By MARC PARRY, Staff writer Wednesday, July 4, 2007
TROY - The mosque, a converted funeral home, is so small it can't accommodate worshipers for the best-attended prayers of the week. On Fridays, they pray in the basement of a nearby college athletic center instead.
They also borrow space for marriage ceremonies. And interfaith meetings. And holidays.
"It's time the community gets its own place," said Abdulkadir Elmi, a trustee and ex-president of Troy's Masjid al-Hidaya.
That should start to happen at the end of this month, with a groundbreaking expected for a proper mosque with a dome and two minarets on more than 12 acres in Latham. The whole project is expensive, so it will be built in three phases.
The first, $3.5 million phase includes the prayer hall and adjacent facilities. Later phases include a gym that could also accommodate large gatherings and a school. The old mosque will remain open.
It's a small story about one mosque, but it also reflects a bigger picture of Muslim growth in the area, where you can still count all the mosques on one hand.
Al-Hidaya leaders estimate that up to 6,000 Muslims now live in the Capital Region. That's perhaps double the population 20 years ago, though the numbers are only rough estimates based on holiday mosque attendance.
Some move here for work, often in engineering and related fields, the mosque leaders said. Others come to work or study at local colleges and end up staying.
As an example, Elmi pointed to the president of Albany's Masjid As-Salam. Shamshad Ahmad, born in India, arrived almost 30 years ago for a postgraduate teaching position at the University at Albany. The physics professor raised four kids here. All went to local colleges. One now has two children of his own.
"Probably most families have a lot more growth then we've had because we haven't really had relatives come over," said Ahmad's son, Faisal, 28, who prayed at the Troy mosque as a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student.
As a child, Faisal Ahmad first worshipped in the basement of an Albany apartment building occupied by Muslim graduate students from Malaysia. Maybe six or seven people gathered for the Friday prayer service, called Jummah.
Growing up, he said, the Muslim community was so small that people tended to know each other. Now, Ahmad walks in the mall and sees unfamiliar Muslim women wearing head scarves.
"It's reached a point where there's new people coming into the community that we've never really seen before," said Ahmad, who believes the Muslim population is more like 10,000 to 12,000.
People often have to drive significant distances to worship at one of the area's five existing mosques. Once it's built, many will have an easier time reaching the new Al-Hidaya Center on Troy Schenectady Road in Latham.
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