The Mosque That Is as American as Apple Pie

The Mosque That Is as American as Apple Pie Donald Trump won’t be visiting Cedar Rapids’s Mother Mosque on his upcoming trip to Iowa—but the historic house of worship, its imam, and its founders could teach him quite a bit. The members of America’s oldest standing mosque shrugged on learning of Donald Trump’s call to bar all Muslims from our shores. “We gave it some talk that he is desperate for votes,” Imam Taha Tawil of the Mother Mosque in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “That’s why we don’t take it seriously.” Much the same view has been expressed by New Yorkers who have long known Trump. They suspect that he just says what he figures will get him ahead and that he is generally no more real than reality TV. What the imam said next came from having long known America and the place his 81-year-old Midwestern mosque occupies in its history. “He can talk what he wants, but the American values are still there,” Tawil said. “We don’t lose any sleep over it.” Tawil’s long view goes back to the 1880s, when four brothers in their early teens became the first Muslims to arrive in Cedar Rapids. Moussa, Abbas, Yousef, and Ali Habhab had departed the village of Kfarhouna in what was then Greater Syria and landed at Ellis Island possessing little more than the sprit such as was making America great. “They were 13, 14, 15, 16, they were very young,” reports Paul Habhab, grandson of Moussa, who was renamed Moses by an immigration officer. “They didn’t know much, they were for the most part illiterate, but they had a good work ethic. They knew where they came from and they knew what they wanted. They were looking for a better life.” Coincidentally, they arrived in America around the same time as Trump’s paternal grandfather. Trump would later say in his book The Art of the Deal that his grandfather came from Sweden, when he in fact emigrated from Germany. The descendants of the Habhab brothers would remain unfailingly proud to be Syrian Muslims. Like Trump’s grandfather, the Habhab brothers started out in New York, in their case likely settling in “Little Syria,” a small enclave of Muslims and Christians just down from where the World Trade Center would later rise. They may have worshipped in a room above a Rector Street barber shop that may have been America’s first mosque, but the building was also occupied by an official from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which the brothers had been seeking to escape. They went to work unloading coal cars for a nickel a ton. “With a shovel, and he would do two cars a day, my grandfather,” reports Paul Habhab, noting Moussa had been just 14. Christians from Kfarhouna had continued on to Iowa and sent back word that Cedar Rapids was a place of promise. The Habhab brothers followed them and went to work on farms that were largely owned by German immigrants. “Eventually they saved enough to do their own thing,” Paul Habhab says.