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This is a list of notable mosques in the United States of America.
Contents
Selected history of mosques in the United States
A mosque, or masjid, can be defined as any place that Muslims pray facing to Mecca, and is not necessarily a building; by that meaning there were mosques in the United States by 1731 or earlier. Muslim Job ben Solomon (1701-1773), an African-American who was kidnapped into slavery in Senegal or Gambia, is documented by his slave narrative memoir to have prayed in the forest of Kent Island, Maryland, where he was brought during 1731-33.
Some sources assert that what is likely the first American mosque building was a mosque in Biddeford, Maine that was founded in 1915 by Albanian Muslims. A Muslim cemetery still existed there in 1996.
However the first "purpose-built" mosque building was probably a mosque opened in 1921 in Detroit, Michigan. It was close to the famous Highland Park Ford Plant which began mass, assembly-line production of Ford Model T cars in 1913, and where "hundreds of Arab American men" came to work. This mosque included Sunni, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims, and was funded by Muhammad Karoub, a real estate developer.
The Mother Mosque of America, built in 1934 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is asserted to be the oldest still-existing mosque building in the U.S. Also is asserted to be the oldest standing mosque in the U.S. is the Al-Sadiq Mosque, built in 1922 in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago.
Nation of Islam mosques, mostly of African Americans, are often in storefronts or former churches.
It has been estimated that there were somewhat more than 100 mosques in the U.S. in 1970, but immigration of more than a million Muslims since then led to hundreds more being built.
In 1994 the Islamic Center of Yuba City, in California, was destroyed by fire set in a hate-crime, and is one of two mosques destroyed by a hate-crime in U.S. history, (the second being in Joplin, Missouri in 2012) . It had just been completed at cost of $1.8 million plus sweat equity of the Muslims of its rural community, including descendants of Pakistani who immigrated to the area c. 1902. Its story, including its rebuilding, is told in David Washburn's 2012 documentary film An American Mosque.
In 2002 a book on "the American Mosque" appeared.
The overall number of mosques in the United States quietly rose from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2010, an increase of 74%.
The "Ground Zero mosque", a planned mosque in lower Manhattan, was the subject of controversy from 2010 on. In September 2011, a temporary 4,000-square-foot (370 m2) Islamic center opened in renovated space at the site, and current plans are for a museum to be built, instead of a mosque.
A 2011 study, The American Mosque 2011, sponsored by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research (Hartford Seminary), the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, as well as the nation's largest Islamic civic and religious groups, including the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found that the U.S. States with the most mosques were New York (257), California (246) and Texas (166).
Through 2014, a building boom for mosques has been going on.
Numerous ones mentioned for their architecture:
An overview is provided.