People tend to think that mosques are places only for worship, but they are living places offering various services to the people at all times of day or night.

Levent Uçkan, the imam at Hasan Pasha Mosque, believes that mosques should be social complexes and not only places to worship five times a day. As the imam of the 116-year-old mosque in Kadıköy, Uçkan has turned his mosque into a place where people from different backgrounds gather. It is needless to say that the Hasan Pasha Mosque is unique with the social projects it carries out.

Having graduated from the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University, Uçkan chose to be an imam after working as a teacher and manager in several nongovernmental organizations. He was assigned to the mosque in Kadıköy about 10 years ago and soon became one of the most recognized faces in the neighborhood. He first decided to keep the Hasan Pasha Mosque open 24/7 as he believes that mosques should be there to serve the needs of people whether spiritual or physical all the times. He attended the Directorate of Religious Affairs' (DİB) project initiated 2011, which aims to turn mosques into social complexes, and became the imam of one of the 40 pilot mosques.

Apart from the services offered to the congregation of the mosque and the Quran courses given to people of all ages, Uçkan works for the people of his neighborhood as well. The mosque has a functioning soup kitchen that offers hot meals to the homeless as well as students, as university students densely populate Kadıköy, every day. About 330 students eat dinner at the mosque and volunteers hand out hot meals to the homeless in the neighborhood. On Uçkan's initiative, a mobile soup kitchen also helps those in need during winter.

"There are 25 student houses and two dormitories managed by Turkey's DİB and we are offering meals to the students two times a day. For the people who are living on the streets, the soup kitchen prepares the soups and distributes them at night," Uçkan said.

The Hasan Pasha Mosque also collaborates with Turkish Red Crescent and the Turkish Green Crescent Society, which helps peole fight addiction. "Every year, we manage to donate 1,000 units of blood to the Red Crescent from our mosque," Uçkan said. With 87,000 mosques, the DİB contributes to the blood donations of the Red Crescent up to five percent. Uçkan, however, claims that this may rise up to 35 percent if imams at other mosques encourage their congregation more. "Apart from our collaboration with the Red Crescent, we are working hand in hand with the Green Crescent as well in our fight with drug and alcohol addiction. We are offering spiritual guidance and rehabilitation and a roof over the heads of those who want to be free from their addictions," Uçkan said.

To offer shelter to addicts who want to recover, Uçkan turned the basement of the mosque into a guesthouse that currently shelters 10 recovering addicts.

"Our brothers and sisters who want to recover from their addictions stay at our guest house between night and morning prayers. We are working to free them from their addictions. So far, we helped 20 former addicts and now they are working at the mosque volunteers as well. The DİB and the Istanbul Mufti Office are backing our program targeting addicts."

Uçkan wants to overcome the tendency to consider mosques places where you can only worship. "We have to make more of our mosques," he said. "If mosques become places where there is no social activity, then we lost what we have in our hands. This is a place of worship as well as a public institute and a management."

With Uçkan's vision, Hasan Pasha Mosque has become one of the symbol mosques in Istanbul. Every year, Uçkan and the volunteers in the mosque give an extensive briefing to the congregation about the ongoing projects and whether the projects have been fruitful or not and ask the congregation about their opinions of the projects the mosque carried out.

"We believe that we can do more than what we are doing right now as a prayer house serving for the people of this country. If the people demand more, we are ready to give them. This is the reason why our mosque's doors are open every hour of every day. In January 2015, we handed the keys to our mosque to the congregation, as those who may need to turn to God can easily find their way to the house of God," Uçkan said.

The Hasan Pasha Mosque's social projects are managed by a group of volunteers. There are 30 men and women who help Uçkan realize the projects that he wants to carry out. "We are doing everything in shifts," Uçkan said. "Unless the congregation sees the imam of their mosque working hard and sweat for the good of the people, no volunteers step forward. If there is something to be done, the first step should be taken by the mosque's own personnel."