Muslim workers, residing in the Italian town of Monfalcone, have been banned by far-right mayor from praying inside their two cultural centres since November, Free Malaysia Today reported.
According to the report, the Muslim residents assemble in a privately owned construction site to perform the Friday prayer as they await a court decision later this month to settle a zoning issue they say has barred their constitutional right to prayer.
Immigrants make up a third of this city of 30,000 inhabitants outside Trieste, most of them Bangladeshi Muslims who began arriving in the late 1990s to build cruise-liners for ship builder Fincantieri, whose Monfalcone shipyard is Italy’s largest.
For Mayor Anna Cisint, the restriction on prayer is about zoning, not discrimination.Urban planning regulations tightly limit the establishment of places of worship, and as a mayor in a secular state, she says it is not her job to provide them.
