Calgary mosque to shut its doors, turn page on troubled past

A downtown Calgary mosque with a troubled past will permanently shut its doors Friday.

Imam Navaid Aziz hopes the move to a new location will be a fresh start for the congregation at the 8 Street and 8 Avenue sanctuary.

The mosque made headlines three years ago when it was reported a group of men, who had left Calgary to fight alongside extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, had prayed there.

“It overshadowed all of the positive efforts and all of the positive emotions that I’d affiliated with that space in terms of teachings, in terms of marriages that I’d conducted, in terms of the children that were born and, you know, had their religious procedures done in the mosque,” said Imam Aziz.

The location for the new mosque has not been revealed, but Aziz told News Talk 770 it is within a two block radius of the old sanctuary and will be two to three times its size.

Aziz said The Islamic Information Society of Canada, which runs the mosque, has been scouting a new location for over a year, as the lease has run out on the current location. He said the landlord plans to renovate the bottom floors of the building and needs the mosque vacated to do it. But, he says they welcome the move to a larger building.

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“We offer two Friday service prayers, which accommodate around 400 people,” he added. “Even that has overflowed and we often get complaints from our neighbours that ‘you guys are blocking off the alleyway in the back’… we even contemplated doing a third and fourth service just so it wouldn’t be as crowded.”

He expects to provide more details on the new location in May.

Aziz said the price of the new location is $1 million less, when you factor in construction, than what they had budgeted for two previous locations they had been considering.