No Place to Pray for Muslim Workers in This Italian City

Italy – Hundreds of Muslim men performed Friday prayers in the northeastern Italian town of Monfalcone. They knelt in a concrete parking lot with their heads bowed to the ground.

They are just a fraction of the Muslims in the city who since November have been banned from praying at two cultural centers by Monfalcone's right-wing mayor.

Instead, they have gathered at this privately owned construction site as they await a court ruling later this month to resolve the zoning issue, which they say has denied them their constitutional right to worship.

Among them was Rejaul Haq, a property owner, who expressed his frustration at what he and many other Muslims perceive as harassment in their city due to the ban on worship.

“Tell me where should I go? Why do I have to get out of Monfalcone? I live here, I pay taxes here!" complains Haq, a naturalized Italian citizen who arrived from Bangladesh in 2006.

“Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jehovahs, if they all have their own churches, why can't we have one?”

One third of the 30,000 residents of the city who live outside Trieste are immigrants, as reported from the Sundaily site.

Most of them are Bangladeshi Muslims who began arriving in the late 1990s to build yachts for shipbuilder Fincantieri, whose Monfalcone shipyard is the largest in Italy.

Their presence is immediately noticeable, whether it is Bangladeshi men cycling to and from work or at the ethnic grocery store on the corner.

For Mayor Anna Cisint, the prayer restrictions are a matter of zoning, not discrimination. City planning regulations severely restrict the establishment of places of worship, and as the mayor of a secular country, she says it is not her job to provide them.

“As mayor, I'm not against anyone, I won't even waste my time fighting anyone, but I'm also here to enforce the law,” Cisint remarked.

He also argues that the number of Muslim immigrants, driven by family reunification and new births, is too much in Monfalcone

“There are too many (Muslim immigrants). You have to tell it like it is,” he said.

His warnings about the social unsustainability of Monfalcone's Muslim population have propelled Cisint into national headlines in recent months.

They have also guaranteed him a place in the upcoming European Parliament elections for Matteo Salvini's anti-immigrant League party, which is part of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's coalition government.

The League has for decades blocked the opening of mosques in their base in northern Italy. However, the problem is nationwide in predominantly Catholic Italy.

Islam is also not among the 13 religions that have official status under Italian law, complicating efforts to build places of worship.

“Currently, there are less than 10 officially recognized mosques,” says Yahya Zanolo of the Italian Islamic Religious Community (COREIS), one of the country's main Muslim associations.

That means that of Italy's estimated two million Muslims, most are housed in thousands of makeshift places of worship, leading to prejudice and fear in the non-Muslim population, according to Zanolo.