For its 41st anniversary this weekend, the Taipei Grand Mosque (台北清真大寺) will open its doors for two days of activities, including photographic retrospectives of the mosque and Taiwan's Muslim community and an exhibition of ebru, a traditional form of Turkish marbling and calligraphy.
The event will be held tomorrow and Sunday at the mosque located opposite Ta-an Forest Park on Hsinsheng South Road (
The Taipei Grand Mosque is a familiar landmark to most Taipei residents, but few have actually stepped inside the building. This weekend's event is both a literal and official opening of the mosque's doors, as Ishag Ma (
Unknown to many, Muslims have played an important part in Taiwanese history, though they now form only a small community of little more than 60,000 people. According to Ma, some of Taiwan's earliest Muslim immigrants were troops who came with General Shihlang (施琅), dispatched to Taiwan to end the renegade rule of Ming loyalist Koxinga (鄭成功) in 1683. The Muslim soldiers settled in Lugang, Changhwa County, which still has many people with distinctly Muslim surnames, such as Ma (馬) and Kuo (郭).
Being such a small community, Immam Ma says Taiwanese Muslims come under enormous pressure to renounce their faith and the Islamic way of life. "Many people of the Kuo clan still live in Lukang," Ma said, "but they have lost their Muslim faith. We have invited them to this event."
Ma said the event is primarily a cultural celebration, but another function will be to invite no longer practicing Muslims back to the faith.
"Muslims in Taiwan are very much misunderstood," Ma said, pointing to the violence of such groups as Hamas, the Taliban and Abu Sayyaf as characteristic of the media portrayal of Islam.
"We want to present the positive face of Islam," he said, citing the exhibition of ebru art as intended to highlight Islamic artistic achievement.
Ma also emphasized the great contribution made to Taiwan by its Muslim population, not least in the area of international diplomacy, where Taiwan often finds itself isolated from the international community.
"We served as an important link with the Middle East during the oil crisis," Ma said.
For the Muslim community in Taiwan, the mosque serves as an important education center, offering Arabic lessons every weekend. It is also the center of the community's social life, and draws many of the nearly 60,000 expatriate Muslims living in Taiwan.
In other steps to inform people about Islam, the Taipei Grand Mosque has a Web site still partially under construction and Ma has suggested redesigning the wide sidewalk in front of the mosque into an information corridor about Islam.
Event Notes
What: 41st Anniversary of Completion of the Taipei Grand Mosque
When: Tomorrow and Sunday 10am to 5pm
Where: 62 Hsinsheng S. Rd., Sec. 2, Taipei 〈北市新生南路二段62號〉
On the Net: http://www.taipeimosque.org
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
RSS