Religion & Beliefs

Save America’s Oldest Mosque: Iowa Flood Update

By Tamar Fox / July 2, 2008

Two weeks ago we told you about how Iowa’s Jewish community has been affected by flooding, and ways you can help, including giving to the Red Cross, and sending donations marked "Flood Relief" to the Jewish Federation, 910 Polk Boulevard, Des Moines, IA, 50312.

But the Jewish community isn’t the only small group with big new problems. In Cedar Rapids, Mother Mosque of America, the oldest surviving mosque in North America, took on so much water that teams of volunteers are still searching for anything worth saving. Among the ruined contents of the mosque are handwritten journals, photographs from the late 1800s, religious books, and the writings and recordings of T.B. Irving, who lived in Cedar Rapids and penned an early English translation of the Koran. If you live in or around Cedar Rapids, Mother Mosque is looking for volunteers to help looking through the wreckage, and soon it will be looking for people to help with teardown and reconstruction. Happily, the community is definitely planning to rebuild. To donate money to help rebuild the mosque, and to see pictures of the flood debris, visit mothermosque.org.

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  • By ThorsProvoni 7/3/08 at 1:21 p.m. UTC

    By all means contribute to the Mosque's restoration, but Albanian and Polish Tatar Muslims built Mosques in the USA long before Arab, Turkish, and South Asian's did.

    From Mosques in the USA:

    The first mosque in America was probably build by Albanian Muslims in 1915 in Maine. By 1919, they had established another mosque in Connecticut. Polish-speaking Tatars build a mosque in Brooklyn, NY in 1926, which is still in use. African American Muslims established the first Mosque in Pittsburgh, PA in 1930. The Lebanese Community of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, opened its first mosque in 1935. The State Street Mosque in New York City was established by Sheikh Dawood Ahmed Faisal in 1955. This mosque represents a special point in the development of the American Muslim community. The Dar-ul-Islam movement began from there.

    The claim by Lebanese Muslims about the Mother Mosque seems to represent willful ignorance, for the Ottoman Empire was the pre-dominant Muslim power for centuries and the Ottoman elite consisted primarily of Slavic, Albanian, and Greek Muslims.

    Polish Tatar Muslims constituted historically one of the most accomplished communities in E. Europe and were granted noble status within historic Poland in the fourteenth century.

    The Polish Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and the Hollywood actor, Charles Bronson, come from the Polish Tatar Muslim community.

    The reluctance to admit that Eastern Europe has been the main center of Islam for the last 4 centuries or so parallels a similar reluctance to accept the primarily E. European origin of Modern Rabbinic Judaism.

    I tend to think of Medieval Judaism whether Karaite or Rabbinic as primarily Arab Islamic Judaism while I categorize Modern Rabbinic Judaism whether Karaite or Rabbinic as primarily E. European Roman Catholic/E. Orthodox Judaism.

    In Why Study Yiddish Culture? I argue that studying Yiddish Culture is necessary to understanding Modern Europe. Likewise, I must argue that studying the Eastern European Islamic synthesis is necessary for understanding both modern Islam and E. Europe and therefore absolutely critical to comprehending the modern Western-Islamic synthesis.

     

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