Oh chacha ji if you have read what Mosques used to be in the Prophets time they were community centres and inportant matters were discussed there throughout time mosques have changed alot.
And why do you cherry pick mosques why cant you make a youth centre instead of going to a marasi concert or a sheesha shop?
I agree with you bro. The reason I mentioned masjids is because in the UK, the only institutions created by British Pakistanis are the masjids. We also have community centres, but they were funded by the state many years ago. The masjids however are entirely privately funded, owned by us and Alhamdulillah abundant.
In the town I live in there are probably ~20,000 Muslims, we have 3 large masjids with capacity in the 1000's and we also have 11 smaller ones. We should be thankful to our elders who worked as manual labourers yet spent thier money to illuminate our city with houses of Allah.
What we as a community must now do is build on that work. The masjids only see people at namaz time (only a few rows of namazi) and children only attend during the madarsa classes. The community will fund repair and upgrade to the masjids, even fund new ones (the one near my house is only a few years old) but it is our duty now to fund thier functionality too.
5 of these 14 masjids are large enough to have rooms function as a youth centre today. Unfortunately we don't move forwards on these ideas as they need money for equipment, staffing etc and our community doesn't understand the benefit this will bring.
We need to make them the hubs of the community they used to be during the early days of Islam. You are right when you say we must stop spending money on stupid things and spend here.
