed beard who heads the Creteil Union of Muslim Associations. "It makes me ashamed."
But next June, Creteil Muslims are scheduled to move into a new, $7.4 million mosque with room for more than 2,500 worshipers. The nearly finished building, with its 81-foot minaret, stands on a knoll overlooking the town's picturesque lake, within sight of City Hall and the local police station.
The mosque will make Creteil something of an exception in Europe. From London to Cologne to Marseille, governments and residents are fighting the rise of minarets on their skylines in campaigns that underscore cultural, religious, and ethnic divides within a continent undergoing its most dramatic demographic change in half a century. Islam is now Europe's second-largest religion after Christianity, and its fastest-growing.
But Creteil's city government is helping Muslims build and finance what will be one of France's largest new mosques.
"We wanted the mosque to be built where everyone could see it," said Mayor Laurent Cathala, who can watch the construction from his 11th-floor office. "We didn't want to hide it."
Still, the mosque did not come this far without a struggle. French authorities are attempting to deport its imam; anti-immigrant city council members are protesting the use of public funds for the mosque's adjacent cultural center; and some townspeople say they are afraid women may no longer be allowed to wear swimsuits at the lake, for fear of offending the modesty of the worshipers. (Not so, says the mayor.)
In London, proposals for a megamosque for 12,000 worshipers near the main park for the 2012 Olympic Games have sparked massive resistance.
In the Tuscan hill town of Colle di Val d'Elsa, Italy, protesters pelted local Muslims this year with sausages and dumped a severed pig's head at the front gate of the construction site of a large, golden-domed mosque. Consumption of pork is forbidden in Islam.
