Mosque Works to Find Unity in its Diverse Community

March 17, 2002

Source: Los Angeles Times

On March 17, 2002, the Los Angeles Times featured an article on the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, CA. "Inside the mosque community... some object to non-Muslims visiting their sacred space; others warmly embrace them. Some women veil their entire bodies; others throw off such practices as outdated... The King Fahd Mosque's struggles to unite a people drawn from a broad range of ideologies, culture and race seem familiar and quintessentially American. The diversity belies the notion of an insular people in ideological lock-step, beholden to a distant desert sheikdom... 'We do not want to be seen as a Saudi outfit,' says the mosque's imam, Tajuddin Shuaib, a Ghana native who studied Islam for a decade in Saudi Arabia and was sent to the U.S. a quarter-century ago. 'We are like the United Nations ... no one nationality dominates.'"