Lighthearted, Sympathetic Look at Local Mosques Finds Much Diversity

It's a very traditional community and doesn't abide by Western traditions of table manners. Everyone did have their own plate, but since there were no spoons, you had to dig in with your hands to get your food. I was a bit reticent at first, but a man encouraged me to help myself, saying this is exactly how the army did it.
                              — "30 Mosques in 30 Nights"
 

Zuhair Sadaat, 25, knew the Bay Area Muslim world was more varied than his parents’ 3,000-member, suburban Santa Clara mosque, where the congregation encompasses doctors, engineers, and other successful professionals.

In 2010, he set out to discover just how diverse it was.

The result: “30 Mosques in 30 Days,” a blog that's clicking with American-born Muslim millennials.
Sadaat (rhymes with Zagat) visits a different mosque each night of the holy month of Ramadan, sizing up everything from shoe shelves and parking to the imam’s ability to inspire when leading the nightly taraweeh prayers.

He began the blog last year. This year he's visiting some of the same and some new mosques during the current Ramadan, which began Aug. 1.

Sadaat compiles a droll, candid and revealing catalog that sizes up everything from shoe shelves and parking to the imam’s ability to inspire when leading the nightly taraweeh prayers.

All in all, it's another one of those oases in a pretty rough neighborhood. And man, it is rough because this place is imposing from the outside. If that iron gate's closed, you're shiz out of luck. Come during prayer time or don't come at all.

Sadaat is a UC Berkeley-educated grant writer. (He calls himself “a nonprofiteer.”) He began his odyssey in his hometown of Santa Clara and now lives in Richmond, where he devotes plenty of space in the blog to rectifying misconceptions about his beloved adopted city. He worked his way north, then East across the Bay, before stopping to tell it like it is in six counties.

The three mosques in Richmond, and many more in Oakland, pull members from different strands of Muslim culture and ethnicities in the East Bay.

I wasn’t even planning on visiting this mosque tonight. I mean, sure, it was on my radar, but I was aiming for an entirely different Oakland mosque. Yes, there are so many mosques in Oakland you can shoot for one and land in another.  

Some included only a handful of worshippers; others, hundreds. Some were spacious and beautifully architected; others a grim use of available space.

In a word, eclectic.

A building in the middle of the warehouse district. A building in the middle of the warehouse district surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence with spikes on top. Welcome to Richmond, son.

One thing inside the masjid which stuck out was that they had El Corán on the shelves. No, not just one Quran in Spanish, but 12. Surprisingly, however, I did not see any Hispanics in the crowd.

What's cool about the prayer space is that the mosque wasn't leveled properly so everyone is praying uphill. It's a strange feeling praying on a surface which is angling upwards. I really don't think I could get used to it even if I came here every day.

Three messages lie behind these light-hearted thumbnail sketches, all maddeningly simple: Muslims are human. Muslims differ from one another, as do mosques. And many, many Muslims call the Bay Area home.

He throws his hands up at some of the attitudes he encounters, especially in regards to the role of women. If lots of women came to pray here in one mosque, men stare blankly at another: Women? What would women be doing here, there's no kitchen.

His journey to Mecca on the Hajj informed his feelings about gender: “In the pilgrimage, men and women do pray next to each other,” he said in an interview. “It’s not even logistically possible not to. So I don’t understand why people get upset.”

Sometimes blog visitors take issue with his observations, like when he despaired that a mosque sunk money into a new minaret instead of something more practical, like a men’s room (the money had been earmarked for a minaret, they argued). But mainly he gets thumbs-ups.

He said there's much more he could be doing to promote his blog, but he's been cool to the idea. For one thing, he doesn't want to become recognizable.

I'm meeting guys who are struggling to make ends meet because they've been relegated to part-time jobs while supporting entire families. There's plenty of cases like that in the South Bay too, but I guess it took me relocating to a new neighborhood to become familiar with them.

His varied mosque explorations beyond his home town mosque, "MCA" (Muslim Community Association in Santa Clara), form the heart of his blog, which he hopes will "educate the general populace about the number and diversity of Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area."

The stark contrast between this mosque and the mosque in which I was raised made me think I made a good decision wrapping up this project here and not somewhere else. The whole point of me burning dozens of gallons of gas this month was to see just how different the communities of the Bay Area are. Well, it doesn't get much different from MCA than this.