European-origin Muslims built America’s first mosques and remained socially invisible

Evidence

Outside the public spotlight and of European origin, Bosnian, Albanian, Polish, and Lithuanian Muslim communities sprang up in New York and Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century. Albanian Muslims opened the first mosque built by immigrants in 1915 in Massachusetts. Other European Muslim immigrants built mosques in Ross, North Dakota; Highland Park, Michigan; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the 1920s and 1930s. As Muslims from the Levant slowly trickled in, the number of mosques gradually increased. For the most part, immigrant Muslims remained invisible as a religious minority, at a time when Jews and Catholics faced pointed religious bigotry and African American Muslims were treated as a domestic security threat. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 523

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• SHARE: Great tidbit for an immigration- or religious-history enthusiast: the first immigrant-built US mosque was Albanian in 1915.