The Mother Mosque of America

In a quiet residential neighborhood on the northwest side of Cedar Rapids stands a modest white building with a small dome and a pointed arch above the entrance door. From the street it could pass for a converted house, and that modesty is part of its history. This is the Mother Mosque of America, completed in nineteen thirty-four, and considered the oldest purpose-built mosque still standing in the United States.

The community that built it traces its roots to the eighteen nineties, when the first Muslim immigrants from Lebanon and Syria began settling in Cedar Rapids. By nineteen fourteen the Arab Muslim population in the city numbered forty-five people. By the mid-nineteen twenties the community had grown large enough to sustain over fifty shops and grocery stores, and was gathering for Friday prayers in rented halls, a temporary arrangement that grew more unsatisfying with each year.

In nineteen twenty-five, a group of young Muslim men formed a fraternal organization called The Rose of Fraternity Lodge and began raising money for a dedicated building. Community women organized bake sales and dinners through the Depression years. Construction began in nineteen twenty-nine and was completed on February fifteenth, nineteen thirty-four, with members doing much of the physical work themselves.

The building predates the larger Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids, which opened in nineteen seventy-one. When the congregation outgrew the Mother Mosque and moved, the original building fell into disrepair through successive owners. In nineteen ninety-one the Islamic Council of Iowa repurchased and restored it.

The National Park Service has documented it as one of the most significant sites in Muslim-American history, a community of immigrants, in the middle of Iowa, who built their house of worship with their own hands during the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century.