Saudi Arabia will fund and construct a massive Islamic centre in central Kabul, an Afghani government minister announced on Monday, following discussions in Jeddah.
The project will cost $100m and will be situated on a hilltop in the Afghani capital. It will contain a university and a mosque and will house up to 5,000 students, Dayi Ul Haq Abed, acting Hajj and religious affairs minister, told the Associated Free Press.
“The agreement was signed last week in Jeddah. The construction will start next year, in a couple months or so,” Abed explained.
The centre will be named after Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, he added.
The complex’s mosque is similar in design to the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital that was also built by Saudi Arabia during the 1980s. According to those estimates, the mosque will be able to hold 15,000 worshippers at one time.
The minister said that the centre would be jointly run by the religious ministries of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, despite other universities being run by the higher education ministry.