The trust constituted by the Sunni Waqf Board for the construction of an alternative mosque in Ayodhya has invited Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath for inaugurating the hospital, school, community kitchen, library and other public utility facilities on the premises of the structure, The Times of India reported on Sunday. The invitation comes two days after Adityanath said it was unlikely that he would be invited for such an event.

On August 7, Adityanath had said that he will not attend the inauguration of a mosque in Ayodhya even if he is invited, as he is a practicing Hindu. He, however, added that no one would invite him anyway. “The day they will invite me, then a lot of people’s secularism will be in danger,” he claimed. Instead, the chief minister said, he would continue to work and ensure that the benefits of the government’s welfare schemes reach everybody.

However, the trust, the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation, said that there will be no foundation stone-laying ceremony for the mosque. “There is no provision for laying a foundation stone for a mosque in the four schools of thought in [Sunni] Islam – Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi and Maliki,” the secretary of the foundation, Athar Hussain, told The Times of India.

The mosque will be built on a land at Dhannipur village in Ayodhya. “These [hospital, school etc.] are public utility projects and we will invite Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to lay the foundation of these buildings,” Hussain said.

Hussain added that the name of the mosque is yet to be decided, but it will not be named after Mughal emperor Babar, unlike the demolished structure. “For Allah, namaz is important, not the name of the mosque,” Hussain said.

The Ayodhya case

In a landmark verdict on November 9 last year, the Supreme Court had ruled that the disputed land in Ayodhya would be handed over to a government-run trust for the construction of a Ram temple. The court said that the demolition of Babri Masjid was illegal and directed the government to acquire an alternative plot of land to build a mosque. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of the temple on August 5.

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