Guardian: Sitting in her white pickup truck at the gates of the Muslim cemetery in Ross,North Dakota, Lila Thorlaksen had a simple answer to a question about those who fuel the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States.
“That’s their problem,” she answered matter-of-factly.
Word of the Islamophobia that continues to swirl around the US and world doesn’t reach very far into the lands that are home to one of North America’s earliest Muslim communities, where lifelong residents like Thorlaksen say there have never been problems and pay little attention to the rhetoric that suggests otherwise.
Ross’s original mosque was torn down in the 1970s due to its deteriorating condition. Thorlaksen’s mother funded the construction of a small masjid that was built on the piece of land in the mid-2000s. There it stands today – with its small dome poking up over the vast expanse of grassland and pasture, oil wells bobbing in the distance – a memorial to this unique chapter of Islam’s American story that will live on long after the residents who remember the original mosque pass on.
“It’s not used much,” Thorlaksen said, looking out of her truck window at the small mosque as the wind howls. She was raised Muslim two miles up the road from the mosque, but became Christian when she got married. “But it’s there if it needs to be.”
Categories: Accepting Islam, Interfaith, Interfaith America, ISLAM, The Muslim Times