20 August 2010

Off to Find America, Mosque by Mosque

Two New Yorkers take to the road for Ramadan

Bassam Tariq, left, and Aman Ali have been touring Muslim America for Ramadan, first in New York and now from coast to coast.

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — For Ramadan, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are touring Muslim America. They are fasting their way across 30 states and celebrating iftars in 30 mosques. They are driving 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) to get closer to their faith.

And they are having a great time.

Ali, 25, an Indian American, and Tariq, 23, a Pakistani American, are buddies in New York. A year ago, they said, they were praying at a mosque with a big crowd on the first day of Ramadan and came up with the idea of spending the holy month visiting a different mosque each day — 30 mosques in 30 days. “In New York City, there’s over 800,000 Muslims. If you type my address on Google, you can find 162 mosques in a five-mile radius,” Ali said. “And so we’re like, ‘Hey, let’s try it.’”

Their friends liked the idea, and demanded a blog about the experience, which Ali and Tariq did “almost as a way to shut them up,” Ali said. The responses started coming: first from friends, then from strangers throughout New York, then from elsewhere in the United States, “and then we’re getting e-mails from Canada, then, like, the U.K., then the Middle East, people from Luxembourg and, like, China — ‘Dude, you’re going to get in trouble, don’t send these e-mails’ — and all over the world,” Ali said.

In a way, the two men toured the Muslim world in those 30 days in 2009: In praying at a wide variety of mosques, they found an equally wide variety of Muslim communities and broke their daily fasts with a wide variety of food.

Tariq said one of the goals was “getting out of our comfort zone” and stepping off the usual paths of their lives. As varied as the city is, he said, “Everyone in New York lives their own bubbled life, and you don’t step out of that bubble.”

Two boys pray in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the stops along Bassam Tariq and Aman Ali's Ramadan journey, and the subject of one of Tariq's photo essays.

This year, Tariq and Ali have left the bubble far behind. With the help of blog readers and the hospitality of friends and strangers across the country, they are driving from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast and back, stopping in states that border Canada and Mexico — taking 30 days to visit 30 mosques in 29 states and the District of Columbia, where Washington is located.

With each new city, Tariq said, “You just already know in your mind that you don’t know what to expect.” And he said the men are making an effort to visit more than the well-established mosques frequented by the most successful Muslim Americans — what he called “doctor mosques.”

“That’s definitely an important narrative if you look at Muslims in this country, but there are so many other narratives that also need to be told,” Ali said. “We wanted to dig a little bit deeper.”

An early stop in Augusta, Maine, for example, introduced the men to the friendly, small, picturesque state capital, its very small, close-knit Muslim community and its mosque — where about a dozen people of various ethnic backgrounds worship. They rely on one another for such essentials as halal food: Community members take turns making the weekly drive to a halal butcher in Boston to pick up each family’s orders.

And a brief visit to the burial place, or mazar, of a Sri Lankan-born Sufi saint in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania, inspired Tariq to stay longer to produce a photo essay about the peaceful spot, the people who visit it and the members of the fellowship that maintains it. “I’ve never prayed with that many white people in my entire life,” he said.

Some things will be familiar: The men will visit Tariq’s family in Houston; Ali’s parents and brother in New Orleans; and the mosque in Columbus, Ohio, where Ali grew up. Tariq said he knows already that it will be hard to tear himself away from his family after less than a day so he can continue the journey.

The blog offers insights into the culture, history and — inevitably, during a month of observing Ramadan’s fasts and then celebrating each day’s iftar — the food Ali and Tariq find before them. “It’s amazing how much people can bond when there’s a plate of food in front of them. It’s the most beautiful thing,” Ali said.

When he is not driving from mosque to mosque, Ali is a journalist and a stand-up comedian. Tariq once worked in advertising but in recent months has been producing a documentary film in his native Pakistan. Both said they recognized that they might never again have the opportunity to leave other responsibilities behind for a month to pray and travel while singing along to what Tariq called “a lot of bad ‘90s pop songs.”

“We’re not trying to claim that our project is one broad, all-encompassing view of Muslims in the U.S., because we don’t have enough space and time to do that,” Ali said. “But what these are, are personal and individual stories along the way. People can take what they want from them.”

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)