Records posted by: YBirt

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Jamia Masjid, 28-32 Howard Road

Posted in:

Building

Author:

YBirt

Bradford's oldest mosque was established by the Pakistani Muslim Association in 1958 at 30 Howard Street. It sits a row of mid-nineteenth-century terraced housing (Nos. 14-32) which listed as Grade II buildings. Originally the mosque provided very practical services alongside acting as a place of worship such as translating official documentation and addressing letters written home for those migrants with poor language skills. The ongoing work of the historian Irna Qureishi shows that main of the core founders of the Howard Street mosque were Pathans who came had come to Bradford via careers as sailors in the British merchant fleet.

At the time of the mosque's foundation, Pakistan was undivided, so the association had members from both East and West Pakistan, or Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. For its first decade, it served as a pan-Sunni institution, and incorporated members of different South Asian Sunni denomenations, both Barelwi and Deobandi. After that, Punjabi and Pathan Muslims from Chhachh in Pakistan took control of Howard Street and installed a full-time Deobandi imam. As a consequence, during the 1960s, other mosques were established in Bradford that branched off from Howard Street on both denomenational and ethnic lines. The mosque was later extended into No. 28 and then from 1979 into No. 32. All three properties are thoroughly amalgamated.

Sources and Attribution

"14-32 Howard Street", Historic England, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1133060?section=official-list-entry.

S. Saleem, The British Mosque (Swindon: Historic England, 2018).

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