A Good Mosque: Masjid Muhammad in Washington, DC

By Shabana Mir

My favorite mosque in the Washington, DC area is Masjid Muhammad. The masjid is a Warith Deen Muhammad community masjid, and the attendees are majority black, though there are always white and brown people there too. Does this mean we feel uncomfortably white/wheatish-to-fair when Svend and I go there? Not in the least.

Imam Yusuf Saleem, a short, wiry, cheerful, dynamic man always talks to us and greets us when we go. His sermons are strangely disorienting because they are so relevant to the lives of Muslims in this country and this community. He talks about how being Muslim doesn’t necessitate adopting a particular culture. He talks about how he’d like to go down to the community room afterwards and sing some religious songs with the brothers and sisters. His khutbas run quite long, but we never get bored. He doesn’t pull the tricks to establish fake authority I described in Khutbas for Dummies.

We sisters sit in the same prayer hall. Yes, there is one prayer hall.

Men sit in the front and women sit on the right rear. There are somewhat smaller numbers of women, which is pretty common; but there isn’t the proportion of 200 men:10 women that I experience in the other jum’a I attend. There is no separation, no 6-foot high screen, and no curtain. Appearances show that the community trusts the women not to break boundaries and do a dance of the seven veils on the men’s side.

When we walk into a masjid or musalla that has the women inside a play-pen while the men are free-range, I feel a sense of being in some strange category of being that must be set aside for labeling and quarantined like a computer virus. I mostly keep quiet, thinking that the others feel differently, but when a regular attendee actually described the play-pen, and a convert said she never went to jum’a because it felt so weird, I decided that the damage was being done quietly. When you see that most women don’t feel as comfortable to attend as compared to another jum’a--where the proportion is less disproportionate--you know that it’s necessary to say something. Because we are losing the women, and they are losing us.

Those who are comfortable with the status quo will dislike the criticism. In fact the dislike reminds me of an Urdu proverb: chor ki darhi mein tinka (there’s a straw in the thief’s beard) long story behind the proverb, but that’s my little South Asian equivalent of the untranslated Arabic phrase dropped by the khatib.

After jum’a, this one time, we all went down to the community room in the basement. Brothers and sisters, all in the same room again. My mind is reeling. They serve food and we eat--bean pie, chicken, and fruit. We talk about the Clara Muhammad School and meet the dynamic lady who works at this school that has a long vibrant American tradition of excellence.

No one looks at us in a weird or judgmental manner. People seem happy to be there and don’t seem to have the time to make others feel uncomfortable. No one tries to segregate me from my husband in a space where I don’t know anyone else. We sit together, and no one wonders aloud whether we are married or not. No one bothers that the chair a few inches away from mine is a brother’s. Svend and I talk to the same people in the masjid. This masjid is actually good for our little family. It doesn’t try to break up our family for prayer and community. We don’t have to choose between spouse and brotherhood/sisterhood.

When our friends got married in this mosque, they talked to each other, walked into the prayer hall together, wearing lovely white simple African-style robes. She wore hijab; he wore dreadlocks. The ceremony was short, simple, affectionate, good-humored and open to the community. No sitting still in a corner with frozen expressions to say Yes, I’ll marry this man for the sum of X dollars.

This is why Masjid Muhammad is our favorite masjid in the DC area. Some claim that others are just as good, in their own way. I don’t argue with that. I just think Masjid Muhammad is a cool, open, comfortable, American community masjid. Even we visitors to the community feel comfortable there.

Svend and I were musing aloud, and he suggested that maybe we could set up a Masjid Website where we can offer kudos to our favorite mosques--not just because they happen to accord with our sectarian beliefs, but because they are inclusive in terms of gender, ethnicity, school of thought, disability, and other considerations; because their climate is comfortable; and because when we leave them we feel spiritually renewed and prepared to remember Allah in all our worldly affairs. Because we don’t feel burned out from conflict, meanness, judgmentalism, exclusion, and injustice.

I hesitate to suggest the reverse of such a website, in this political climate.

Also known as the Mother Masjid, Masjid Muhammad was established in 1960 by the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. It is located at 1519 4th Street NW in Washington, DC.

Shabana Mir is a doctoral student in Education Policy Studies/Anthropology at Indiana University.