As members of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee West turned over the first shovelfuls of soil at the groundbreaking of their new mosque, they broke ground in a bigger, more impactful manner. After over a year of vocal minority pushback and delays, the new Brookfield mosque project was finally beginning construction, something this community had fought hard to make a reality.
But it wasn’t just the Muslim community of Brookfield that allowed this house of worship to overcome the negative views of some opponents – it was the unification of interfaith communities and Milwaukeeans of all types that made this project come to life. And now it is the entire community that has the possibility to benefit from this place of prayer and community center, all beginning with one shovelful of dirt.
The Muslim community in the greater Milwaukee area is not new: the community traces its roots back to immigrants from the Middle East and Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. Their story is a classic one of immigration for a better life, and their roots are as firmly set in Wisconsin’s soil.
Othman Atta, who currently serves as the executive director of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, looked into the history and origins of Muslim immigrants to Wisconsin for the 25th anniversary of the organization in 2007.
“I had broken them down into three different areas: the Muslims who came from the Arab world, those who came from the subcontinent, as I call it, which is Pakistan, India, Kashmir and then black Muslims. All three actually kind of played a role in the history of Islam in Wisconsin and the greater Milwaukee area.”
The community of Muslim immigrants settled in the Milwaukee area, but also spread throughout Wisconsin as early as the 1940s. According to Atta, “There were Arabs who actually started to come into the Milwaukee area from the 1940s and even the 1950s. At the same time, there were individuals who were coming from Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s. Then you had the black Muslims that started out in the Nation of Islam.”
The Nation of Islam built its third house of worship, a temple, in Milwaukee. Once the majority of the organization was absorbed into the general Muslim community due to the actions of Warith Mohammed, those temples were transformed into mosques. The Islamic Society of Milwaukee maintains the Clara Muhammad School in the former Milwaukee temple, paying homage to the old ways of the Nation of Islam and allowing it to maintain a strong connection to the black community of Muslims.
Janan Najeeb, who serves as the president of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition, recalls the story of her family choosing to move to Wisconsin. “My paternal grandfather was a merchant and he traveled between the Middle East and the U.S. For whatever reason, he took a liking to the Midwest and Milwaukee. He is actually buried in Milwaukee. He brought my father here as a teenager to study and work. My grandfather died at a young age and my father was still in high school. My father remained here with his uncle who was also a merchant; my father finished high school and technical school and served in the U.S. Army. Then he went overseas, got married and after having his first two children, he brought his family to warm Milwaukee.”
Wisconsin presented a different and new environment for the Muslim immigrants who often traveled enormous distances in search of a new life, according to Mushir Hassan, one of the leaders of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee West Task Force, a group that is helping to oversee the mosque being built in Brookfield. Many of the immigrants to the greater Milwaukee area have been professionals, educators and parents looking for better education opportunities for their children. These immigrants have folded into the greater Wisconsin community over the past 60 years, helping to form the fabric of the towns and cities of which they are a part.
Najeeb remembers the difficulties of growing up in such a different environment.
“We obviously felt rather isolated because there were was only a very small population of Muslims. We did not have a Mosque and there were very, very few children our age. We had many friends of other faiths but we grew up in a practicing Muslim family and faith was part of our identity, so we felt something was missing.”
“People have a genuine curiosity about learning about other cultures, and that is pervasive in Wisconsin,” Hassan says. From his experience as a Muslim living in Wisconsin, Hassan has found the non-Muslim residents of the state to be a very friendly community of people curious to learn more about different cultures.
Muslims have been praying locally on Fridays at Waukesha Memorial Hospital and in evenings during Ramadan at Elmbrook Memorial Hospital since 2000, but the growing community required a larger area to worship.
Unfortunately, not all have been welcoming to Muslims living in Wisconsin and throughout the United States. Members of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee faced some of this adversity head-on when they proposed a new mosque for the Brookfield and greater Milwaukee community.
Some opponents of a stronger Muslim presence in the United States have accused all American Muslims of terrorism in an attempt at inspiring fear in the general population. These sources of Islamaphobia are often referred to as Fear Inc. “There has been a vocal minority clamoring with usual ‘fear the Muslims, they are all terrorists’ tripe, but they have been the minority. The opponents used typical Fear Inc. smears about Muslims that were easy to counter, as they were so baseless. Many people saw past the opponents hiding behind ‘concerns about traffic’ being raised by the mosque,” Hassan says.
Much of the community has been helpful, however, and has attempted to make the construction of the mosque a reality. “Overall there was minimal, loud, opposition. I really need to stress the world minimal. Overwhelmingly, there was not any rejection, if you want to say that, or any difficulty that the Muslim community had. In fact, the Brookfield community worked with an interfaith organization in Brookfield, and many of the individuals out there were already part of the community, whether it was physicians, part of different programs, part of their interfaith groups and so forth,” Atta says.
The presence of those interfaith groups proved to be essential to the success of the project in Brookfield. Many members of interfaith groups came out to show their solidarity with Muslims attempting to build their house of worship.
In March 2012, the Unitarian Universalist Church located in Brookfield released a statement in support of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee’s project, writing, “We, the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Church West declare our full and heartfelt support of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee in establishing the Islamic Society of Milwaukee West Masjid Project.”
The mosque, currently being constructed on Pheasant Drive in Brookfield, will be a multi-purpose building that aims to bring together both the Muslim and non-Muslim residents of the community. The mosque will hold over 100 worshippers, a classroom and meeting room, a children’s room and a banquet hall for 120 guests.
According to the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the mosque is being built largely to “engage [and] empower the Muslim congregation to help support the needs of the local community at large.”
Hassan is confident that the mosque will serve as a hub of connections between the entire greater Milwaukee area communities. “Numerous people have expressed interest in an open house to learn more about Islam. We are already engaged with our local interfaith group. I see the mosque serving as a resource for people wanting to learn more about Islam. I think it will be an education center for both Muslims and non-Muslims.”
Atta believes the Muslim community in Wisconsin will continue to grow, and thinks the atmosphere of Wisconsin is a big draw to Muslim immigrants. Hassan himself is the son of a Palestinian immigrant to Wisconsin. “I’ve always asked my parents, ‘What brought you to Wisconsin? Couldn’t you have picked San Diego?’ I don’t think it was the weather that brought them here, unless they happened to come during the summer!”
The Muslim community that will use the new Brookfield mosque comes from a diverse set of backgrounds. Atta estimates that 40 percent of the Muslim community in Milwaukee is Arab, 40 percent is Indian or Pakistani and the remaining 20 percent can be categorized as South Eastern Asians and European-Americans.
Atta attributes the continued happiness and support of the Muslim community to the positive attributes of Milwaukee. “Some people just came and settled in Milwaukee, some had originally come to Chicago, and they would look for greener pastures and come up north, and some of them arrived in Milwaukee. I think it’s a nice, small community, the greater Milwaukee community, which would include Brookfield and so forth. It has many of the elements of a bigger city like Chicago but not all of the negatives. And at the same time you’re close enough to Chicago, if you wanted something of that sort you could always jump down there, it’s an hour and a half.”
“After you have lived in other cities, you recognize what they mean by Midwestern values. It is a nice place to raise children, we sit on a great lake and for years growing up, the school systems and park systems were the envy of many states,” Najeeb says.
The environment isn’t the only thing keeping Muslims in Milwaukee, as they often find the values they cherish aligning with those of other Wisconsinites. Atta recounted his experiences in various Muslim communities in the United States, especially the difficulty in finding a masjid, another name for a mosque.
“We’re along a beautiful lake, and I think you have some people who have very traditional values, very family-oriented. I think a lot of positives, and even just the Muslim community itself, it’s one of the communities here in the Milwaukee area that is very diverse, and it’s not broken down. You know if you go to Chicago, you have a masjid for the Pakistanis largely, or the Arab masjid, or even the Kashmiri masjid, and pretty soon they’re going to get into ‘Here’s the masjid to those from Karachi’. Even among Palestinians, you go to Michigan, it’s like, ‘Oh here’s this particular village that has its own masjid.’”
For now, the groundbreaking remains an exciting event for Muslims throughout the Milwaukee area, but it is just the first step in the struggle to improve Muslim/non-Muslim relations. Many of the current Muslims work as professionals in the Milwaukee community, and have integrated themselves into the average lives of many non-Muslim people. “The next step is volunteerism and community engagement. This is starting to occur in pockets and will likely increase with a center of activity such as the mosque,” Hassan says.
