The Mother Mosque of America

The Mother Mosque of America, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the heartland of the United States, is honoured as one of the oldest purpose-built mosques still standing in America. It was built in 1934 by a small community of Muslim immigrants who had come, in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, from Syria and Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman lands of the eastern Mediterranean, to settle in the American Midwest, where many worked as pedlars, shopkeepers and farmers. Far from the lands of Islam, in a country overwhelmingly Christian and on the wide prairie of Iowa, these immigrants held to their faith, and as their community grew they gathered the means to build a place of their own for prayer and for the religious life of the community. The result was a modest building of white-painted clapboard, plain and unassuming, much like the small chapels and meeting-halls of the rural Midwest, marked as a mosque only by a simple arch and a small dome; humble though it was, it was a true mosque, built for the worship of God by an American Muslim congregation. The Mother Mosque is a landmark of the long and often overlooked history of Islam in the United States, which reaches back through the enslaved African Muslims of earlier centuries to the immigrant communities of the modern age; from such small beginnings the Muslim community of America would grow, over the following generations, to number in the millions. The building, later disused, has been restored and is honoured and used again. This scene depicts the Mother Mosque and its prairie town. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.