ABAN24 - A viral online claim that Denmark plans to build 30,000 new mosques this year is completely false, the Danish government said Tuesday.
“Denmark takes a historic step towards the Muslim religion announced 30,000 mosques will be build across the country this year,” said the text underneath a composite image posted on Facebook on March 24.
The post included two photographs, one of Denmark’s outgoing Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen holding a copy of the Quran, and another of a Copenhagen mosque.
However, a spokesperson for the Danish Prime Minister's Office said in a statement it had not announced the building of 30,000 mosques and that the photo of Frederiksen was fake.
“The Prime Minister’s Office can refute the claim. There has been no such announcement by the acting Danish Government nor any previous Danish Government,” the statement said. “Furthermore, the photo in question is fake."
“The Prime Minister’s Office generally considers it problematic that manipulated photos are being circulated with false descriptions.”
Denmark’s Ministry for Rural, Urban and Church Affairs said in an email the claim was false and that it was not the government that initiated the construction of religious buildings, but religious communities themselves.
The image of Frederiksen is an edited visual from a summit she attended in Harpsund, Sweden, in November 2024. She was pictured speaking at the event in the same outfit, and in front of a similar background but was not pictured holding a Quran.
There are 6 million people in Denmark, according to Statistics Denmark. If 30,000 mosques were built, that would equate to one for every 200 people.
Of Denmark’s population, around 4.2 million are members of Folkekirken, the mainstream Evangelical-Lutheran Church. There are no official statistics on the number of Muslims in Denmark, but a website about the country, produced by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says there are around 270,000.
Folkekirken says there are around 2,300 churches in Denmark. There were around 190 mosques in Denmark as of 2022, according to a paper in the Journal of Islamic Studies.
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