Carambeí Mosque

Hajj Ismail Muhammad adapted his house and turned it into a mosque. From that moment on, in addition to religious services, Hajj Ismail also started giving religious and Arabic classes to the local population. The Islamic community of Carambeí is formed only by the family of Hajj Ismail and a few other people from the city, not exceeding the number of 15 followers in the city (estimate), but the mosque has the full support of Muslims from the city of Ponta Grossa, who usually travel a lot to the place, especially on weekends for classes and prayers, thus bringing together the two communities, the one from Carambeí and the Sunni one from Ponta Grossa should give a total of about 30 Muslims who attend the Mosque of Carambeí. However, work has already begun to increase this number, and the Mosque receives direct support from the nearest large Mosque, the one in the city of Londrina. The Mosque today has a few spaces suitable for Muslims to pray, as well as a large kitchen, a veranda for recreation, a small library and places for ablution, and bathrooms. There are also rooms that have been adapted as classrooms, and the Hajj office.

The city of Carambeí is a small town in the interior of Paraná, with about 20 thousand inhabitants and located a few kilometers from Ponta Grossa, which is about an hour's drive from the capital Curitiba. The city stands out a lot because of the Dutch immigration, who arrived there en masse in the beginning of the 20th century. In the mid-2000s, the Sunnis in Ponta Grossa found it difficult to attend the local mosque, so CDIAL, one of the organizations that takes care of Islam in the country, decided to finance the rent of a prayer room for Sunnis in the city of Ponta Grossa. However, some of them objected in order not to see the community dividing even more and leaving the local mosque practically with no frequenters, so CDIAL decided to open a mosque in a nearby city, so that the Muslims would not always leave the mosque in Ponta Grossa to go there, only in sportive cases, and so it chose the city of Carambeí. To command this new mosque, a CDIAL chose Hajj Ismail Muhammad.