Postcard from Inuvik

THE MIDNIGHT SUN MOSQUE, est. 2010 🇨🇦

If the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem means “the furthest,” then does that mean that the Midnight Sun Mosque on the literal edge of the Arctic Circle is the new Al-Aqsa?

Maybe not by exact distance from Mecca (that distinction belongs to Southland Muslim Association in Invercargill, New Zealand). Nor is it as it advertises, “the northernmost mosque in the world” (older and much larger mosques in Norilsk, Siberia vying for that title).

But there’s no doubt that the Midnight Sun is the world’s most isolated mosque, having travelled 4,000 km from where it was built, including 1,500 km on water, to finally reach its destination in Inuvik, NWT.

The local immigrant community was the first to prosper and organize well enough to construct a traditional mosque in the Far North, however, they’re by no means the first Muslims familiar with the Arctic.

Beginning in the early 1900s, a network of Lebanese peddlers ventured into the Canadian territories on river floats, selling their wares to Indigenous communities as they drifted along. The traders learned how to communicate and navigate from the local Indigenous populations. But trading was a job, not a career, for most Arab bachelors in the Far North. Their goal was purely extraction.

What’s changed is the economic prosperity of Arctic cities. Thanks to a diversity of rock and mineral mining projects, Inuvik jobs are often more stable, secure, and better paying than their southern city equivalents.

In just over a decade, the Muslim population grew from about ten to one hundred, mostly men. They include Sudanese, Somali, and Egyptians, virtually all of them displaced by war zones, despots, and failed states. Such national turmoil no doubt made the Arctic seem more hospitable and maybe equipped them with the survival instincts required of foreigners to endure nearly six months of straight darkness.