Imam: Fear, anger drowning American dream
Says Christchurch, Tree of Life massacres are linked by hatred
Malik Mujahid has given many sermons as an imam affiliated with the Downtown Islamic Center in Chicago, a large mosque with more than 1,000 members.
And when he left Chicago on Thursday to give a jumah sermon — one delivered just after the lunch hour on Fridays — at the Muslim Association of Greater Pittsburgh in Richland, he had no way of knowing it would be after a terrorist killed 49 Muslim worshippers in two mosques attending a jumah sermon halfway around the world in Christchurch, New Zealand.
He knew he had to refocus his sermon Friday to focus on the massacre rather than the Chinese oppression of Muslims as he had planned.
And he knew what he wanted to say to more than 100 mosque members gathered there Friday. It was something he prepared for by first visiting the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 Jewish faithful were killed this past October.
“The motivation of the killer in Pittsburgh was anti-Semitism,” he said from the lectern. “The motivation of the killer in Christchurch was Islamophobia, another form of hate. But the common factor was hate.”
“We have to liberate our country, and other countries, from the fear of hate,” he said.
Mosque members — about 90 percent immigrants, primarily from Pakistan — listened intensely to his 30-minute sermon,
and many of them had tears in their eyes when he finished.
But Mr. Mujahid, 67, himself an immigrant from Pakistan, said it was hard to stay focused while he spoke as he looked out on the members, some of them with their young children kneeling next to them, or sitting on their laps.
“To tell the truth, it was difficult for me to give a sermon,” he said afterward, choking up as he spoke. “I had to tell myself to be under control.
“You see, it is not just the 49 people who died in New Zealand that I’m worried about, it’s the whole world, and America, too.
“Fear, hate and anger here is drowning the America dream, and not just for minorities, but also for the majority,” he said.
That fear, at least, was on display in several ways before the sermon Friday.
When Shazia Ahmad, the mosque’s office manager, came to work, there were already several voice mail messages, asking whether there would still be a jumah sermon because of concerns by members — in particular parents bringing young children with them — that someone might target the site.
“They were asking: ‘Is it safe to come today?’” Ms. Ahmad said. “It is devastating to hear that this happened, and that people had to be concerned.”
As a result, the mosque’s president, Omar Abbasi, called the Northern Regional Police Department and asked for extra patrols during the jumah sermon — a request that was granted immediately.
“They responded very well,” said Waqas Tirmizi, a mosque board member and president-elect. “We were grateful.”
As the congregants drove up to the mosque — a former Christian church — a police SUV patrolled up and down the roads on two sides of the mosque, bringing comfort, if not dismay because nearly everyone felt it was necessary following the attack in New Zealand.
Even non-Muslims felt the fear.
Maysa Chok, owner of Nonni’s Pizza in Fox Chapel, has been providing lunchtime fare for the mosque’s Friday service since the mosque opened four years ago, having one of her employees — a white man, she said — deliver dozens of chicken hoagies.
But when her driver came to work he immediately asked her: “Is there a delivery for the mosque? Because I’m not going today. Did you see the news?”
Ms. Chok, who is also Muslim, said she understood and agreed to drive the food over herself.
“He’s a nice guy. I’m not upset with him,” she said. “I was happy to do it myself.”
There were bright moments for the mosque on Friday, too, however.
Ishita Rahman, head of the mosque’s outreach committee, which works to bring understanding between Muslim, Christian and Jewish congregations in the region, said she had received multiple calls from some of those congregations Friday morning expressing their support for the mosque.
She said each call of support was appreciated because the news of what happened in New Zealand “felt like a punch in the gut.”
The Tree of Life massacre was horrific, she said, but New Zealand “was a much bigger dose of the same thing. This has to stop.”
One of the calls she got was not from a congregation, but from a member of the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America group, which has a chapter nearby, who said she wanted to bring cookies for the jumah sermon as an expression of support.
“I just thought that that would be a nice gesture to check in and see how they’re doing,” said Rosie O’Grady Ravish, the Moms Demand Action member who came dressed in her red Moms Tshirt to deliver not only cookies but also hugs to Ms. Rahman.
As it turns out, her reason for coming aligned with Mr. Mujahid’s sermon.
“I felt it needed to be done; we need to reach out,” said Ms. O’Grady Ravish, who was raised Catholic but is not a church-goer now. “If we don’t start to have conversations about our differences, we’re just going to continue to be divisive.”