On Hardwicke Lane, a tiny masjid faces hostility and xenophobia, but it can’t afford to move

In the north inner-city, wedged between Dorset Street and Hardwicke Street, is Hardwicke Lane.

Down this laneway, there’s an Islamic community centre that doubles as a small masjid, which is Arabic for mosque. 

There’s no sign on the building’s heavy green door. But a small plaque that reads, “Sultan Mecid Education Centre” is affixed to the wall above it. 

Tunahan Bilir pokes his head out of a small window, “Hello,” he says, waving. He’s in a suit and a navy-blue tie.

Faded yellow lines have stained the window panes. Their traces are on the building’s bricks and its green door, too.

They are detritus of all the eggs thrown at the masjid, said Bilir, its manager and imam, later. 

He points to bolts on the ground, saying people sometimes throw nails and bolts in the hope of flattening his or visitors’ car tyres. 

Inside, he plays a video on his phone of someone setting fire to their bin right outside the building, recently. The flames dance and swallow the bin. Bilir hollers, “Where are you going? Come here,” after a man, but he shrugs and drifts away. 

Someone broke into the masjid and stole its donation box, too, he says. “Around €500 was lost and reported to the police.”

They decided to go part-time. The masjid is now open for prayer only once a week, he says. “Only Jumma [Friday],” said Bilir.

Ideally, Bilir says, they’d want to move to a bigger and safer space, but they can’t afford to rent elsewhere, so they stay, bobbing and weaving around others on Hardwicke Street.

“The rents are expensive, and the place is small. This is not just a mosque, but it’s also a community centre, mainly for the Turkish community, but the other communities are welcome,” he said.

That the local government should aid “faith-based communities” to thrive by offering a shared hub in the north-east inner-city that people like Bilir and those of other faiths rent a space in is one recommendation of a recent report from the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice (JCFJ), a faith-driven organisation advocating for social equality. 

Steps like that can “make access to services simpler for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, reduce space for misinformation and tension, and support a more flourishing civic life in the north-east inner-city”, says the report.

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council has not yet addressed queries sent on 22 October, including one asking about its response to the report’s suggestions. 

The view from the inside 

Visitors to the masjid must take off their shoes at the door. It’s a tradition and a mark of respect for Islamic prayer halls.

The door opens to a tiny entrance hall and an even-smaller kitchen. The prayer space is upstairs, where a sajjadah (prayer mat) rests in the corner of the room, under strands of rosary beads.

There is a whiteboard on the wall, and a few small desks are dotted around the room for classes.

The walls are adorned with strings of Ramadan ornaments like paper minarets and paper moons clinging to lines of pipes on the ceiling.

On a square table sits a plate of chocolate-glazed biscuits. A masjid volunteer brings hot black tea, served in hourglass-shaped Middle Eastern tea cups. 

The place can fit around 50 people for Friday namaz (prayer), says Bilir. But they will be squeezed in, he says. It’s not comfortable.

He says some Muslim Somali people in the neighbourhood also come to the masjid, and so do Irish converts. 

Nowhere to run to

Last year, the “Grá na hÉireann East Wall” account on X published a picture of Bilir standing on Hardwicke Lane, in his suit and tie, gazing down at his phone. 

Behind him, a cluster of men were sitting on their knees on the ground with their shoes tucked beside them.

The men look solemn; it looks like the end of a group prayer when some Muslims stay on their knees a bit longer to mutter private hopes and wants to Allah.

One Black man darts a direct, unhappy glance at the camera like he’s noticed someone’s watching. 

“Welcome to Dublin North Inner City this is the new Hardwicke Street, I remember Dublin City in the rare all the time,!! #IrelandisFull” reads the post.

“With buildings hard to find, it is not uncommon for the practice of religion to spill on to the street,” says the JCFJ report.

Bilir says that just recently, a guy shouted at a group of worshippers trickling out of the masjid.

He tried to calm the man down, he says, asked him to cut people a break and come upstairs for a chat instead, but he wouldn’t budge.

“He was using the F word again and again and again, and they recorded people coming out of the masjid without asking, and they put us on TikTok,” said Bilir.

“Physical verbal abuse is very often, like every Friday,” he said.

He’s bewildered about all that, said Bilir.

Even the masjid’s name, Sultan Mecid – which is a registered charity – he said, is an ode to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid, and his aid and solidarity with Irish people as they grappled with famine and hunger under British colonial rule.

Leaving communities like those at Hardwicke Lane’s masjid to face complicated upheavals on their own “runs the risk of hollowing out precisely the networks that keep vulnerable residents connected to wider society”, says the JCFJ report. 

Ain't it hard just to live?

Anti-immigrant accounts pin the blame for crime and anti-social behaviour on Hardwicke Street on the presence of immigrants in the area.

But exploring newspaper archives shows that issues in the north inner-city, including on Hardwicke Street, have been long-running, dating back to the 1980s at least.

Over four decades later, Janet Horner, an area councillor, says she’d chalked up some of the hardships faced by Bilir and the masjid on Hardwicke Lane to the neighbourhood’s persistent anti-social flare-ups.

But when people are specifically targeted and shouted at for their faith, it is different, she said, and she will check on Bilir again soon. 

Irish anti-immigrant accounts on X and others on social media fearmonger about Muslims and complain that there are already too many Muslim communities and prayer spaces.

One post on X features a video of a map showing Islamic community centres and masjids dotted across the country, with ominous music playing in the background. “Islam in Ireland. Are people even aware of the rapid spread,” it says. 

As people rioted outside Citywest hotel and transit centre last week, someone commented: “no iPAS no mosques”, under a participant’s livestream on YouTube. 

“The number one name for boys birthed is Mohammed?! WTF happened to Henry, Willie, or Sam?!” said another comment. 

Christians (mostly Catholics) made up about 76 percent of the population of Ireland in 2022, according to the census that year. People with no religion accounted for 14 percent. 

Muslims made up just about 1.6 percent in 2022. That’s up from 1.1 percent in 2011, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

The most popular baby boy’s name in Ireland last year was Jack, not Mohammed, according to the CSO. 

“Jack has held the top spot since 2007, with the exception of 2016, when James was the most popular name,” it says. 

A country profile for Ireland in the European Islamophobia report drafted by two researchers at the University of Limerick, outlines concerns about a surge in Islamophobia in Ireland alongside growth of the broader anti-immigrant campaign in the country.

It points to underreporting of hate incidents and criticises the portrayal of Muslims in the mainstream press.

“This report highlights a sample of the evidence of contentious co-location of terms such as ‘Muslims’, ‘Islamic’, and ‘terrorist’”, it says.

Muslim women in the country especially struggle when looking for work, it says. 

“These have included experiences of discrimination in/looking for work, with the hijab being reported as a key factor for women in this regard,” says the report. 

Even back in 1997, when there were fewer Muslims living in Dublin, someone tried to burn down the masjid on South Circular Road. 

“An attempt was made to gain entry to the front of the mosque at about 6.30am before the blaze broke out,” says an Evening Herald article dated 30 June 1997.  

Know thy neighbour 

Bilir, the imam of the Hardwicke Lane Masjid, says that housing is so expensive in Dublin that he couldn’t find a place for his family, so he has had to leave them behind in the United Kingdom, and travel back and forth. 

Moving the masjid is out of the question for now, he said.

Says the JCFJ report: “Many of these faith-based communities describe various levels of hostility from neighbours who resent their presence.” 

And space scarcity is the “single biggest factor that decides what congregations can do in the north-east inner-city”, it says.

As they rent here and there, they become fragmented and hard to reach, says the report.

It quotes one “community leader” as saying, “You can’t actually keep track of where they are, because they don’t have the spaces.”

Evictions and rent-hikes compound insecurity,” says the report.

“Many groups patch together interim arrangements, with services in one venue, classes in another, and outreach in a third, while they look for a suitable, more permanent home,” says the report.

Fr. Edmund Grace, a research fellow at the JCFJ, said he’s been trying to spotlight the scarcity of suitable places of worship for different faith communities for a while now.

He wrote about it on the JCFJ website in October, and alongside Imam Samsudeen MecSheain in the Irish Times last January, he said, sitting in a room at the JFCJ’s old offices where portraits of Pope Francis hung in the corridors. 

Grace says he’s seen mosques shutter because landlords want to revamp and sell. 

“They had one place, for instance, where 400 people could gather, and the owner decided to develop the property, and that just went,” he said.

The JCFJ’s report says some of the places that people gather to worship in are “desperate”, quoting one interviewee as saying that some carry “ real health hazards”.

“One north-east inner-city community now rents a warehouse in Dublin 12. Their pastor described the practical difficulties around baptisms and funerals,” it says.

Horner, the local councillor, who’d worked with the JCFJ in drawing up its new report, said that having a shared hub in the north-east inner-city would be important to accommodate Muslim city dwellers.

“They are living in the city centre,  and there needs to be somewhere nearby,” she said.

The JCFJ report quotes one of its research participants as saying that “some groups will always prefer to meet in the city centre – despite perceptions around crime – because ‘they feel less other’ there”. 

In the meantime, Bilir says he’s been talking to the Gardaí, asking for community gardaí to help close the space between the masjid-goes and the people who single them out on Hardwicke Street.

He says he doesn’t want people to get a permanent criminal record and ruin their lives for throwing eggs or shouting abuse at them. 

He’d rather talk it out, said Bilir, who volunteers his time in prisons and in Mater Hospital, offering spiritual guidance to anyone who seeks it.

A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said it can’t comment on specific cases and locations. 

But its “community policing teams maintain regular contact with a diverse range of establishments and respond to concerns raised on anti-social behaviour on an ongoing basis”, they said.

Meanwhile, Dublin City Council has not had an integration strategy since its last one expired in 2020, and so hasn’t formalised fresh ideas for togetherness and cohesion into an actual plan that can help communities like the masjid-goers on Hardwicke Lane.

That’s also mentioned in the JFCJ report, which underscores the role of faith-based communities in aiding integration. 

Horner says Hardwicke Street's Irish residents don’t talk to her either, so she can’t help bridge a connection between them and the area’s immigrant communities.

In response to an interview request sent on WhatsApp last week, someone who introduced themselves as a “PA” to local independent Councillor Christy Burke texted back to say he wasn’t available for an interview. 

Bilir, the imam at Hardwicke Lane masjid, says that if people really got to know the community that comes to Sultan Mecid, they’d stop hating on them. 

In Arabic, he says, “الناس أعداء ما جهلوا”. People see the enemy in what they don’t know.