Islam in Idaho: A Small Group of Muslims Hear the Call of Prayer and Worship Together in Rexburg

By Warren Cornwall
Idaho Falls Post Register

REXBURG -- The call to prayer comes from a plastic alarm clock and a cramped living room takes the place of a mosque, but the humble trappings don't stop Rizwan Ahmed Qureshi.

The slight, bearded man stands barefoot in his Rexburg apartment, eyes closed, murmuring quietly in harmony with another man. Above his head hangs a framed tapestry embroidered with Arabic lettering. "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful" it begins.

This is the inconspicuous world of Islam in eastern Idaho. A world where a handful of the devout, most of them recent immigrants, quietly practice their religion. They find each other by word-of-mouth, phone books and friends. They pray in apartments, malls and storage rooms. And they negotiate life in the heartland of another religion -- the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Qureshi is one of the most observant of a small group of men -- usually four or five -- who gather at his home in Rexburg each Friday for the midday prayer, known in Arabic as zuhr.

Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day, the first shortly before sunrise and the last after sunset. On Friday, however, many gather for a group prayer, called jama'ah, and a few words from an Imam, a leader chosen for his knowledge of Islam and the holy text, the Koran Qureshi, serves as the local Imam, and his apartment has become the weekly meeting spot.

Though the gathering is small, it's far more than what Qureshi found when he first moved to Rexburg in 1992. He spent two months looking for a fellow worshiper. Ricks College and the local phone book turned up nothing. Finally, some friends in town learned of a connection.

"They said, 'You're a Muslim and we've found another Muslim for you,'" he said.

The Friday gatherings offer a connection in what is otherwise a fairly lonely endeavor. Ahmad Zadah, a U.S. Department of Energy engineer who lives in Idaho Falls, grew up hearing the call to prayer echo through the streets of Aleppo, Syria. Men would crowd into the mosques that dot the city of 1.2 million people.

Here, the nearest mosque is in Pocatello, and that one is little more than a rented room. Zadah usually prays at home. He hasn't summoned up the nerve to pray at his office. Qureshi, on the other hand, routinely unfolds his prayer rug and faces Mecca, Islam's holiest site, in a supply room at Madison Memorial Hospital, where he works as a lab technician. The call to prayer has caught him on the side of the road, in libraries, classrooms and the Grand Teton Mall.

The Rexburg gathering is in many ways a mirror of the 4.5 to 6 million Muslims in the United States, said Diana Eck, Harvard University professor of comparative religion and Indian studies and director of the Pluralism Project, a group of academics studying changes in America's religious landscape.

Qureshi, a Pakistani citizen, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 for college. He now plans to apply for citizenship. Zadah left Syria for college in the United States, and is now a U.S. citizen. Ahmad Bwika, a Kenyan, came to the United States to attend Ricks College. Another man, who declined to give his name, was born in the United States and converted to Islam.

Part of the U.S. Muslim population is made up of immigrants from predominantly Islamic regions of the world -- south and southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Eck said. A smaller number are converts.

The number of Muslims in the U.S. has grown in recent years, putting them on par with Jews as the country's largest religious minority. Still, they are far fewer than the estimated 245 million Christians, said Eck. And they remain misunderstood by many who hear the word Islam only as part of the phrase "Islamic terrorist."

"People don't know much beyond what they see in the news," she said.

Both Qureshi and Zadah chafe at media coverage that portrays Muslims as terrorists and extremists. When, Zadah asked, do you hear anyone referred to as a "Christian terrorist"?

But one-on-one, they are met most often with curiosity. In his discussions, Qureshi tries to stress the overlap between religions. Muslims believe the prophets of the Bible were divinely inspired, and that Jesus was part of that lineage.

"I always start from the common beliefs," he said.

There are some major theological differences, he noted. Unlike Christians or Jews, Muslims believe the final, most complete prophecy was received by Muhammad, a 7th century resident of Makkah, a city in what is now Saudi Arabia. And while they accept that Jesus was a prophet, they reject the claim that he was the son of God.

The biggest challenge Qureshi and Zadah face is isolation. They grew up in communities where Islam soaked into all parts of life -- school, friends family.

In eastern Idaho, they live surrounded by another religion as prominent as Islam in their home country.

The minute I got here I had a knock on my door," Qureshi said, referring to his first visit from a Mormon missionary.

His first landlady gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon, and invited him to several LDS functions. Out of curiosity, he once went to Sunday services at a local ward house. The worshipers welcomed him, but wondered why he had come.

"They said, 'You're Muslim, what are you doing here?' And I said, 'I just wanted to see what you guys are doing.'"

In some ways, Zadah said he feels more comfortable among people who shared a religious devotion, even if it's to another religion. But worries about how to transmit his heritage to his three children -- Zaki, 3, Sherin, 3, and Sarah, 1.

"Here it's harder, because I have to do the teaching at home," he said.

Passing on tradition is a common concern among U.S. Muslims, Eck said. To do that, Muslim communities have built weekend Islamic schools or full-time parochial schools, she said. Those are most common in major cities like Chicago, which boasts nearly 70 mosques and half a million Muslims.

In eastern Idaho, the word "community" would be an exaggeration. The once-a-week meetings are the biggest event for the few Muslims scattered throughout the area.

That eventually could take its toll. Both Zadah and Qureshi say they eventually want to move to a larger city, in part to have more company when they gather to pray each Friday.

This article by Warren Cornwall appeared in the Idaho Falls Post Register on July 17, 1998. Permission has been obtained for republication/translation of the text (including for IIP's home-page on the Internet) by U.S. Embassy Public Affairs and press outside the U.S. On the title page, credit author and carry: "Copyright 1998, The Post Register."