Serendipity, coincidence or just plain Mystery – call it what you will – but tommorrow, in Spain, the New Mosque of Granada will be officially opened. A Google news search for new Granada Mosque yields some details as does reading this Kashmir Observer article or this Boston Globe article – (written by Tom Haines who happens to be travelblogging around the world with a laptop and the greenest of my envies!). [Update: 07-Mar-2005 – these links are out of date]

But what really grabbed my attention was the headline from Knight-Ridder Newspaper’s Washington Bureau entitled,
“In Chiapas, missionaries battle for converts”. Chiapas is a poor region in Southern Mexico where Mayan peasants practice a mixture of religions. Now it seems that, in the wake of the Zapatista uprising, Muslim missionaries from Granada are amongst them.

Curiously, Islam in Mexico appears to have two strains – a Sufi and a Sunni one. Even curiouser is that the leaders of these strains are British converts! Shaykh Abdalqadir al Murabit, formerly Ian Dallas is the worldwide leader of the Murabitun Sufi sect and Imam Omar, otherwise known as Mark Weston, who runs the Islamic Cultural Centre of Mexico.