Islam in the Arctic
[2] In areas where the midnight sun or polar night renders the five daily prayers impossible to tie to dusk and dawn, congregants typically either use the same timing as a more southern region, the holy city of Mecca or their homelands.
[4] In 2018, a delegation from the United Arab Emirates accompanied Adnan Amin, the Director-General of the International Renewable Energy Agency based in Abu-Dhabi, to the fifth Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavík, Iceland.
During the travels of Ibn Fadlan to Volga Bulgaria, he described how prayer times functioned "during the white nights" when in conversation with a local muezzin:[14][15] Day was breaking.
However, while the environmental issues surrounding the performance of religious obligations in northern climes were probably known in the wider Islamic world, the topic was generally ignored by Muslim scholars and writers.
[15] The Siberian-based Khanate of Sibir was the northernmost Islamic state in history, with its territories including parts of the shore of the Arctic Ocean.
This ran counter to what most ulema in Russia taught, stating that the prayer shouldn't be conducted during the summer months due to the solar conditions not being able to be met.
An early attempt to build a mosque in a major city (Yakutsk, about 450 kilometers (280 mi) south of the Arctic Circle) failed upon the outbreak of the First World War and the following October Revolution.
[2] After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, three central Muslim directorates competed for control of the Islamic population in Siberia, the far East and the far North; one of these three was absorbed into another, leaving the CDUMR and the Council of Muftis—the latter seen as closely tied to the Russian government.
[29] Twenty years later, Ali alone travelled northward to the Arctic Ocean as a merchant, stopping in Aklavik, but ultimately returning to Alberta.
[29] After the First World War, the Lebanese Muslim Peter Baker started a successful business transiting supplies north from Edmonton to the Mackenzie River to outfit the oil prospectors in the area alongside John Morie.
[30] When the indigenous tribes were largely given the right to vote in 1960, one of their first elections catapulted Baker to the status of Member of Legislative Assembly for the riding of Mackenzie North in 1964, and it is suggested that he was the one to propose Yellowknife as the capital of the territory.
[31] Following the completion of the mosque, the Muslim Welfare Centre in Toronto provided the funds to purchase an adjacent property to set up the "Arctic Food Bank".
[35] In 2018, a trucking warehouse in Whitehorse, Yukon, was converted into a mosque chiefly by cabinetmaker Fathallah Farajat, from the southern city of Hamilton, Ontario.
[39] The opening of the mosque, which was constructed with a financial contribution from the ZTF,[40] marked the first time that there was a Muslim prayer hall in every Canadian province and territory.
[41] In 2018, a study of Finland's Muslims living inside the Arctic Circle found Palestinian, Iraqi, Persian, Turkish, Bengali, Somali, Pakistani and Afghan immigrants - virtually all of whom practiced Sunni Islam.
[42] Norway's largest Arctic mosque is in Tromsø, built in 2006 by a convert to Islam and financed by a donation from an anonymous Saudi businessman.
