INTRODUCTION
Al Huda,
Images from a Roman mosque
- Al Huda in Arabic means The Right Way and it is also the name of a very popular small underground mosque in Rome.
A former garage of outskirt, Al Huda has opened in 1994 becoming in time an emblematic 'new place' of the Italian capital. Unknown to the city, it is well known to hundreds of Arab and Muslim people whose work and live in the popular north-east of Rome 'Centocelle' neighborhood, and more felt in heart by them than the famous Paolo Portoghesi's 'Moschea di Roma' (the Italian Islamic Center and the biggest European mosque).
I stepped in Al Huda for first time in a rainy afternoon of January 2007, pushed by curiosity, and also to get in touch better with an almost unknown world. I kept going at the mosque for more than one year, until the Muslim holy month of Purification and Fast of Ramadan in September 2008, and still now when I can and I am in Rome I go there. Mainly from the lands of northern African Maghreb, people come here are also originally from all over the Muslim world, from South-East Europe (as Albania), to Middle-Orient (as Lebanon), to the far Asian countries (as Bangladesh and Pakistan) and they have formed a certain big community.
It is here that this Muslim community meets and celebrates festivities, and faces challenges of his future. An 'identity place' of different generations of new Italians and sign of a multiethnic and against racism Italian time too, Al Huda is expected to be closed, maybe this year (2013, which marks the first black African Italian minister in history of Italy, Cecile Kyengie, Minister for Integration, born in Congo), to move by Arab foreign funds, for a modern and biggest mosque in same area.