The Mother Mosque of America: Iowa's 1934 Mosque, the Oldest Still Standing

The oldest surviving mosque in the United States is a small wood-frame building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, built mostly by its own congregation as the country slid into the Great Depression. It opened on February 15, 1934, as the Moslem Temple. Today it is the Mother Mosque of America.

It was the first building designed and constructed as a house of worship for Muslims in America: a simple, one-story wood-frame building in the prairie schoolhouse style. It illustrates two strands of American history — the story of immigration, and the beginning of Islam as an established religion in the United States.

Muslims in America before the mosque

Immigrants were not the first Muslims in America, though that is often suggested.

• 1527. The first documented Muslim was Estevanico, a North African Muslim captive who arrived with the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. He would later transform knowledge of the American Southwest.
• The slave trade. The first true wave of Muslims arrived as slaves, on cargo ships. An estimated 10 to 40 percent of the enslaved African population was Muslim — 600,000 to 1.2 million people. They left no self-sustaining communities, but their history and legacy live on in the Black Nationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Immigration. Scholars describe Muslim immigration in three phases — 1878–1924, 1952 and 1965 — though these track only Arab Muslim immigrants.

Laws that kept them out

Before the Civil War, few Muslims immigrated, because of the rules on citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1790 — Congress's first attempt to set immigration policy — allowed only free white persons of good moral character to become citizens, which discouraged dark-skinned Arab, Indian and African Muslims. From the 1830s, nativism rose: intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its un-American beliefs. The laws of the period were aimed less at Islam than at foreignness and non-whiteness, and most targeted Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

From the late 1870s, immigrants arrived from what is now Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon. They were classified as "Turks," considered Asiatic, and therefore ineligible for citizenship. Many were poor laborers looking for economic stability; a great number became disenchanted and went home. Those who stayed became miners, factory workers, peddlers, grocers, shopkeepers and petty merchants. Muslims were only 10 percent of Arab immigrants, but sizeable clusters settled in the Midwest, and until 1924 their numbers grew as political conditions changed in the Ottoman Empire.

Building it

Cut off by language, custom, race and religion, the Arab Muslim immigrants wanted a house of worship.

What the congregation changed

The congregation that worshipped here became an important force in changing the status of Muslims in the United States:

• Donations from the Aossey family founded the first Muslim National Cemetery in Cedar Rapids in 1948, a resting place for the whole Midwest.
• Abdallah Ingram later won recognition of Islam as a valid religion in the U.S. military, so that Muslims would no longer be buried as atheists.
• Members were among the founding organizers of the Federation of Islamic Associations of the United States and Canada.

Decline and return

By 1970 the community had outgrown the building and built a new mosque on First Avenue SW. By the 1980s the old one had been sold, served various purposes, and fallen into neglect and disrepair. The Islamic Council of Iowa bought it and renovated it in the early 1990s. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 15, 1996, and today it is again a place of worship, and a resource center on Islam and the history of Muslims in America, at 1335 9th St. NW, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52405.

Sources

Based on "Iowa: The Mother Mosque of America" from the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.