Grande Mosquée de Paris: The Minaret and the Wartime Secret
Why is it significant?
Stand in the little square and look up at the square white minaret, edged in green tiles, rising above a wall of whitewashed plaster. If you did not know better, you would think you had stepped into a street in Fez.
Key Facts
| Place | Grande Mosquée de Paris: The Minaret and the Wartime Secret |
|---|---|
| Address | 2bis Place du Puits de l'Ermite, 75005 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.84210, 2.35510 |
| Part of Walk | Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the little square and look up at the square white minaret, edged in green tiles, rising above a wall of whitewashed plaster. If you did not know better, you would think you had stepped into a street in Fez. That is no accident: Moroccan craftsmen carved the plaster, cut the tiles and shaped the cedar wood of this mosque.
The Grande Mosquée de Paris was born out of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from North and West Africa fought for France, and tens of thousands of Muslims among them were killed. In gratitude, the French state funded a mosque in the heart of the capital. The first stone was laid in 1922, and it was inaugurated in July 1926 by the French president and the Sultan of Morocco. It is the oldest mosque still standing in mainland France.
Its first rector was Si Kaddour Benghabrit, an Algerian-born diplomat, polyglot and lover of music. When Paris was occupied in 1940, the mosque found itself at the centre of a quiet, dangerous story. According to testimonies gathered after the war, the mosque sheltered people hunted by the occupiers, Resistance members and some Jewish men, women and children, sometimes by giving them papers that described them as Muslims.
Historians still debate how many were saved, because nobody kept records of such things, and the numbers told later vary enormously. The best-known story concerns the Algerian-Jewish singer Salim Halali, whom Benghabrit is said to have protected by having a false family name engraved on a tomb in a Muslim cemetery. What is certain is that, under the noses of the occupiers, this place chose to protect rather than denounce.
Today the mosque is also part of everyday Paris: a garden courtyard with fountains, a tea room where people drink sweet mint tea under the fig trees, and a hammam. Visitors who are not Muslim may tour the courtyards outside prayer times. When you leave, cross Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire and enter the gates of the great garden opposite, then bear left and climb the little wooded hill.