In an attempt to get past a violent, protracted conflict, India’s minority Muslims intend to start construction of a new mosque in the same city later this year, where Hindu devotees get ready to dedicate a massive temple to one of their holiest deities.
Construction of the mosque would start in May, following the holy month of Ramadan, according to Haji Arfat Shaikh, the head of the development committee of the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation (IICF), which is leading the project.
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The mosque would take three to four years to build, according to Reuters.
In 1992, extremist Hindus destroyed Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya, claiming it was constructed over an old temple located where the Hindu deity Ram is said to have been born.
Relations between the Hindu and Muslim populations had been damaged by the conflict for decades, and the demolition of the mosque led to widespread riots that claimed 2,000 lives, most of them Muslims.
In 2019, the highest court in India declared that the mosque’s demolition was illegal, but it also found that there was evidence of a non-Islamic building underneath it. It mandated that Muslim community leaders be given land elsewhere in the city so they could build a mosque, and Hindu organisations be granted the site to build a temple.
Muslim organisations have had difficulty raising money and starting work at a barren location some 25 km (15 miles) distant, despite the fact that building of the $180 million temple started within months and the first phase is scheduled to open on Monday.
