Khongor Mosque

The Khongor Mosque serves the small Muslim community of Khongor, a rural district (sum) of Darkhan-Uul Province in northern Mongolia, and was completed in 2007. It is one of several mosques built in Mongolia's provincial towns since the 1990s for ethnic Kazakh families who settled there for work in mining, farming or herding, away from the main concentration of Mongolia's Kazakh minority in the western province of Bayan-Olgii. Like most mosques in the country, it follows the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam practiced by Kazakh Muslims. Modest in scale compared with the larger mosques of the capital Ulaanbaatar, the building functions as the religious and social focal point for Muslim residents living across the surrounding Darkhan-Uul countryside, a role typical of the small, community-funded mosques that have appeared across northern and central Mongolia in recent decades.