Muhammed Sayyed remembers when he arrived in Guelph in 1992 and there wasn't a single mosque in the city to serve the needs of the Muslim community.
“We didn’t have any mosque here,” said the president of the Muslim Society of Guelph on Saturday. “We used to go to Cambridge for our main prayer services.”
Things have changed considerably as the Muslim community of Guelph has blossomed over the past 20 years.
“We have five full-time prayers being held in Guelph every week,” Sayyed said, including one at the University of Guelph.
“We built our first mosque in 1995 on Marlboro Street. Then we built our second Mosque on Norwich Street and in 2012 we started the third one here,” Sayyed said.
Plans are now well underway to expand the society’s 286 Water St. home.
On Saturday the MSOG held its annual community barbecue, with a big crowd from the Muslim community joined by neighbours and local politicians in celebration.
Sayyed outlined the plans the society has to improve and expand.
They include new and improved road access from Municipal Street and Denver Road, a new parking lot on the property with 100 additional parking spots and, most importantly, a new two-storey, 10,000 square-foot multi-purpose hall to the main 40,000 square-foot building.
The society has already raised roughly $1.25 million of the estimated $3 million cost of the entire project.
The MSOG moved into the former school building on Water Street in 2012. It now contains a daycare, a Montessori school and a private Islamic Meezan School.
Sayed said the building is getting so crowded that school classrooms are being taken over for other purposes.
“The school building will go back to being just for a school building. Right now we are borrowing three classrooms for use a prayer hall,” Sayyed said.
“The school needs more classrooms and we don’t have the room.”
The on-site parking lot will help ease the problem of people parking on Water Street, he said.
The MSOG has two prayers on Fridays, which attract roughly 450 people combined.
“We need the space. We’ve tried to manage it by changing the prayer time and by holding multiple prayers and we’re just running out of room, out of space and out of parking.”
