Spiritual treasures: America's 7 oldest mosques

There are approximately 3,000 mosques spread across the United States, and while the vast majority have been built by communities since the mid to late twentieth century, mosques are not new to the American scene.

There are some suggestions that small mosques were constructed by Muslims who arrived with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century. Slave accounts, such as those written by Ayyub ibn Sulayman, reveal that enslaved Muslims continued to practice their religion secretly, perhaps gathering in small groups to pray, essentially a mosque, a place where Muslims gather to pray.

However, the oldest built American mosques, which still exist today, were mostly built by Muslim communities that came as part of mass migrations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some are the result of Islamic missionary work, others are the product of liberated black Americans who rediscovered their ancestral Islamic roots. While there is still controversy over which mosque is the oldest, due to the dearth of work in the field, the oldest accounts and written documents available suggest that the next mosques may be the seven oldest in America today.

1. Al-Sadiq Mosque, Chicago, Illinois:

America's oldest mosque was founded by an Ahmadiyya Muslim preacher, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, in 1922 as part of the mission's new U.S. headquarters in Chicago.

A photograph in the movement's magazine, Sunrise Islamiyya, reveals that it was initially known as the Ahmadiyya Islamic Mosque and Dar al-Resalah. The mosque is housed in a modest two-story building with a mashrabiya (protruding window) and a large dome with two false minarets with fusiform spindles. Today, on the same site, there is a small sandy mosque, with a pointed roof, and two green minarets. The name of the mosque, "al-Sadiq", may be a reference to its founder.

2. Brooklyn Islamic Mosque, New York City:

Also known as the Bowers Street Mosque, it is the oldest surviving mosque in New York, located on a quiet road in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The mosque is a former two-story church dating back to the late nineteenth century, now covered with white wooden slats, and topped with an ornate tower and crescent.

Its design refers to the origins of the mosque's founders, Tatars from Lithuania, Poland and Belarus, where all mosques once looked like this. The community bought this building in 1927 and it remains in their custody to this day, although daily prayers are no longer held here.

3. North Dakota Mosque, Ross, North Dakota:

The North Dakota mosque is not so much a mosque as a memorial to Syrian and Lebanese Muslims who once prayed at this remote, windy location, close to the Canadian border.

They immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century from the then Ottoman-occupied territories in Greater Syria, and built a regular, large, rectangular, wooden and brick building on this site around 1929. As much as it was a place of worship, it was also a place of community activity. Demolished in 1979, a small square brick building with four thin false minarets and a small copper dome was constructed in 2005.

4. Mother Mosque, Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

The oldest purpose-built mosque in America, the "Mother Mosque", is said to have also been built by Syrian and Lebanese Muslims who emigrated from Ottoman Greater Syria.

When it opened in 1934, it was known as the "Rose of Fraternity Lodge and Islamic Temple", and was used for prayer, education and community activity, as well as storing ancient Qur'ans brought by immigrants with them from their homelands. These days, the local community uses a nearby larger mosque built in the seventies, and the mother mosque is mostly used to educate people about America's Islamic heritage.

5. American Islamic Society, Dearborn, Michigan:

The American Islamic Society took root in a Dearborn home in 1938 among a group of Lebanese immigrants who moved to the area after the opening of the local Ford Motor Company.

In the eighties, the mosque made headlines because it became the first mosque in America to be granted permission to broadcast the call to prayer publicly using loudspeakers. Today, the mosque is housed in a huge purpose-built building covering an area of about 48,000 square feet, and includes an Islamic school and a medical center.

6. Islamic Center of Washington City:

When the Islamic Center opened in Washington in 1952, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower described it at its inauguration ceremony as one of the "most beautiful buildings in Washington."

The oldest mosque in the U.S. capital was founded by a group of diplomats and local Muslims who founded the Washington Mosque Foundation in 1944. They then hired the Italian architect Mario Rossi to build the mosque because of his experience working on mosques in Egypt. Rossi relied in his design on the classic Mamluk architectural style of the country.

7. Mohammed Mosque, Washington, D.C.:

Although the Mohammed Mosque began under the name "Temple of the Nation of Islam 4" in 1960 – created with the help of Malcolm X – it was widely regarded as the first "mosque" to be built in the U.S. capital by enslaved descendants of African-Americans.

The mosque became a mosque for mainstream Sunni Islam in 1975, when Warith al-Din Muhammad, one of the sons of the nation's leader Elijah Muhammad, appointed a Sunni imam, changed the name from "Temple 4" to the Washington Mosque, removing the benches and redirecting the direction of prayer toward Mecca in Saudi Arabia. It has been known as the Mosque of Muhammad since the eighties of the last century.