DEL.ICIO.USAtlanta mosque celebrates its 50th anniversary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, October 10, 2008
Forty years ago, Safiyyah Shahid went by the name Hazel 3X. X for ex-slave, X to stamp out her life until that moment, X because slavery erased family names, and the number three because there were already two Hazels around.
That’s how it worked within the Nation of Islam, she said. It sought to empower African-Americans to reclaim their pride and heritage, if through an ideology commonly understood as black nationalism.
RICH ADDICKS / raddicks@ajc.com
Membes of the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, which marks it’s 50th anniversary this month as Atlanta’s oldest mosque, participate in the late afternoon prayer.
Shahid’s father was a Baptist minister and she grew up attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor. But she believed that Elijah Muhammad, who then helmed the Nation of Islam, seemed to promise a quicker realization of the goals of the civil rights movement.
During a recent evening communal break-fast in the month of Ramadan, Shahid spoke gently about her journey with the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, an egalitarian, mainstream Muslim community of which she is an influential part — as director and principal of the Mohammed Schools of Atlanta.
The community, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary next week, got its start in a very different fashion — as the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 15, whose members met discreetly at the time in the Auburn Avenue district.
The festivities, which run Oct. 16-19, include a fashion show, a gala featuring Mayor Shirley Franklin, a 5K fund raiser for Mohammed Schools, a men’s discussion on “responsibilities of manhood” and an interfaith program, said Atlanta Masjid leader Imam Plemon El-Amin. An exhibit tracking the group’s history also will be on hand, a way of “looking at one third of our history as having an evolutionary, developmental phase,” said El-Amin.
Those were combustible days, in the thick of the civil rights movement.
Qur’an Shakir, a teacher at Atlanta’s private W.D. Mohammed High School, recalls her mother describing the group’s 1950s gatherings — in a “little rat hole of a place, and the Ku Klux Klan had rented one room and they had another, and they could hear each other,” she said. “It was that kind of a time.”
Atlanta Masjid moved to its first owned property on Bankhead Highway in 1965 and moved to the East Lake area in 1974, said El-Amin, a former president of the Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta and founding member and director of its World Pilgrims program, which coordinates trust-building trips for Christians, Muslims and Jews. In 1990, Atlanta Masjid expanded it’s property, purchasing a strip mall on Fayetteville Road that now houses the mosque and several other businesses including a restaurant, a halal meat market and hair salon.
The ideological shift came in 1975, when Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, who passed away last month, took over the reigns of the Nation of Islam after the death of his father, Elijah Muhammad, with whose doctrine he broke drastically. He “led the transformation of the Nation of Islam into a more mainstream Islamic community,” said El-Amin.
A few years later, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan separately revived the Nation of Islam.
For its part, most of the Atlanta community followed Mohammed’s reformation, said El-Amin. They began practicing the pillars of traditional Islam including five daily prayers, the monthlong period of daytime fasting during Ramadan, annual pilgrimages to Mecca, and charitable work along with adopting “the clear understanding that there’s one God, one universal God,” said El-Amin, who in 1985 replaced Imam Ibrahim Pasha. Pasha of Chicago had led Atlanta Masjid since 1976 and now chairs its board.
Of the 35 masjids in Atlanta, the Atlanta Masjid was the first in the metro area, said Khalid Siddiq, one of the directors of the Al-Farooq Masjid of Atlanta and a former chairman of the Majilis Ash-Shuraa, a leadership body of Atlanta mosques. These days, the Atlanta Masjid and Al-Farooq Masjid, located on 14th Street and founded in 1979, draw the largest attendance and both engage in interfaith work, said Siddiq.
Imam William Abdur-Rahim, co-founder of the Majilis Ash-Shuraa, said the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam spawned several other mosques, including his own, and has played a “pivotal” role as a political, economic and cultural force. “They came from the Nation of Islam to becoming one of the ambassadors of Atlanta,” said Abdur-Rahim.
Part of Atlanta Masjid’s strength seems to come from the community itself, many of whom have stayed involved over generations, said Shakir.
Plus, there’s commonality among the broader Muslim communities, despite differences in language or tradition. “We pray the same way. We fast the same way. We get married the same way. We die the same way,” said Zarinah Abdur-Rahman, part of the Atlanta Masjid community for nearly 30 years. “It is beyond culture.”
At the same time, the community keeps a universalistic outlook, the one outlined by Mohammed.
“We’re part of one humanity, and there’s no superiority of one over another,” said Shahid. “God’s way is the way of peace, and I believe that that’s what the human soul yearns for is peace — peace within and peace without.”
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