Five historic mosques of America you shouldn’t miss

Photo: The turret on top of the Brooklyn Moslem Mosque, NYC, USA / Courtesy of Tharik Hussain

The oldest surviving mosque in America recently celebrated its 110th anniversary, and almost no one in the US or anywhere else knows anything about it. The history of Muslims in the US has barely been explored, but a visit to the country’s mosques is a wonderful way to remedy this. The story of a mosque is the story of its people, so here are five historic American mosques you can visit to begin unravelling the story of American Muslims.

1. THE BROOKLYN MOSLEM MOSQUE, NEW YORK CITY

America’s oldest surviving mosque sits on a quiet road in Washington Heights, Brooklyn, New York City. The two-storey late-19th-century building is covered in vertical, white wooden slats. The mosque society was founded in 1907 by white Muslims from the Baltic states of Lithuania, Poland and Belarus. The community of ethnic Tatars came together to purchase the former church in 1927 before making it look like the mosques they had left behind in the Baltic: small wooden buildings with ornate little turrets on the top.