Many years ago, my father used to comment to me about the uniqueness of the United States as we would drive by churches, synagogue and even a mosque on the prairie in my home state of North Dakota. A mosque on the prairie? Yes, that’s right, there was a mosque built right in the middle of the North Dakota prairie almost 80 years ago by homesteading immigrants from the Middle East. And this past summer, a new mosque was dedicated on that site near Ross, North Dakota, a rural community in central North Dakota with a listed population of 48 people. That locale is generally acknowledged as the site of the first mosque in all of North America.
My father came from Lebanon as a young man to join his father who had homesteaded in North Dakota not far from the site of this mosque. He knew many people from the Muslim community in North Dakota who were his friends as he grew up in Lebanon. And we would always stop to see these friends when he took our family on trips to see his uncles living near Regina, Saskatchewan. He always said, “We can’t drive by here without stopping to see my buddy, Charlie (Shehata) Juma.” And as we drove down the gravel roads to get to Charlie’s place, it was always fun to read the names on the mailboxes along the way — names like Ole Swenson, Hjelmer Olsen, Hans Schmidt and Hassan Abdullah. That’s right, Hassan Abdullah smack in the middle of the North Dakota prairie. North Dakota was one of the only states that still offered free homestead land to immigrants coming to the US in the last part of the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s. And, although the majority of the immigrants from the Middle East — largely from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine at that time — were Christian, a sizable number of Muslims homesteaded in North Dakota. One of the first Arab immigrants to this area was Hassan Juma who settled on 160 acres in 1899. Nearby was Samir Omar and by 1902 at least twenty other families had followed Juma and Omar to that area in North Dakota.
The Homestead Act allowed these farmers to lay claim to 160 acres of government— owned land and after five years of personally farming the land, the homesteader would become the owner. However, many of the Arab immigrants ran into problems in those early days because the US objected to their naturalization. But in 1909, the government withdrew the ban and the Arab immigrants were able to apply for citizenship.
The Muslim immigrants began to have their Friday prayers in the homes of community members in the early 1900s. In 1929, the residents built a mosque which is said to be the nation’s first. Accounts differ, but it’s generally agreed that other Muslims around the country organized their mosques in rented spaces. The mosque at Ross is said to be the first built specifically as a house of worship.
The building itself was not a very attractive one. It was long and low, sunk into the ground. It was intended to be the basement of a structure yet to come. Unfortunately, the Depression hit soon after it was built, and the transformation never happened. The building was used as late as the 1960s.
In 1983, author Francie Berg wrote: “The potential significance (of the building) went unknown for many years. However, a few years ago, the North Dakota Historical Society began some research into the mosque, intending to submit it for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, in order to preserve it. Researchers soon were disappointed to find out the building had been torn down a year or two earlier.”
I have distinct memories of going to that mosque with Charlie Juma and my father as we stopped to visit the Jumas and their neighbors. Later in my life, my father and I were part of an effort to acknowledge the site as a national historical site. But that has not yet happened. However, during the last two years the mosque has been rebuilt and rededicated on the site. Among the group who rededicated the mosque and gave commemoration speeches were three Roman Catholics, Father William C. Sherman (a priest), Paul C. Whitney and John Guerrero. The trio have jointly written a book about the Arab immigrants to North Dakota, “Prairie Peddlers: The Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota.”
Contrast this wonderful scenario with a recent article in the Economist about the politics of mosque building in many parts of Europe titled, “Constructing Conflict.” The article points out that there is much resistance to the building of mosques in Europe. A story about plans to build a new mosque for the 120,000 Muslim community in Cologne, Germany, for example, states, “Ralph Giordano, a German-Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor.. stirred a national debate by issuing a stark message: ‘I urge the mayor and members of the city council to stop the building of this mosque.’”
Presently there is a very popular Canadian Broadcasting program, entitled, “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”
It is a sitcom originating in Regina, Saskatchewan and has a lot of fun with the trials and tribulations of Muslims living and worshipping on the prairies of Midwestern Canada. It does much to “humanize” Arabs and Muslims. These were and are the same Arabs and Muslims who settled on the prairies of North Dakota and Canada and helped to make this region one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. And as Charlie Juma used to tell my father and me, “What a great country we live in. We always talked about getting rich in America and going back to the old country. But, we’ve got everything we need right here. Heck, I’ve even invited my neighbors to the mosque. It’s kinda funny but my friend Ole always refers to it as the Muslim church down the road.”
