Uraza Bayram (Eid ul-Fitr), a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, turned the Russian capital into "Moscowbad" again. The holiday showed that the vast influx of Muslim believers creates one and the same problems year in and out.Some say that Moscow needs more mosques to have the problem solved. However, as experience shows, Moscow-based Muslims do not want to visit new places for mass prayers.
There are four mosques in the city, but tens of thousands of Muslims come to the Cathedral Mosque in the center of Moscow, near the Olympic Sports Complex. Crowds of Islam followers inundate the streets in the area, create traffic jams, besiege the Moscow subway and bother Muscovites, who rush for work. As many as 50,000 Muslims came to the Cathedral Mosque on August 30 for prayers. Only 15,000 came to the mosque on Bolshaya Tatarskaya Street (Novokuznetskaya metro station).
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin ordered to arrange the prayer house at one of the pavilions of the exhibition center in Sokolniki Park. Moscow authorities were expecting up to 9,000 believers to come to the pavilion. However, the turnout was much lower than expected. The huge pavilion, with countless prayer rugs on the floor, was half-empty, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote. Read the rest on:
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