What’s happening in American mosques? Rep. Peter King (R-NY) wants us to believe that nefarious, dubious, felonious and maybe even evil work is happening inside of them.
On Sunday, March 6, 2011, a few days before Rep. King’s “hearings” on Capitol Hill, I decided to drop into my local mosque in Rolling Meadows, Illinois to get a reality check on what’s happening, and to see for myself if my mosque is in fact fomenting “extremism” as Mr. King claims.
I confess, I do not currently attend this mosque on a daily basis. As such, maybe I’ve been ignorant of this alleged “extremism” right under my nose! I decided it was time to do a little citizen investigative journalism.
I got to the mosque around 9:45am. There were a few people milling about setting up for some kind of presentation. In a large hall there were about 100 chairs lined up and at the head of the room was a long table with name cards on them. There was a screen and a powerpoint projector.
The people I saw seemed to be some seriously religious folks. The women were wearing scarves on their heads and the men had beards. Some of the men were even more seriously religious looking with their skull caps, and then there were the men who were obviously the head honchos of the mosque (or so I assumed) with their beards, skull caps and those long robe-like gowns that I keep getting as gifts from people coming back from Hajj but which I can never get myself to wear.
“Oh boy,” I thought to myself. “What have I walked into?”
I’ve been to this mosque before so the layout was familiar to me. It is split into three sections - a prayer area, a section with classrooms, a library and a computer lab, and then a large multi-purpose space. I walked into the multi-purpose room.
It was a busy Sunday at the mosque. Every part of it was being used. To my right were a set of double doors leading to the school section. About 200 kids from KG through high school were in classrooms on that side of the building. By the time I arrived most of the kids were in the classrooms working on memorizing passages of the Quran, learning the Arabic alphabet and learning the basic religious beliefs that every Muslim is supposed to know.
I walked through the double doors and took a peek down the hall. At one end was a library and computer lab. The rest of the hallway had doors leading into small classrooms filled with desk-chairs, large whiteboards and artwork done by the kids. I didn’t find an militant chanting or breast-thumping in the classrooms. Wasn’t that supposed to be going according to Rep. King? Maybe that was during the next period.
I turned back and went into the library. I looked around for signs of “radical” books. I didn’t find any that called for killing “infidels” or “waging war” but I did find one on the importance of good dental hygiene and another on the proper technique for performing wudu (ritual washing of oneself before prayer).
I also found a bunch of kids story books. There were quite a few copies of the Holy Quran, books on the life of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and on his sayings too. Imagine that...
The only time I did a double take was when my eyes glanced over a DVD about the Crusades! Gotcha! Perhaps this was one of those slick al Qaeda propaganda pieces that CNN talks about being sold by street vendors in Iraq. On my second glance I noted that it was a documentary from The History Channel.
I went back into the multi-purpose room where all the chairs were set up. It was beginning to fill up. As I walked back through the double doors I saw an easel with a large handwritten sign that read “Money Matters”.
Aha! So that’s what was happening. The mosque was holding a seminar on money. Very interesting. Perhaps there would be some unsavory information about funding “extremism” here.
I took seat off to the far right of the speakers’ table where I could see the panelists, the presentations and the audience. I sat through presentation after presentation waiting for discussions on how to raise money for “operations” or something similarly dubious. Instead I got presentations on the ins and outs of medicare, something about a medicare “donut hole”, why auto insurance gap coverage is needed on leased cars, and why I should never buy stuff online while at places like Panera Bread because the public wi-fi networks in such places are not secure and that could lead to identity theft.
The presentations were given by a multi-disciplinary team of professionals. Everything was in English. Most of the information was interesting. None of it struck me as very “extreme” or “radical”.
This was all happening in the public spaces of the mosque. I was sitting about 5 feet from another, smaller room next to the multi-purpose room. People were walking in and out of this other room all morning. I got up and sat closer to the door. I even snuck a quick peek into this smaller room.
What I saw surprised me. There was a meeting going on. Perhaps it was a “secret” meeting!
As I listened (okay, as I eavesdropped) I was able to discern the plot that these men were hatching. There was a bus involved. They had 25 people recruited so far. They talked about the capitol building in Springfield.
Oh! My! Gosh! I whipped out my smartphone. Should I tweet it or should I call 911? Maybe both? Which one first? Facebook? No worries - my Twitter feeds to Facebook so that’s covered. What about a blog post? As I tried to figure out how best to alert the world to this deadly plan one of the men walked out of the room.
“Salaams Junaid!”
Oh snap! He knew me. It was Mohammad*, a guy who lived in the subdivision down the road from my house.
“Hey Mohammad. Salaams” I replied. “What’ up?” Did he know I was eavesdropping? Was my life in danger?
“Are you going to Springfield for the Muslim Action Day this year” he asked me.
The lightbulb went on in my head. False alarm. This was hardly some violent plot.
“Yeah, I am going.”
Mohammad smiled and said “I’ll put your name on our bus list then.”
“I’m actually driving down the night before” I told Mohammad. We then talked about connecting while we were in Springfield on Wednesday, March 9th for the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago’s third annual “Illinois Muslim Action Day”. I helped organize the first IMAD in 2009 and this year I decided to help out a bit with the public education reform agenda. Mohammad and talked about the issues and agreed to meet up in Springfield.
At about 12:30pm school ended and the classrooms emptied out into the multi-purpose room. By this time the personal finance seminar was over and a large row of tables with doughnuts, cookies, juice and pizza was set out. The children streamed into the multi-purpose room and headed straight to the food table, helped themselves to some snacks and then, much to the dismay of their teachers, began running around playing tag, tossing around mini footballs and pulling out Transformers and Pokemon toys from their school bags to show off and trade. Is any of this extreme? Radical?
By about 1:00 pm the heart of the mosque sprang to life as the Adhan (the Muslim call to prayer) was announced from the prayer room and the moms and dads and teachers began corralling the kids and moving them towards the prayer room. The mosque attendees removed their shoes, many disregarding the 20+ year old rule against leaving shoes in front of the doorways, and headed into the prayer room for Zuhr (early afternoon prayer) salat.
The mosque remained busy for about another hour after Zuhr salat as moms and dads socialized and the kids played. Slowly the mosque emptied out as families trickled out of the mosque and went on their way.
The 4 or 5 hours I spent at this mosque on this particular Sunday seemed pretty benign to me. I saw kids learning to read Arabic, parents learning about “529” education accounts, and mosque organizers working on getting the members more engaged in civic action.
Yes, the Muslims in this mosque looked a lot like their co-religionists in Pakistan and in the Middle East with their beards, headscarves and other aspects of their physical appearance. But so what? The vast majority of Muslims in those foreign countries are peace-loving regular people too.
The activities of the mosque seemed very mundane. And as the day progressed the crowd at the mosque grew and there were women who did not cover their hair and men who were clean shaven. No fist fights broke out as a result of these two groups of Muslims converging on to a shared religious space.
In fact, many of the people at this mosque - regardless of their outward appearance - seemed to be concerned about the same things: funding their kids’ education, making sure their kids learned the basics of their faith and getting the community more involved in civic life.
So much for radicalization in our mosque.
Rep. King - please take our mosque off your hit...errr....checklist. There’s no radicalization going on here.
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*This conversation didn't actually occur this way. I consider this a piece of literary non-fiction and to that end I've created some composite characters and invented some conversations.
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