King Charles III visited Cambridge Central Mosque on Monday, 20 July, the Türkiye-backed building known as Europe's first eco-friendly mosque, in what its trustees described as the first official visit by a British king to a mosque.
The King, 77, toured the mosque and met its imams, trustees and members of the Muslim community in the English university city. He was shown the building's environmental features and praised its design, telling those who guided him he was impressed with "all the care and attention" that had gone into it, the BBC reported. Following custom, he removed his shoes before entering.
The mosque is the reason the visit reads as a Turkish story as much as a British one. It opened in 2019 as the first eco-friendly mosque in Europe, and it was built with contributions from the Turkish Diyanet Foundation. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended the opening, and according to Cambridge Mosque Trust board member Zeynep Coşkun Koç, he "was personally involved in every detail of the project." The Diyanet Foundation, Koç told Anadolu Ajansı, "has been our biggest supporter from the very beginning."
The trustees framed the day as a first. Koç noted that Queen Elizabeth II had visited a mosque in 2002, but that there had been no such visit for two decades, and that a reigning king had never officially visited one before. For the head of the British state, who is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, to tour a mosque built with Turkish support gave the occasion its weight.
Türkiye's presence ran through the guest list and the gifts. Among those attending were Türkiye's ambassador to London, Osman Koray Ertaş, the trust board members Koç and Selim Argün, and the British scholar Abdal Hakim Murad. The King was presented with Paşabahçe glassware inspired by the dome of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, a limited edition of Fuat Sezgin's "The Scientific Heritage of Islamic Civilization," and a book on the mosque's construction and the 23 awards its architecture has won. The mosque was hosting an exhibition, "Science and Technology in Islam," on the contributions of Islamic civilization to those fields.
Erdoğan welcomed the visit, and a letter from him was presented to the King during the tour. In it, the Turkish president said he considered the visit valuable at a time when, in his words, Islamophobia and racism are on the rise, a framing the mosque's trustees echoed. Koç called the day historically important both for the mosque and for the wider public.
The building itself has become a marker of what Turkish religious diplomacy can look like abroad. It brings together Islamic geometry and local Cambridge architectural elements, draws on natural light and timber, and has collected design awards since it opened. On Monday it drew the British king, shoeless inside a mosque that Türkiye helped raise.