Erdogan, Mahmoud Abbas join Putin in Moscow mosque inauguration

Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption The Turkish and Palestinian leaders Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mahmoud Abbas attended the mosque opening.

The mosque, which is the second largest in Russian Federation can accommodate up to 10,000 followers, and was built with funds from many Muslim countries.

The opening of the Grand Mosque in Moscow on Wednesday is a “milestone event” for the whole Muslim world, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, Sergey Naryshkin, has said. Reconstruction work began in May 2005, but in 2011 the old building was completely demolished.

However, it is one of only six mosques in the Russian capital, which local media say has a Muslim population of about two million, including around 200,000 practising Muslims, many of whom are forced to pray on the street during religious festivals. Available in the mosque can fit up to 10 thousand people at a time.

The $170m mosque – entirely funded by private donations – unveiled on Wednesday, the eve of Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha that is known as Kurban Bairam in Russian Federation . Plans for a mosque in one neighbourhood were dropped three years ago after protests by residents.

The newspaper cited a January poll by the Levada Center think tank that found 51 per cent of Muscovites are against the building of new mosques in the city. Only 4 percent support the idea.

“In Russia’s big cities, judgments of interethnic and inter-confessional issues are always more critical”, Karina Pipiya, a sociologist at the Levada Center, told The Moscow Times.