France’s oldest mosque, in the Indian Ocean, gets a facelift

At France’s oldest mosque, a five-century-old edifice on the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, the sound of jackhammers is broken intermittently by recitals by the faithful hunched over in prayer.

At France’s oldest mosque, a five-century-old edifice on the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, the sound of jackhammers is broken intermittently by recitals by the faithful hunched over in prayer.

The white-and-blue prayer hall at the mosque in Tsingoni, used five times a day, is plagued by crumbling ceilings, leaks, giant cracks and damp.

“The humidity, the dust, the lack of ventilation, I can’t stand it. I’ve developed allergies,” complained Badirou Abdou, a local council representative who has prayed at the mosque since he can remember.

Abdou now worships in a temporary prayer hall one floor above the original, which is getting a much-needed facelift along with the rest of the mosque at a cost of some two million euros ($2.2 million) to the city of Tsingoni and the French state.

The building, perched on an island whose population is 95 percent Muslim, is the oldest working mosque in France and classified as a French Historic Monument since 2016.