We went from the Kazhak family to a mosque that they attend. It was the first time I’d ever been in one. They had scarves at the entrance that we could put on our heads and a wall full of cubbies for our shoes. We all filed up to the second floor prayer room and wandered around. There is a domed ceiling/roof that really impressed me. If you stand under it, you can hear every voice in the room as if the speaker stood right by your side and spoke through a microphone. It was both wondrous and unsettling.
This building had been recently completed. Many of the more traditionally oriented of the congregation continue to use the old mosque. This one have 80 attendees, including women and children. This is a small fraction of the town as a whole.
Their Islamic faith is one of the things that set the Kazhaks apart. The highest concentration of them was in that town, which the guide always referred to as the Illegal Mining Town. Prejudice can be a problem in Mongolia, and Kazhaks are low on the totem pole. They formed a community much like China Town or Little Italy in the USA.
The mosque had windows running along two sides. From one of these you could just make out the dome from the old mosque in town. This was the only time on the trip that I recognized the presence of a mosque.
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