Meditation around Mint Tea

A Mint Tea in Paris

The Mosque in the 5th arrondissement is home to one of the most pleasant tea rooms in Paris. With its winding and green courtyards, it is a beautiful place to sip a Mint tea with good Moroccan pastries.

Its patio creates an atmosphere of calm and serenity, surrounded as it is by its finely sculpted arcades. The tea room, the presence of olive trees and fig trees, make it a real change of scenery in the Latin Quarter.

Very popular with Parisian families on Sunday afternoons, it is open until midnight for a Mint tea under the stars while contemplating the fascinating history of its walls.

Next time, ask the waiter for a Mouima Mint Tea or Green City to taste the difference and share the best Mint Tea experience in this unusual place.

The Great Mosque of Paris

With its minaret, 33 m high, it is the first and largest in France, installed on a plot of over one hectare. It is of Arab-Islamic architecture, inspired by the Alhambra Palace.

A first mosque project had been considered as early as 1895 by the Committee for French Africa, led among others by Théophile Delcassé, Jules Cambon, Prince Bonaparte and the Prince of Arenberg. The encyclopedia Wikipedia very aptly quotes what the journalist Paul Bourdarie relates in the newspaper La Revue indigène :

“ Such a proposal could not be forgotten and disappear. It corresponds too well to the policy that France owes to itself to follow towards its Muslim sons, and which must be translated sometimes into acts of political or administrative fairness and sometimes into gestures of sympathy or benevolence. "

The journalist Paul Bourdarie is the real father of the project of the Great Mosque of Paris by the constancy of his efforts so that it is finally erected. The political decision to build it was taken after the First World War, in tribute to the more than 100,000 dead Muslims who fought to liberate France.

Funded by Arab-Muslim countries, the Great Mosque of Paris was built and decorated by Moroccan craftsmen on the site of the former hospital of pity. Its first stone was laid in 1922. It was inaugurated on July 16, 1926, in the presence of President Doumergue and the Sultan of Morocco Moulay Youssef. M. Doumergue then celebrated the Franco-Muslim friendship sealed in blood on European battlefields, and he affirmed on this occasion that the Republic protects all beliefs.

The Righteous Forgotten Arabo-Muslims

Did you know that the Paris Mosque protected Jews during World War II?

And here's a fact history teachers should teach in college ... French film "Les Hommes Libres", directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi, sheds light on the remarkable true story of how Muslims took refuge to Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II.

The film is inspired by real events and in this case our "Schindler" is Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris until 1954.

Beneath the fortress of mosaics and peaceful gardens occupying an entire block of the Latin Quarter, it is revealed that the underground caverns of the mosque once served as a refuge for resistance fighters and French Jews, where they could receive certificates of Muslim identity.

Meanwhile upstairs, Si Kaddour Benghabrit , Algerian and Moroccan theologian and senior official, was making mosque tours to Nazi officers and their wives, unaware of what was going on under their feet

The most notable case of the mosque refuge was Simon Hilali, a Sephardic Jew who survived the Holocaust by posing as an Arab named Salim with the help of Benghrabit and who later became the most popular singer  using Arabic language of the time.

Ismaël Ferroukhi, the director of the film is still putting pressure on the ministries of culture and national education so that his film is shown in schools.

“It pays homage to people in our history who have been invisible. It shows another reality, that Muslims and Jews existed in peace. We must remember this - with pride. "

In case you want to know more about something that your textbooks cannot bring to your attention, the film "Free Men" is available on all VOD platforms.

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