The first mosque built from the ground up in the United States was erected in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, almost a century ago by immigrants from Lebanon. Today it’s called “The Mother Mosque of America.”

Fatima Igram Smejkal, a trustee of the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids, is one of the many descendants of those Lebanese immigrants who built and fostered the Muslim community in Cedar Rapids.

Her photo books tell their story.

“This is the mosque, the Mother Mosque behind them. As you can see, it was called then the Moslem Temple. You can see the United States flag right there, which was very important to the immigrants. And my father, Abdullah Igram, is here on the left,” she said.

Her grandfather was among the tens of thousands of Christian and Muslim young men who fled the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century with little more than a Bible, or in his case the Quran.

“My grandfather came to this country in 1916. He went to Ellis Island. The family did meet my grandfather, took him to Danbury, Connecticut, from Ellis Island. Eventually they brought him to the Midwest, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” said Smejkal.

They settled in Midwestern towns that were booming agriculture and business centers linked by railroads and waterways.

“They would have prayers and they would meet with families in homes. And they would, you know, pray and read from the holy book. And then they would have like a social hour. And they would, they knew that they needed a place larger than just going from home to home,” said Smejkal.

So in the 1920s a group of Cedar Rapids Muslim women began fundraising with bake sales and dinners to build a mosque.

“So they built the small mosque, which is now called the Mother Mosque,” said Smejkal. “And at that time it was called the Nadi, which was meeting place.”

Used for both prayer and as a social hall, the mosque was officially opened in February of 1934.

“These pictures show the activity and how the community were vibrant and alive all these years, 100 years,” said Imam Taha Tawil, of “The Mother Mosque of America.” Tawil came to Cedar Rapids in the 1980s and also served as a faith leader at the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids. “And this is Tima, this is Tima with her mom Aziza,” he said.

“Then in 1972 they built the Cedar Rapids Islamic Center because we outgrew the small mosque,” said Smejkal.

Today the Muslim community that founded the “Mother Mosque” keeps growing. Both their descendants and newcomers from Afghanistan, East Africa and beyond are continuing to redefine being both Muslim and American in the heartland.

The numbers are so large on any given Friday during prayer the Islamic Center uses the gym instead of the official prayer room.

“We use this entrance for Friday prayer. That's more convenient,” said Smejkal. “Unfortunately because it is a gymnasium, we are. We have to roll and unroll the rugs for prayer on Friday,” Smejkal.

For the community, the mosques are key to maintaining and transmitting their faith and heritage, while also embracing diversity in the U.S.

“I don't really think those immigrants from the early 1900s were in a survival mode like these immigrants. They were in survival mode, meaning they had to learn the language, they had to get, of course, employment, housing, and make a life for themselves. But, they didn't from danger or war,” said Smejkal.

“When I meet these people from the mosque, that's why I'm so kind to the ones that come in from Somalia and the Congo and Sudan and Afghanistan. I have no idea what they left, what they're thinking when they walk in that mosque,” she said.

Over the last decade, hundreds of Muslim families have arrived. They are mainly from African countries and Afghanistan.

Faroz Waziri and his wife Mena are among them.

“We start from scratch here. We were immigrants came from Afghanistan. Personally, that was not my choice to come to America. It’s, I kind of forced to leave the country,” said Waziri.

They arrived in the mid-2010s on a special visa for those who had worked for the U.S. armed forces oversees.

“It was very difficult for me to, to come to a new country with a lot of obstacles and culture barrier, language barrier,” he said.

The Waziri’s are now naturalized citizens and have a U.S.-born son in the third grade. They also earned college degrees in Iowa, with Faroz now working as a Refugee Resource Manager and Mena working at a hospital as a medical laboratory scientist.

They attend the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids regularly.

“Yeah, I love when I came here, I see a big community, Muslim community when I go to the mosque, especially during Ramadan time,” said Mena Waziri. “So we love that part of Cedar Rapids.”

On a recent Friday, Smejkal could be found greeting her fellow faithful with a cheerful “salaam.”

“It's very important for me to represent the mosque in a good way, in a good manner. I've kind of just done the whole gamut of volunteering there, which was very important to me for the kids. I wanted to give them the childhood that I was so fortunate and so lucky to live in, from my parents, my grandparents, other members of the Muslim community. I felt so fortunate to be around them, to learn from them. And experience what I did, and I wanted to give that back to those boys and girls and men and women now,” she said.

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