The advertised purposes of the rally were to protest the presence of refugees, many of them Muslim, in Middle Tennessee, and to hold up as an omen for the future the shooting in September of eight white people at a church in Nashville by a Sudanese-born man. They considered themselves defenders of the faith.

Religion was the common denominator of the whole, loud weekend. And it was perhaps through the worship services — the only time many people at the heart of things would gather and take stock — that one could best understand what happened: the nervous Friday afternoon prayers in Shelbyville; the bellicose devotions of the white nationalists on Saturday; and the subdued Sunday night reflection on love and hate at the little church that had been dragged into all of this against its will.

Friday: Dread at the Mosque

At first, the local men said, only a few in the Somali community had known about the rally. Now everyone had heard about it, that it was the kind of protest where, in the Somali phrasing, “they talk with their fists.”

There is not a permanent imam in Shelbyville so Sheikh Abdulrahman Yusuf, imam of a large Somali mosque in Nashville, about an hour to the north, had come down to lead Friday prayers. He had lived in Shelbyville himself 15 years ago, drawn shortly after his arrival in the United States by reports from other refugees about good jobs killing chickens.

A decade or so ago, amid a recession and with hundreds of refugees moving in, there was friction, at the schools and at hiring offices. Lawmakers pushed a flurry of anti-refugee legislation, aimed at Muslims in particular. A mosque in nearby Columbia was burned to the ground.