Sheikh Kaleem grasps my hand and smiles when I ask him what impact his blindness has had on his faith.

“You ask some interesting questions,” he said amidst a crowded room of people at the Islamic Da’wa Center in Milwaukee.  “I’ve memorized more verses of Quran while I was blind than I did when I wasn’t. If it meant I could memorize more Quran, I wish I could go through this blindness process at least 10 more times.”

He’s wearing a pearl white turban and hunches foward in the noisy room as I lean towards him to hear better. The sheikh is an active imam in several mosques in the Milwaukee area and has also taught kung fu for over 30 years. During that time, he said his students have never lost a tournament.

Both the sheikh and his wife are blind. The sheikh worked as a visual artist and lost his vision in the early 1990s from excessive exposure to art chemicals. His wife lost hers recently to a battle with sickle cell. But neither of them make much of their blindness.

“I see it as a temporary inconvenience,” he said. “Allah has the ability to give us sight and the ability to take it away. To say being blind is a problem would be denying the will of Allah.”

There are over 15,000 Muslims in Milwaukee today, but when Sheikh Kaleem was a child in the 1960s, there may have been only 3-4 Muslim families in the area and no mosque.

“I still remember being a child and we’d pray Friday prayer inside someone’s living room,” he said.

The Muslim community here is rapidly growing thanks to some of the work the Da’wa Center has been doing. One of the crown jewels of this center is its outreach to prison inmates and transitioning them to a better life once they get out.

“When you’re locked up, a lot of people turn to Islam because it’s a way to survive and avoid getting beaten up by other convicts,” said Ayyub Alamin, one of the center’s founders. “But that’s easy because you’re practicing Islam in isolation. It’s when you get out when the real struggle begins.”

Imam Zakaria is an imam at the mosque and a Muslim chaplain in the state’s correctional facilities. He said one of the ongoing issues for the mosque here is reaching out to ex-cons who begin slipping back into their old habits after they get out of prison.

“I’ll see a brother at the Da’wa Center and a week later I’ll see him locked  up again inside one of the prisons,” he said as he shakes his head.

What I like about the Da’wa Center is there are very few people who simply come here to worship. Each of them are plugged into the community trying to better the people around them. A man named Hashim chats with me at length about this subject and how we as Muslims have been neglecting the social service aspect of our religion.

“We spend so much time taking care of minarets and domes on our mosques that we don’t take care of our people on the streets,” he said.

The Da’wa Center’s roots go back to the 1980s when a few Muslims set up an Islamic hotline that anyone could call for answers about Islam. One guy running a grocery store set up a phone line at his job that people around the neighborhood could call with questions about Islam. After work, the calls would be forwarded to his home, sort of like a 24 hour Islamic hotline. In the mid 1990s, the actual Da’wa Center was established and has been growing ever since.

Sheikh Kaleem says he has to run to lead prayer at another mosque. Before he leaves, he puts his hand on my shoulder and asks me to look around the room as everyone was eating dinner.

“What a beautiful community,” he said. “You can just sense the beauty by just walking by these people.”

Sheikh Kaleem grabs his robe and walking stick and gives me his salams. I hand him a 30 Mosques business card and he rubs his fingers over it and smiles.

“I sense there’s something really special about you,” he said as he put the card in his shirt pocket.

I want to ask him what he meant by that, but at this point, he already walked away. I don’t know when will be the next time I’ll see him but that’s only a temporary inconvenience to me. I have a feeling we’ll cross paths sooner rather than later

We arrive around 6 PM to Dar Al Hijrah, the local mosque in downtown Minneapolis, and are welcomed by the congregants of the community. A group of elders sit around reciting Qur’an together. They take turns reading the first part of a verse and then everyone recites the last part together. It sounds difficult, but the harmonies are incredible.

Before entering the mosque, I make a point to get permission to shoot photos and video of the community. I speak on the phone with Abdul Qadir, the executive director of the community, and get his permission for taking photos, but told me to be mindful of the congregants as a lot of them are a little weary of people taking photos. People being weary of having photos taken is not unique to the Somalian community, we’ve have been experiencing this since the beginning of the trip. But the level of unrest and uneasiness I felt from the congregation when I took out my camera was new.

Minneapolis is known for its large Somalian community. According to Abdul Qadir, the executive director of Dar ul Hijrah, There are close to 10,000 Somalians in the twin cities. They began to come when the Civil War broke out in Somalia in the 1990s. We’ve found small pockets of Somalians throughout the country, but the community in Minnesota/St. Paul is by far the largest and most well-established.

The Riverside Plaza, a large high-rise apartment complex, is where many of the newly refugees are placed. It is a government subsidized complex that is predominantly East African. Just walking around the street, you will be greeted by women in long flowing abayas and men with kufis. The Somolian community got together and rented a small room in 1998 in a building right next to the housing complex to conduct prayers. In 2006, the entire building came on sale so they decided to buy the entire building. They called this community center Dar Al-Hijrah, the home of Immigrants. Ironically, as the mosque expanded, it also got a next door neighbor, Palmer’s Bar.

I asked Abdul Qadir what the relationship was like with the pub and he said they’ve been very accommodating.

“Sometimes, the music gets a little loud, but we just tell them to kindly put the music down for us to pray. And they are very respectful.”

Regardless of the level of respect, Abdul Qadir acknowledges the awkwardness of the proximity.

Breaking fast, sort of

The congregants break their fast with dates and bread. The mosque only provides food on Saturdays and Sundays. Soon after I devour a date, a member of the mosque performs the call to prayer to get everyone together for maghrib, the sunset prayer.

Afterwards, The Party

After breaking their fast, many Somalians go back to the mosque for taraweeh, the night prayer, or, those that are not working, are out socializing. You will find a large number of Somalian brothers at the International Corner on 15th and Nicollette. You can google it, or just follow the loud clanking sounds of the dominoes. The sound of dominoes hitting the table, the constant yelling back and forth meshed with foozball slammery drowns the place — this coffee shop is bursting with energy.

I start taking photos at the pool table, and then head over to the internet hub. I finally make my way to the rowdiest part of the coffee shop, the guys playing dominoes.

As I take photos of the people playing dominoes, I hear a man screaming from two tables away in my direction. He gets up from his seat, points and yells at me. Suddenly, two men grab him and hold him back. The guys playing foozball at the adjacent table come around and start probing me. A group of men surround me.

“What did you do wrong?” says one of them.

Nothing.

I start handing out our yellow 30 mosques business cards hoping  to calm people down by showing that I’m a Muslim and not the government. But no one is buying it.

“Are you the FBI? Did the government bring you here?” A brother says to me in my face.

I should note that most of these men tower over me. If I was in need to head butt any of them, I’d need to stand at least on one or two stools.

“Alright, thats enough.” says a Somalian brother, holding the brother back and saving the day.

I am able to get a couple of more photos before another guy playing dominoes gets out of his seat throws the dominoes on the ground and complains to the owner. Ahmad, the owner, calms him down and tells him to leave if he will continue to be loud.

I’m freaked at this point, but everyone around me has started laughing.

“Did I do something wrong?” I ask the guy who saved me.

“Nah. this is just the way we have fun in Somalia.” he replies laughing.

This guy is Eid Ali. He is a cab driver and sits on a leadership board that speaks with the local government about their issues and concerns. Eid is an eloquent, unassuming man. We move towards the computers and begin to talk. After some convincing, he happily lets me join him on the road for a half an hour. .

“Look, don’t take offense.” Eid says to me as we’re driving. “Ever since people from our community left to fight in Somalia, the FBI and the media has been down our throats.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but make a mental note to Google it later. (LINK)

Soon enough, Eid parks his taxi and I start to take photos. After about 30 minutes, he looks at his watch.

“Am I keeping you from something?” I ask.

“Well, today is Friday, it is a busy day for us cab drivers.”

We exchange numbers and part ways.

The Next Day

On the road to Milwaukee, I place a call to Abdul Qadir, the executive director of the Dar Al-Hijrah, to ask him a question.

“Why is the name of the mosque Dar Al-Hijrah, ‘the home of immigrants?’” I ask.

Abdul Qadir pauses on the phone.

“I don’t really know. I didn’t attend that meeting when they named the masjid.” He says, “but I think it’s kind of a way to attract people.  I mean, we’re all immigrants here and we’re just trying to figure out how to get around.”

Instead we program our GPS to take us to Ross, North Dakota – a town with a total population of 48 people during the last U.S.Census. When my brother got married, I think there were more people sleeping over at our house that weekend than live in Ross.

Ross is home to the first mosque that was ever built in the United States. A Syrian farmer by the name of Hassan Juma immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Ross in the late 1800s. More Syrians came into town shortly after and the community built a mosque in 1929  after spending years praying in each other’s basements. It was later demolished in the 1970s but there’s a Muslim cemetery nearby where many of the original community members are buried. In 2005, a new mosque was built on the same land as the original mosque.

Bassam and I don’t know anyone who can help us find this place. Google Maps barely even knew. To our luck, a local pastor got us in touch with a woman named Lila who is the caretaker of the place. She can”t meet with us at night to open the mosque but she kindly let us visit it from the outside.

We’re driving through Ross amidst a barren landscape and take a turn down an empty dirt road. We have little idea if we’re going the right way but I keep my eyes peeled intent on finding the place.

About a quarter mile down the dirt road, my jaw drops as we find the place we’re looking for. Standing in front of me is a cube shaped mosque with a helmet dome and mini-minaret pillars on top. My heart is punching in my chest as I begin to walk towards it.

A sign to the left of the door dedicated the building to “Sarah Allie (Omar) Shupe.” I don’t know much about her but I remember reading she was instrumental in making sure this new mosque was built. I think about what she must be like and for some reason, I begin to feel like I’m falling. Fast. It was the same plummeting feeling I got when I was 18 and a skydiving instructor shoved me out of an airplane for the first time.

I don’t know why I’m falling. Maybe it’s because I’m standing in front of a place that’s taking me back in time.

I find the cemetery about a hundred feet from the mosque. I begin reading the names on the tombstones and the birth dates below them. 1882, 1904, 1931.  Each of them has a star and crescent symbol at the top of the stone reflecting a Muslim was buried there.

Some of the stones indicate the Muslims buried here were veterans that served this country in armed conflicts like the Korean War. It takes several seconds for my brain to realize tears are spilling down my face. I feel ashamed to have known very little about this place until I got here.

Ross is a small town and we know virtually no one we can stay with for the night. We drive around for miles and can barely find a gas station, let alone a hotel.

We’re told the nearest hotel is about an hour away in Minot, so we head there for the night. I begin to write the post about our visit to Ross but feel I incomplete. We know very little about this enchanted place, so we ask Lila to meet us in the morning to learn some more about it.

####

Lila and her son Greg stand by the mosque as we pull our car through the opened gate the following morning.

She’s an olive skinned woman who bounces her arms along with her cheerful tone. She flashes a radiantly youthful smile and slaps her knees every time she laughs.

Greg opens up the door to the mosque and Bassam and I pray inside to pay our respects to the place. I walk around the stone room and am fixated on how serene and simple the place is.

I walk back outside and again read the name of Sarah Allie (Omar) Shupe. Lila points to the name and pauses.

“That’s my mother,” she said. “She was the driving force for this place.”

This mosque was built in 2005 on the same land the original mosque was built on. I asked her why the original one was demolished in the 1970s.

“Oh, I’m not going to go there,” she said as she looked away. “I wasn’t there at that meeting so I don’t want to get into it.”

I can sense the question is a sensitive subject, so I decide not to pry. Instead, Lila takes me inside and shows me a framed collection of photographs of some of her relatives and family friends who helped pioneer the community here. She points to one of Allay Omar, her father, and one of her mother Sarah.

Allay Omar grew up in a region a part of Syria that is now modern day Lebanon. Waves of Syrians came to this country in the early 1900s once the United States lifted its ban on immigrants from Arab countries. Syria at the time was under control of the Ottomon Empire in Turkey and many Syrians fled to the U.S. to avoid getting drafted in the Turkish army.

Lila’s father and other immigrants came to North Dakota because the Homestead Act gave people up to 160 acres of land after taking care of it.

Greg explained tensions would often flare among the Syrians and other immigrants here not over their race, but over resources like land and livestock. As Greg speaks, Lila uses her motherly instincts and sways nearby mosquitos off his arms.

Lila was born and raised in the area and still lives a little over a mile away from the mosque. Her high school graduating class had five people in it. I ask her what that was like, being not only the only Middle Eastern kid, but one of the only minorities in town.

“I knew I was darker skinned than most people, but I never saw it that way,” she said. “I am who I am.”

These days she says it frustrates her about what people think about people in the Middle East being male chauvinists and anti-Semitic.

“They say the men are oppressive towards their women over there and I’m sure that happens,” she said. “But I never had that experience. My father treated us like princesses. My father had Jewish friends and taught us to love them. I have Jewish friends too and I’m always going to have Jewish friends. I was taught to love everyone.”

“I really wish you could have met my father,” she said smiling again. “He was a wonderful man.”

Talking to Lila made me feel like I was meeting him.

Bassam and I look at the time and realize we need to hit the road to our next stop in Minnesota. Lila smiles again and asks me to sign the mosque’s guestbook before I leave.

“I will never forget this place and the contributions you, your family and friends have made,” I write. “And I hope nobody ever does.”

BAM / Thud / CLUNK. However you describe the sound, Aman and I hear it before we see smoke build up in front of our Chevy Cobalt. Aman panics and pulls to the side.

“I think I hit a large rock.”

A rock, really?

We get out and inspect the car. Things look fine, we wait for the smoke to settle and get back in the car and drive forward. But forward means that we are stuck in first gear moving 10 miles per hour. Cars pass us by, trucks honk their horns. We pray to find the next side lane that’s open and when we do, we park.

Aman isn’t getting any signal on his phone. I’m not either. The car isn’t moving and our GPS says we are about 40 miles south of Bozeman. To top it off, we have an eleven hour drive to Fargo, North Dakota tomorrow. This doesn’t look good.

We wait ten minutes in hopes of a police officer to pass by, but no luck. I start walking towards Bozeman in hopes of getting some reception so I can call AAA to get our car towed.  Aman stays back to watch the car, I strap on my camera and start hiking north –the start of another interesting adventure.

On the way through a narrow stretch of the highway, I see a man parked by a stream, putting his fishing gear away in the back of his Nissan pick-up truck. I walk towards him and strike up a small conversation. The fisherman tells me that I wont get any reception until I reach the city and Bozeman is at least 30 miles away north. I start kicking the sand aimlessly and work up the nerve to ask him if he can take me to the nearest city with signal. He thinks for a second and tells me to get in the back of his truck.

On the truck ride over, the fisherman gives me the lowdown on where we are. We’re in Big Sky, Montana, a small town known for its large ski resort. It is located off of highway 191, which is known to get dangerous in the night time. Just when I’m about to ask him why, we find a tow truck guy and the fisherman drops me off there.

After saying goodbye to the fisherman, I head inside the tow truck office and am met by a mustache, er, a man named Ken. I give Ken the lowdown on what happened and how we need a tow truck asap. Ken nods his head and starts typing up a report on his small computer. Soon enough, Ken was getting his flat bed truck ready to pick up Aman and our Cobalt.

“Heh, so I guess we’ll be best of friends by the end of this.” I say to him.

“Ok.” he responds.

Clearly, Ken is a man of few words.

We pick up Aman and the Cobalt, and finally head towards Bozeman.

I plant myself by the side door, while poor Aman gets crammed in the middle between me and the stoic Ken. As we head north on the highway Aman notices the crosses lining the entire highway.

“What are those crosses for?” Aman asks Ken.

“For those that have died on this highway.” Ken responds.

“Wait, how do people die here?”

“In the night time, bears come out. Deers will run around. Slippery roads from the ice. You name it.”

Aman is fixated on Ken’s mustache and begins to chat with him about his facial hair.

“How long have you had that mustache?” Aman asks.

“Going on 41 years,” Ken’s muffled voice says from behind his facial hair.

“How long did it take you to grow?”

“About a year.”

“I consider myself a facial hair aficionado, and I’ve got to say, you have one fine work of art on your face.”

“Thanks, I’m not sure I know how to respond to that.”

I see the sun setting and realize that soon enough we’ll be breaking our fast. And that’s when I realized how tired and exhausted the day had made me. One of the best ways to get through the day fasting is to keep yourself busy and now, finally having a moment to relax, my brain catches up with my stomach and it’s a terrible feeling.

# # #

I wake up to the truck pulling over inside a parking lot. We have arrived in Bozeman and get outside the car. I remember taking a photo of Ken and asking him to smile.

“I am smiling,” he said.

Classic.

We exit the tow truck, take our stuff out of the Cobalt and wait for our host, Ruhul, to pick us up. Aman and I are silent and are dreading the inevitable talk about what we have to do if the auto repair took more than a couple of hours.  Then of course, the worst question – What happens if  we miss more than one day?

Soon enough, Ruhul, our host, shows up and we are on our way to his house.

Ruhul is one of the oldest members of the Muslim community in Montana. He is a professor in Mechanical Engineering at Montana State University.
According to him, there isn’t a single mosque in the entire state of Montana. Not one. It’s one of the only states in the entire country that doesn’t have a mosque.

I ask him where he prays taraweeh, the Ramadan night prayer.

“The university [Montana State] has given us a prayer room and another space for taraweeh prayers.”

Ruhul likes it in Bozeman, that’s why he’s been here for over 20 years with his two daughters and wife.  He’s leading the push to help build the first mosque in the state. But it’s hard to, he says, because most of the Muslims here are transient. They come to the area to attend school at Montana State University but end up leaving after graduation. Ruhul says that makes it hard to build a mosque because there isn’t a longstanding Muslim community here. But once you build a mosque, a community will slowly begin to form around it.

We arrive at his house, break our fast and eat a great meal prepared by his wife. Ruhul tells us there is no access to halal meat whatsoever in the area, so his family has a halal meat company in Iowa regularly send meat via FedEx. Wow.

After eating, we head out to Montana State University, where the community gathers to pray.  We enter a small classroom where there are 15 people in the middle of  praying the night prayer, Isha. We join in.

Around the room, I see about fifteen students and a couple of faculty members. They all look back at me and smile. I didnt plan on praying with the congregation today, but I felt compelled to. Maybe we will make to North Dakota tomorrow, maybe we wont. Whatever the case, we have to try and that’s all really we can do.

Imam Fahrudin stands in the parking lot of the Islamic Community of Bosniaks in Boise. Fahruddin, 21, was playing soccer at a nearby field before arriving at the mosque.

Note: Due to car troubles and long drive time, this post has been made a day late. Please accept our apologies as we are trying to stay on schedule with our route.

During the Ethnic Cleansings in the 1990′s, the US government helped bring thousands of Bosnian families to America. Like most refugees, they were settled in quieter parts of America, areas that are less crowded and more affordable. And that’s how many Bosnian families ended up in Boise, Idaho. But unlike many of the other refugee communities that were brought to Boise, the Bosnians decided to stay in the city. Many of the Somalian, Burmese and Afghan refugees that were stationed to Boise fled to different parts of the country where there were more people from their  ethnic backgrounds.

“It’s a lot like home here,” Merzeen, a construction project manager who came to Idaho 12 years ago from Bosnia, says, “the climate, the outdoors.” The Bosnians, like Merzeen, had no issue embracing Boise as home.

Soon enough, the Boise Bosnians were growing in numbers (approx. 2,000), but there still wasn’t a community space big enough to accommodate them. The small 1500 sq ft makeshift house they prayed the Friday prayers in wasn’t enough for their growing community and they needed a larger space.

It took 12 years for the Bosnian community to come together and build a mosque. The community bought out an abandoned church and built a mosque with their own hands. Everything from the wall plaster to the electric wiring was done by the community members.

On July 4th 2010, the Islamic Community of Bosniacs in Boise officially opened its doors. It was a joyous and emotional occasion with food, riveting speeches and, of course, fireworks. The completion of the mosque was a long and labor intensive road. Thankfully, Denis, the de facto historian of the community, has been taking photos of the center since the first community meeting at the abandoned church.

The following moments are taken from Denis’ extensive collection of photos that can be found in the Boise mosque, tucked away in the bookshelves binded neatly inside five white large photo albums.

The first meeting held at the abandoned church right after the purchase of the property was finalized.

The community bought the church for a half million dollars.

During the construction, at any given point, there would be close to 40 community members helping out.

Community members take out theseats from the church hall to make space for prayer. The prayer area of the mosque, musala, was completed within two weeks of the construction.

Many photographers in the community have meticulously captured every step in the building this mosque.

Since many of the Boise Bosnians are construction workers or electricians, the community didn't feel the need to hire any outside laborers.

After all the construction inside was complete, the last step was to put up mosque sign.

The community members climb to the top of the mosque in celebration of the mosque construction being completed.

In celebration of the mosque's opening and Independence Day, the community held a fireworks show on July 4th.

As the congregants enter the completed mosque for the first time, a young man tries to hold himself together.

.

Faraz has been married to a Mormon woman for a little over a month. But he has known his wife Erika for almost 10 years so I asked him the reasoning behind why it took a decade to tie the knot.

“That’s because it took about five years to convince her family,” he said with a chuckle.

Enter Utah, where roughly 62 percent of the people here follow The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It’s a Christian church followed by the Mormons who believe after Jesus,  a man by the name of Joseph Smith was also given a book of revelation from God in the 1800s in upstate New York.

Faraz spent most of his life in Utah and easily stood out in school as not just the only Muslim in school, but only minority.

“In middle school, here I was, this big 5’10 Pakistani dude in Salt Lake City,” he said laughing again.

Faraz is a brawny guy who speaks with an intriguing twang. He’s the kind of person who likes to strike up a conversation with anyone. We met him at the Utah Islamic Center, a mosque inside of a shopping center in the Salt Lake City area that’s home to a few dozen families who congregate here. Bassam and I didn’t know a lot about the Muslim community in Utah prior to arriving and Faraz graciously helped us out getting us connected to the people we should meet before leaving.

Salt Lake City is a growing community with over 20,000 Muslims. Muslims first began coming here in waves in the early 1980s and now the city has a significant population of Muslim refugees that have recently come from places like Burma, Bosnia and Somalia. But from what I understand, there aren’t as many Muslim women here as Muslim men. It’s not an uncommon sight for Muslim men to have Mormon wives, considering how many Mormon women there are instead of Muslim ones.

Wedding photo provided to us by Faraz

Islam doesn’t prohibit Muslim men from marrying non-Muslim women, but many cultures that follow Islam see it as some kind of unwritten taboo (in my opinion). Faraz doesn’t want to sensationalize the adversity the Muslim community here gave him for marrying a non-Muslim white woman, but it was definitely there to some extent.

“I’d show up to Friday prayer and I’d never see any of my friends anymore,” he said. “I’d want to hang out and everyone said they were busy. I guess we’ve all been too busy for each other lately.”

Faraz said his wife isn’t a strict Mormon but it took her mother and stepfather an extensive amount of time to warm up to him, not because of who we was personally, but we’re understandably concerned that his wife would lose her Mormon identity.

“There are many things I disagree with about the Mormon way of life and I’ve made it very clear to her that I would like her to someday convert,” he said. “We’ve also agreed that our children will be raised Muslim. Things like that, you need to agree upon those things beforehand otherwise they can become problems down the road.”

But what made it easy through the years was Faraz’s family was always on his side. Before getting engaged, Faraz made the Hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia with his family. There, his father asked him to pray to Allah if Erika was meant for him. Months later, he got married.

Faraz said Erika’s family still isn’t 100 percent on board with him and it definitely was a little awkward at the wedding, even though everyone enjoyed themselves. But he takes it in stride, because at the end of the day, there is still plenty of love all around both families. He said his mom and Erika have begun to bond over cooking. Erika, he said, is quickly becoming an expert at South Asian cuisine.

The Mormons

Faraz tells us that Salt Lake City is home to the Mormon’s most holy temple so we decide to check out the place. It’s a  colossal complex where many Mormons from all over the world come to volunteer their time as missionaries. Across the street from it is the church’s just as impressive looking conference center.

We were greeted at the temple’s entrance by Sisters Todd (from Pennyslvania), Sister Han (from China) and Sister Aslam (from Pakistan). On their own dime, they traveled to Salt Lake City to volunteer for the church and welcome tourists like us checking out the temple. Each of them were happy-go-lucky missionaries eager to tell us more about their religion and learn about our 30 Mosques project too. But our conversation came to a close when two church security officers asked Bassam to delete all the pictures of the missionaries from his camera.

At first, I thought about how amusing it was that this is the second time on this trip that we’ve been basically kicked out of a place of worship.  But it made me think more so about the fact that Bassam and I need to be more sensitive to people during the places we visit. I don’t know what the reasons why the security guards asked us to delete the photos, but I’m sure it had a lot to do out of respectful concerns for the church’s women. We Muslims would (and should!) have similar concerns if some random stranger started furiously snapping pictures of our women. Not because women are incapable of handling themselves, but we as Muslim men need to demand our women always be respected.

I don’t know any Muslims that would drop everything they’re doing to fly across the globe to welcome people to the holy Kabah in Saudi Arabia. But these Mormons have demonstrated it’s definitely possible for the human body to be capable of loving their religion this much. It makes me wonder, about myself most importantly, why we don’t have the same kind of love for Islam.

Amanullah has been working in casinos for over 29 years.

“Nobody enjoys this work,” he tells me as he sips on a cup of chai. “But we do it because we want a better life for our kids.”

Amanullah oversees slot machines at the MGM Grand Casino and is a board member of the Jamia Masjid, a mosque in downtown Las Vegas just minutes away from The Strip, the city’s infamous road of casinos and hotels.

Gambling is prohibited in Islam, but Muslims working in casinos is somewhat common here.

Amanullah smiles with an almost cotton-like beard as he talks about the spiritually grueling lifestyle he lives, so that he can make a better life for his kids. He’s an active person at the mosque and I can only imagine the type of criticism he gets from his fellow Muslims for working in casinos.

“They may not say it to me directly, but oftentimes I can feel  it,” he said as he nods his head and blinks slowly.

He grew up in Afghanistan and came to the United States in the 1980s when the Soviet Union invaded. He settled in Las Vegas because he had an uncle that lived there that was all alone. He took a casino job because he desperately needed money to support his family and send home to relatives oversees.

“I had no money,” he said. “I used to walk my daughter to school and I would have no money to even buy her milk. I was only making enough to cover rent.”

Many of the people who work in casinos are immigrants from foreign countries like Bosnia, Afghanistan, Morocco, the Philippines and Somalia. Most of them came to Las Vegas because they had friends or family already living here.

Amanullah says he’s never enjoyed working in casinos and it eats at him inside working at institutions that center on indulgence and extravagance.

“In all my years I’ve never gambled or sipped a drop of alcohol,” he said. “I’ve never enjoyed seeing any of this around me and as I get older it becomes more and more difficult to stand this. The only thing that gives me peace is my family and the masjid.”

I stared into Amanullah’s eyes and began thinking about my father. My father travelled 5-6 days a week on the road for a baking company and never enjoyed a single moment of it. But like Amanullah, he did it for his kids. The bags under Amanullah’s eyes remind me of my dad’s as he came home from a long week of work too exhausted to do anything but collapse on the couch.

There’s something many people don’t understand about the need for a man to provide for his family on his own, and what lengths he’s willing to go to in order to make that happen. Amanullah tells me he’d rather do this than rely on welfare or other forms of governmental assistance to feed himself. As much as he hates working in casinos, it helped put his daughter through college.

I spoke with several Muslims at the Jamia mosque who work in casinos. Each of them have their own stories about how they got into the business but none of them enjoy it.

“Look, this life is pathetic,” said Bilal, who recently got laid off from a casino. “The management has so much control over you that you can’t do anything. You can’t even move around without someone watching you.”

I asked him why go through the torment then?

“The money,” he said. “A manager can make somewhere around $85,000. But you’re like a robot at work and all you can think about is your family.”

Bassam and I walked through the Aria Casino on The Strip that many Muslims are starting to work at since it opened in December. I walk past countless rows of slot machines as my ears begin to rattle from the clanging slots that gulp up coins like a vacuum cleaner. My stomach begins to churn as I’m smothered by the smell of cheap cigars and Axe Body spray from tourists trying their luck against the casino card dealers.

I think to myself, “This is the life these Muslims deal with every day, so that their family doesn’t have to.”

As we’re getting to leave the Aria casino, Bassam and I speak with Kariuki (pronounced Karaoke). He’s a Christian man from Kenya who’s been shining shoes in a casino bathroom for three months. He said working here has good days and bad days so we asked him what a good day entails.

“A good day, ha!” he said with a chuckle. “A good day is when I get money. There is no life here. The only thing we do in life is work and sleep. When I go out with someone, all I think about is ‘Is this going to make me late for work?”

Dr. Aslam Abdullah is the director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, the group that runs the mosque and is editor of the Muslim Observer, a publication based in Dearborn, Michigan. Before we left Las Vegas, we chatted about this whole Muslims in casinos issue and the complications surrounding it. He said before we point fingers at Muslims for working in casinos, we really should point fingers at ourselves.

“This is the failure of our leadership and institutions to provide for the social and economic well being of our community,” he said.  “I talk about this in the khutbahs (Friday sermons) a lot and I tell people ‘Before you look down on them, find them an alternative.’”

He explained most of the Muslims who work in casinos are immigrants who take the jobs because it’s unskilled labor that pays well. It’s our failure as Muslims, he says, to help them integrate into society and help them find a way of life that doesn’t go against Islamic guidelines.  Rather than condemn them and reject them, it’s our obligation as Muslims to help them.

“We’ve developed this ‘holier than thou’ attitude where we look down on people who don’t memorize as many surahs (chapters) of Qur’an as us,” he said. “But what good is memorizing 30 surahs compared to 10 surahs, if you don’t understand or follow any of it?”

Make no bones about it, no Muslim in their right mind will condone the concept of working at a casino. It’s tough to make it in this country, and many of these Muslims will go through morally compromising situations if it means that their children can live a life where they won’t have to. Simply slamming Muslims who works in casinos is too easy and basically pours gasoline on the flames that burn the bridges between us.

Jesus Fliers

Tired and starting to feel a little hungry, we arrive in Santa Ana, California and began our search for this hidden Cambodian mosque. A large group of people are gathered near the mosque and are passing out fliers. They see Aman and I walking towards them and stop us.

“Hey brother,” one of the older man says.

I smile.

“We have this live concert tonight and would love it if you can come with us. There will be prayer and we’ll be celebrating Jesus.”

I take a flier from him, read it and tell him I’ll think about it.

A block over, I see an open courtyard and three Cambodian women wearing hijab sitting under a tree. Two young girls playing basketball, and a group of young guys hanging out in izaars. Looks like today is going to be an interesting day, I’ll have to take a rain check on that concert.

Two Shots and a News Special

Saleh does what he wants, when he wants.  This was made clear when he walked into the masjid, interrupting the conversation we were having with one of the elders in the community, and began grilling us with questions.

“So are you here to raise money?” he asked us.

Aman was quick to clear our name and plug our site. But at that point Saleh was disinterested and continued on his merry way.

He allowed me to take photos of him and looked at each photo after they were taken.

“I’ve been shot five times and I just got out of jail.”

No joke. One of the  community members was there when he got shot twice. The story goes something like this – Saleh’s home boy was being picked on by the rival Latin gang and Saleh didn’t like that. He confronted the crew alone and began throbbing punches at six to seven of them. Saleh was uncontrollable, knocking the Latin gang members like bowling pins. They couldn’t  stop this Cambodian juggernaut until a guy pulled out a pistol and shot him twice. bam bam and Saleh was on the ground.

Saleh was shot in the butt and leg. The ambulance and local new stations showed up in minutes. As the local news channel reported the shooting, Saleh waved and smiled at the camera as he was being transported into the ambulance. Getting shot in the buttocks and still cheesing for the camera? Yes, that is badassery.

That’s Brisk, Baby

Around the corner of the mosque, a kid walks around with a 20 oz. bottle of liquid.

“This is pee pee.” The kids tell me. He has a thick Spanish accent and smells his plastic bottle  with amusement. It looks more like iced-tea to me.

“It’s not piss,” his friend says.

“Smell it!” he yells.

After his friend smells it, the boy runs to me and makes me smell it. And yes, it is pee pee.

The question became less on if it’s pee-pee now and more on who urinated in that bottle?

“Dont look at me…” the kid with the unzipped pants holding the smelly bottle of piss says.

Doctor Who

Right after  Asr, the afternoon prayer, I sit around in the prayer room with some of the congregants. Their topic of discussion today: expansion.

Like every mosque we have visited in our trip, there were a lot of talks of expansion. The congregation looked small to me, and I wondered, do they really need to expand?

“We need more parking here. There is absolutely no place for parking.” Says Mohammad Saeed, the president of the Mosque. “that is why less people are coming to the mosque.”

Are there more Cambodians that come here for prayer?

“There are more than Cambodians that we have to look out for.”

So what’s keeping you all from expansion?

“I don’t think there is anyone in our mosque that makes more than 15 per hour,” Ghazali, a young man with a bluetooth headset that seemed conjoined to his ear, says, “there are no doctor’s here.”

The congregants nod their heads.

Dodging Shots

I see a man entering the mosque and wait for him to enter so I can take a great candid shot.  I begin snapping when he enters. AHHH!! The man screams and flings his back to the camera.

I freak out. Did I do something wrong?

“That is Harun, he is the masjid caretaker,” Mohammad Saeed, the president of the mosque, says, “he was hit by a claymore in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge. He is not all there. Please excuse him.”

The Grounds

The grounds right outside of the mosque is the center of the community. Two girls from the community play basketball without a goal. The goals break often which ends up making the grounds just an open concrete space.

Abdul Ghoni, I think

Abdul Ghoni halts in the middle of the playground near the mosque and starts doing push-ups. He does five, six, seven and then stands back up as if nothing happened. He is 27 years old and works at the local school. He cleans tables, picks up trash, and sweeps the floors. He tells me what he does with pride and dignity. Kareem, our local guide, tells me that Abdul Ghoni doesn’t miss a single prayer at the mosque.

I ask Abdul Ghoni to spell his for me. He thinks for a minute and asks for a piece of paper and a pen.

I hand him a black papermate pen from my back pocket. He starts shaking the pen furiously because it’s not working. I try scribbling on my hand to see if it works another surface and it doesn’t give in. We leave the pen alone and Abdul Ghoni goes his way. And I stay put speculating how to spell his name.

Courts

The basketball goals in the grounds of the mosque are broken all the time, so the kids sneak into the local elementary school to shoot around an hour before Maghrib.

Ayoub’s Truck

I have seen very few parked trucks that sell both funyuns and watermelons.  Ayoub, one of the pioneers of the community, runs this truck right outside his house.  Ayoub’s wife runs the truck and, surprising, the mobile store helps bring in a decent amount of income for the family. I ask him why he started the truck store.

Ayoub looks over at his wife and says, “Eh, it keeps her busy.”

Cambodian Doe

Forgive me, I have forgotten your name. I saw you standing in the distance as the sun was setting in this small neighborhood, where the majority of the congregants are either Cambodian or Hispanic. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take this photo.

It took me a while to find the right place for you to stand and then spent the next two minutes snapping away. Thank you for your patience. Also, you have very soft hands.

Great great great

Three generations old. She came when she was in her early 60′s. She walks around the community space. She sits under the shade of the tree waiting for her other friends to show up.

“The elders in our community are dying,” Mohammad Saeed, the president of the mosque tells us, “just last year, we lost five elders.”

The great great great grandmother looks over at the sun, patiently waiting for Maghrib, the time for break fast, to approach.

Food Time

Un-Pakistani

Looking for a place to sit with my dinner plate, I somehow end up next to a group of three Pakistani guys. We all look at each other and ask ourselves, “how did he end up here?”

After telling them about the 30 mosques project, I ask them how they got here.

Malik lives about 20 minutes away from here. There are three other mosques that are closer to him, but goes out of his way to come here.

“There is no politics here. No elitism. There is none of those things that are found at the local Pakistani mosque. Everyone here is unassuming,” Malik says.

“Really?”

“Yeah! In those Pakistani mosques the doctors sit here, the engineers here, and the cab drivers here. Over here, there is none of that. No one will ask you what you do for a living and everyone sits together.”

After Malik said that, I couldn’t help but wonder what he did for a living — it must be Pakistani in me.

Matt, er, Mohammad Saeed

“I don’t feel like vacuuming,” Mohammad says after we break our fast, “I’ll just do it tomorrow.”

Outside of the community, Mohammad goes by Matt Ly. He is the el jeffe of the center. A stout, but muscular man who watches over the entire mosque operations. He stares at the carpet, picking up small pieces of lint and crumbs of food with his hands.

Mohammad’s uncle was one of the first Muslim Cambodian refugees in 1979. He sponsored 17 Cambodian families and brought them to the states. This was considered one of the first emigrations of the Cambodian Muslims to the states. When the families first came from Cambodia they started in different cities and went their own ways. A small community  ended up in Santa Ana and established this mosque in 1982. Soon enough, the Santa Ana community began calling all the Cambodian Muslims convincing them to settle here in Santa Ana.

The brutal communist regime, Khmer Rogue, had killed and tortured many in Cambodia. Religion wasn’t allowed, so the Cambodian Muslims would pray secretly and hold small Friday prayer services. They all had an incredibly difficult time and went through it together. So when many of them settled in the States, it made sense for them to live amongst one another and heal together.

Mohammad was 17 when he escaped Cambodia. After things finally calmed down, he went back to Cambodia in hopes of staying, but ended up coming back to the States. His family is here, his work is here.

“When I leave to a different state, I miss California because, you know, it is home.”

Mohammad pauses.

“But when I go back to Cambodia my heart rises and I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

Mohammad gets up, heads towards a closet and comes out with a vacuum.

We broke our fast with a bag of nectarines that Benyamin, the woodworker we met earlier that day, grew at his home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. His wife made us some awesome chocolate banana bread too.

We get to Phoenix shortly before 9 p.m. to find the mosque right off the highway. The place is still packed as people prepare for Taraweeh, the Ramadan night prayers.

We’re greeted at the mosque by Usama, the mosque’s president. He’s a straightshooting kinda guy that talks to us in depth about the history of Phoenix’s Muslim community.The city has around 80,000 Muslims and a huge refugee population of people from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Albania, Somalia and other countries.

He said it’s great that there are so many cool cultures in the city, but what has happened over the years is the Afghanis have formed their own mosque as have the Bosnians and Albanians, etc. etc. etc. Segmentation is a huge problem among Muslims in this country. I completely understand it may be unintentional when people immigrate to this country, they find comfort by linking up with people of similar backgrounds. But in 2010, we can no longer afford to do that. Out of the over 300 million people that live in this country, only around 7 million people are Muslims (and that’s a liberal estimate). So we simply cannot afford to divide ourselves.

On the opposite side of the highway from the mosque is the ICCP’s future home, a colossal mosque that you can see from miles away. The outside structure of the $3.5 million building is already finished and the mosque board is trying to fundraise the remaining money they need to complete it.

We asked Usama if building a mosque this vivid necessary, especially in an economic climate where many Muslim communities are struggling to afford running their places. He said the mosque isn’t in debt at all and is only building things they can afford. Plus, he said it’s a house to worship Allah, shouldn’t we try to beautify it as long as it’s well within our means?

“We want people to drive by the highway and know that Muslims are here in this community,” he said. “We have had Muslims we’ve never met before drive by, see that there is a mosque here, and then want to donate.”

This new building will be the future place where the community will worship, and Usama said the current mosque will be used primarily to expand the Islamic School for the children.

I asked him if the ICCP has gotten any opposition to their new mosque, in light of all the Ground Zero hullabaloo in New York. He said unfortunately they have been getting opposition. What’s interesting is many of the city planning boards have been incredibly supportive and cooperative with the mosque’s plans over the years, but in recent months they seem to be scrutinizing the plans even more and pushing up deadlines for them.

The current mosque has been in the neighborhood for over 15 years to little or no complaints from local residents. Now all of a sudden, a few neighbors have regularly complained to the city about the mosque’s parking situation and other issues. The city recently even tried to prohibit street parking by the mosque only on Fridays from 11-3 p.m., which is usually when the Friday Jummah prayers are.

This neighbor below, the mosque has tried to reach out to him and make peace by doing things like bringing Ramadan dinner food to him. Usama told me he’d graciously accept the food, only to call the city the next day to complain about the mosque’s parking.

I think we as Muslims need to focus less on the Ground Zero mosque and more so on places like this or other communities like Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The Ground Zero mosque (and I dunno why I’m calling it that) is pretty much a done deal at least from a municipal approval standpoint. So let’s not forget about the other communities across the country where Muslims need our help. Remember, there are only 7 million of us.