Lakemba Mosque

About

Lakemba Mosque, officially the Imam Ali bin Abi Taleb Mosque and widely known as Masjid Ali Bin Abi Talib, stands at 71-75 Wangee Road in the suburb of Lakemba in south-western Sydney. It is owned and operated by the Lebanese Muslim Association, whose offices share the same address, and is recognised as Australia's largest mosque.

The community first gathered for prayer on the site in a small house purchased by the LMA in the 1960s. That structure was demolished in the early 1970s, and the present mosque rose over five years of construction, opening in 1977 with a former Prime Minister in attendance. Funds came both locally and internationally, with about half drawn from the Middle East and the single largest gift from the Saudi royal family.

While the congregation was historically of Lebanese heritage, worshippers today include Australians of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali, and South-East Asian background, along with a small but growing number of converts. Most follow the Hanafi or Shafi'i schools.

The mosque offers classes in the prophetic biography, fiqh, and aqidah, and gives a platform to local shaykhs and visiting scholars. Friday gatherings draw several thousand, and Eid prayers regularly fill the building and streets, with crowds of thirty thousand in 2015 and forty to fifty thousand the next year. Since 2014 the mosque has anchored Australia's National Mosque Open Day.

History

The Lebanese Muslim Association, the first Muslim-centred organisation in Australia, acquired the original house on Wangee Road in the 1960s for use as a musalla. Construction of the present mosque began in the early 1970s and concluded with its opening in 1977. The current imam, Sheikh Yahya Safi, was appointed in 1996, and the assistant imam, Sheikh Jamaluddin El-Kiki, a graduate of the Islamic University of Madinah, joined in 2022, with Sheikh Mohamed Harby serving as deputy assistant imam and qari since 2015.