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The COREIS is located in Al-Wahid Mosque – the second official mosque in Italy after the one in Rome – in Via Giuseppe Meda 9, Milan. A modern building of recent construction without any particular architecture.

In the year 2000, with the unanimous approval of all the political parties, Milan City Council permitted the construction of the Al-Wahid Mosque – the second official mosque in Italy after the one in Rome – inside the COREIS headquarters in Via Giuseppe Meda 9, Milan. In the Al-Wahid Mosque there is a training school for Italian imams who deliver sermons in Italian every Friday. At the same time, Italian COREIS has had a great deal of experience with the immigrant communities, including the Turkish, Pakistani, Moroccan, Bosnian and Senegalese ones. This bears witness to the universal nature of Islam, which unites different peoples in a single community, the ummah, irrespective of their national, ethnic and cultural origins.

For eight centuries Islam was not visibly present in Italy, and many people would still like to confine it to a very special historical period like that of Frederick II in the Kingdom of Sicily. The recent wave of immigration to Italy, which started in the 1980s, has been the cause once again of an important Islamic presence in the country. It would, however, be reductive to continue to regard these events from the historical, quantitative, sociological and anthropological points of view without taking into account their effective spiritual significance in the cycle of time. In the last twenty years, the Italian Muslims belonging to Italian COREIS (Comunità Religiosa Islamica- Italian Islamic Community) have witnessed a number of epoch-making changes that have renewed in Westerners their memory of their own sacred origins, which are also present in Judaism and Christianity, and, in Easterners, a renewed intellectual vision of the Islamic religion. This was the original intention behind the foundation of an association of native-born Muslims that has organized numerous conferences, university lectures and training courses, and promoted publications. Distant from any proselytism, which is unfortunately rife in all religious misconceptions, dialogue has become the antidote to ideological exploitation and the preferred means of recognizing the validity of the other religions. As the founder of COREIS, Shaykh Abd al Wahid Pallavicini, put it, the metaphysical reference to the value of dialogue in the continuous quest for a more fundamental knowledge of reality, «Is the testimony of the universality of Islam, conveyed to our compatriots by the presence of us- Italian Muslims - which prevents our co-religionists from feeling they are condemned to always being immigrants in this world that belongs to the One God, the one and the same for all of us, “the Lord of the East and the West” (Koran 73:9), the geographical and spiritual poles between which we ask to be helped to form a bridge».

COREIS has always been focused on promoting interreligious dialogue, especially with the Jewish community and the Catholic Church, thanks to its president, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahid Pallavicini, who was present in Assisi in 1986 at the ecumenical meeting organized by Pope John Paul II. In line with this approach, COREIS decided to participate, as the only representative of Italian Islam, in the three world congresses of Imams and Rabbis for Peace, the last of which, entitled “Israel-Palestine: the Sacredness of Peace”, was held in Paris in 2008 as part of the interreligious program of UNESCO. In the same spirit of fraternity and collaboration, COREIS has staged a series of meetings in Italy entitled “Italian Imams and Rabbis in Dialogue”, which took place in 2007 and 2008 in six Italian cities, in collaboration with the Italian Rabbinical Assembly. With regard to the Islamic–Christian dialogue, COREIS has taken part in the initiatives of the group of 138 international Muslim scholars, clerics and intellectuals who, in 2007, sent a letter entitled “A Common Word between Us and You” to all the Christian authorities in the world. Yahya Pallavicini, together with representatives of the other signatories of the letter, participated in the first Islamic-Catholic Forum, which was held in the Vatican in November 2008 in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI. In December 2008, as a recognition «for their noble contribution to the development of the intercultural and interreligious dialogue promoted for over twenty years», the Mayor of Milan conferred the Certificate of Civic Merit, the Ambrogino Award, to COREIS Italiana.

Starting from a virtual visit through the website, students will be driven by teachers to a general discussion about dialogue, using also more resources and interactive videos.
At the end of activities students of different cultures could prepare a short summary to disseminate the experience in the school.
See this online brochure:
http://www.coreis.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/dentro_la_moschea_2016-2017.pdf