Tucked away in the rolling grasslands of north-western North Dakota is a tiny mosque – a milestone in Islam’s long history in the United States

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.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s there if it needs to be.’ Photograph: Ryan Schuessler

The number of practicing Muslims in or around Ross – population 109 – is small today, and those who remain would be over 80 years-old, at least. However, the descendants of North Dakota’s Muslim homesteaders, many of whom are now Christian, are keeping their forefathers’ memory and tradition of coexistence alive by maintaining and visiting this small cemetery and mosque in the heart of the Scandinavian-dominated northern plains.

Islam’s roots in north-west North Dakota, while few in number, run deep. Family names like Omar, Juma, Abdallah and Hassen are woven into the fabric of this region, today the center of North Dakota’s oil boom. Ross’s Muslim sons went off to fight for the United States in the first world war and other conflicts. During the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, townspeople would congregate in their rural masjid – locally called the Mohammadan church – to pray for rain.

Thorlaksen’s father was among the 2,000 or so Lebanese immigrants who came to North Dakota near the turn of the 20th century. In the 1920s, after spending decades praying in community members’ basements, they built a half-basement mosque on this piece of land in rural Mountrail County – one of the first masjids to be built in North America.

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“It was part of my upbringing,” said Emmett Omar, an engineer now living in Washington state, but who was raised in Ross and remembers visiting the mosque as a child. “Every community has their little temple, or church, or mosque. And that was ours.”

“It was in such poor shape when I was growing up,” said Betty Abdallah, who now lives in Colorado but who grew up on a farm near Ross. “We’d go out and clean the cemetery, but [the mosque] was in such poor shape that we weren’t really allowed to go in. I never actually was inside the old structure.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The mosque in Ross. Photograph: Ryan Schuessler

As the generations went on, Ross’s Muslim children often married their Christian neighbors. Islam slowly faded among the new generations.

“One of the memories that really sticks out,” Abdallah said with a laugh, “and I make jokes about it – is prior to butchering and hunting, [my dad] would go through his ritual of cleaning and praying. And do you know how long it takes to butcher 50 chickens when you have to say a prayer for every chicken?”

“It was beautiful to listen to him pray and talk about his beliefs,” she added. “He was just a cool dad. He didn’t care that I went to a Lutheran church, or that another sister went to a Catholic church.”

The mosque that sits on the piece of land today has a small prayer rug in the center of the cement floor, pointed east towards Mecca. There is a frame of pictures of Ross’s Muslims – the parents and grandparents of today’s Ross diaspora.

“That made my father very proud,” Abdallah said about the new mosque. “It was something he could look at. If he chose, he could go out there and pray.”

“It’s significant to the people that grew up there,” Omar said. “It was part of their life.”

“From my upbringing, the Muslim faith isn’t unkind,” Abdallah said, when asked about her reaction to hearing anti-Muslim sentiment in mainstream American politics and media. “It makes me sad, for the stupidity. It’s not Muslims that are unsafe. It’s ‘radical’. And you can be a radical Christian. You can be a radical Jehovah’s Witness. It’s just the word ‘radical’.”

“There’s a lot of hatred being spewed forth by a segment of Americans,” Omar said. “And that’s not an indictment on all Americans. It’s just an indictment of those that follow the likes of the Donald Trumps, and people like that.”

