Kurd ministry orders nearly 4,000 mosques renamed after Kurdish religious figures

Left: Front gate of a mosque in Erbil (also called Arbil), capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. Iraq's Kurds are primarily Sunni.

The Arabic names of mosques in the Kurdish autonomous region will be renamed after Kurdish religious figures, a Kurdish government official said Wednesday.

The Kurdish Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs decided to change the Arabic names of mosques into Kurdish in a bid to add a sense of national identity to the religious institutions, the ministry's media director Meriwan al-Naqshabandi said.

According to official statistics, there are 3,686 mosques in the Kurdish autonomous region, most of which have Arabic names.

Many Islamic clerics criticized the decision. Kurds have always sought to be independent of the Iraqi State.

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