Muslims in NYC Masjids: Living Our Lives As Strangers... To Eachother

To live your entire life of being a stranger is hard. Granted that we all know from the hadith that Muslims may come to be seen as strangers at a time but will we become strangers to each other as well.

I speak with first hand knowledge of the situation of many NYC masjids. I've been going to one for almost 16 years yet when I walk in there I feel like a stranger.

Few want to look me in the eye or say a word to me.

Its not as if they don't know me. They know me. They've seen me come to that same Masjid since I was in elementary school.

I remarked to a friend of mine how unfortunate it was that I often feel that the mood/atmosphere of the masjid is depressing. I rarely see people smile or laugh.

The look on people's faces is gloomy.

At times I felt betrayed by my community in the Masjid. I felt that very few cared to do anything positive in the Masjid by creating an inviting environment to the teenagers, youth, and even to the non-Muslims in our community.

I'm not talking about Inter-faith but at the least to try to do some dawah type outreach to the others surrounding us.

These 2 days I realized with a heavy sad heart that our community Masjid has failed our community.

Perhaps we, me included, have failed because our community is nothing more than the sum of all our efforts.

I thought about this happened and came to this conclusion.

NYC Masjids are immigrant masjids and as such, the faces of their parishioners reflects their daily struggles and uncertainties as immigrants in America.

This is a fact. Everyone in our Masjid is an immigrant. Mostly South Asian immigrants but there are a few African immigrants and a handful of immigrant Arabs as well.

I rarely see the children of these immigrants.

I know what the children think and their parents think.

They want to escape from this masjid and community. They want to 'make it' out with better jobs and their own house; not the crowed apartments and manual labor jobs their parents and them currently live and work.

To move to middle class Muslim communities of Long Island or NJ where they won't be reminded of their current lives struggling as lower working class people living in the current community and nearby Masjid is a dream.

Is that the answer for me too? To leave this community and Masjid for another?

And what about for now? I once thought about how and what I could do to make our community Masjid better... I now realize that people don't want to make this Masjid better.

Our Masjid is seen as the immigrant working class.

Immigrant dreams are to become part of the American middle class and this Masjid is not something they want to remind themselves of but rather to escape it.

And so, we will continue to be strangers to each other.