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What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About American Mosques

The real-estate tycoon made his reputation by building glorious structures—so why is he threatening to shutter houses of worship? 

BY PETER MANSEAU

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during the WHO-HD Iowa Forums at the Des Moines Area Community College Newton Campus, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Newton, Iowa. (AP Photo/Matthew Holst)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during the WHO-HD Iowa Forums at the Des Moines Area Community College Newton Campus, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Newton, Iowa. (AP Photo/Matthew Holst)” 

The first mosques in America might have looked at home at a Trump resort.

Lavish and flashy, literally fantastic but not built to last, they were reproductions of notable Islamic houses of worship constructed for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The fair included pavilions allowing visitors to experience far-flung locales, and planners did not shy away from religion. They built mosques for the Turkish, Egyptian, and Tunisian sections—the last of which, as part of a “French Colonies” exhibit, stood in the shadow of both a crescent-topped dome and the tricolore.

Ersatz though they were, the fairground mosques were used for genuine religious purposes. “Every detail of Mohammedan worship is there followed out,” one newspaper account reported. When “Allahu akbar” echoed from their minarets, the many Muslims who answered the call to prayer included nearly 200 men, women, and children who had been brought from Cairo to bring street scenes to life.

At the time, some in the small U.S. Muslim community saw the fair and the concurrent Parliament of the World’s Religions as opportunities to explain Islam to their fellow citizens. “So many false reports have been circulated regarding the plans of the devout Mussulmans of the East to introduce the Islamic system into America,” the Massachusetts-born convert Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb wrote in 1893,  “that it seems imperative to explain the project more fully than has been done heretofore.”

Since then, the Muslim population in the United States has grown from the thousands to the millions. Chicago’s temporary mosques came down, but in the decades following the World’s Fair, longer lasting communities were organized in Maine, Indiana, South Dakota, and Iowa, where the 1934 “Mother Mosque of America” still stands.

Yet judging by recent events, one might have met less resistance building mosques in America a century ago than today.

Earlier this week, a public meeting discussing the construction of a new Islamic center in Spotsylvania, Virginia erupted in anger when a man began shouting that Muslims belonged to an “evil cult.” “Every one of you are terrorists,” he said to applause before a sheriff’s deputy brought proceedings abruptly to an end.

Similar scenes unfold whenever mosques come before planning and zoning boards across the country. Sessions of local government ostensibly concerned with traffic and parking unleash rhetoric unimaginable against any other Americans.

Source: The Atlantic

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