A way of life

About 30 men crowd into the living room of a small beige house on Airport Road.

With heads bowed, they face northeast toward Mecca, the spiritual heartbeat of Islam. In almost perfect unison, they drop to their knees, then fall prostrate on the floor, foreheads pressed against the carpet.

It’s just past noon on a Friday in late January. Lynchburg’s first and only mosque, barely a month old, hums with life.

Local Muslims have gathered to observe jum’ah, Friday noon prayer, which like Sunday Mass for Catholics, is communal and obligatory. They arrive just before noon and leave just after 1 o’clock, back to their day jobs and families.

“This is our humble beginnings,” says Maqsud Ahmad, president of the Greater Lynchburg Islamic Association (GLIA), a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 to support the local Muslim community.

The mosque has none of the markings of the grand structures you might find in larger cities. There are no onion-shaped domes, no intricate arches, no towers spiraling toward the heavens.

It doesn’t even have an official name. It’s known simply as the “GLIA mosque.”

But for the area’s Muslims, the mosque is a much-needed place to connect with others who share their faith. For recent and not-so-recent immigrants, it serves as a reminder of their homelands — a symbol of Islam in a city dominated by churches.

Since the U.S. Census does not ask questions about religious affiliation, there is no hard data on the number of Muslims in Central Virginia. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Muslim population has grown substantially in recent years.

Ahmad, a native of Pakistan, has lived in Lynchburg for 33 years. For most of that time, he estimates that the Muslim population ranged between five and 10 families. During the past five years, that number skyrocketed, he says.

Now, approximately 60 families belong to GLIA, and more Muslims are scattered throughout the region. Many are immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Middle East, who came to Lynchburg for education or job opportunities, Ahmad says.

Signs of growth are also evident in new businesses that cater to the Muslim community, like the International Halal market on 12th Street, which opened last June, and the Kabob Grill, which recently opened on Wards Road.

“We never had a solid base to get started with this project,” Ahmad says.

“People want a mosque where they can independently pray, and we can support it now,” he says.

More than 40 people have come to this mosque this Friday.

As the men pray, a smaller group of women, wearing colorful headscarves (hijabs) pray in a room behind them. The faint smell of pizza, today’s lunch, permeates the air.

The living room serves as the prayer space for men; there is no furniture, only white walls and a green carpet. A maroon prayer rug lies in one corner, marking the direction of Mecca. Gold-framed pictures adorn the walls, depicting Islamic landmarks, like Kaaba and Prophet Mohammed’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia.

Like Christian services, jum’ah includes a sermon, which today is delivered by Firas Gblan, a native of Jordan.

The former journalist now works at a nearby convenient store. The theme of his talk is “Islam is the religion of moderation.”

He quotes passages from the Koran, switching between Arabic and English, and denounces extremism.

“Our Islam is a peaceful and easy religion. We respect all people, regardless of their race, creed, color, sex and religion,” he says.

Syed Ahmad, 42, a neonatalogist at Virginia Baptist Hospital, was reluctant to move to Lynchburg until he found out about the Islamic association. The native of Pakistan has lived in the U.S. for 16 years, and in Lynchburg for just over one year.

“I got this impression initially that there were only a few Muslims here, and there was no community,” he says. “But once I came to know that there was a big group of families, I opted to come here and bring my family also.”

In the past, Ahmad lived in Marquette, Mich., where the Muslim population was virtually non-existent. The only place that held Friday prayer was the local prison, and Ahmad would attend on a regular basis. The nascent Islamic community in Lynchburg is a major improvement.

His wife, Aliya Ahmad, said that while the mosque makes it easier to worship, the most important consideration in moving to the area was her husband’s job. Religion would still come first in her family, even without an organized community.

“For us, the religion is the way of life,” she says. “It’s not a part of life; it should be the way of life.”

Eman Firas, 24, has lived in Lynchburg for one year after moving from Jordan, where most of the population is Muslim.

“It’s wonderful,” she says of the new worship space. “The mosque is a place for connections between Muslims.”

GLIA hopes to reach out to other local religious groups. They welcome visitors who want to learn more about Islam, and recently hosted a Catholic priest from the area.

Parvez Salim, the mosque’s education director and a GLIA board member, emphasizes the commonality between the three major religions.

“In a nutshell, there are more things that are in common than different,” he says. “We have the same God, the same values, the same principles.”

The mosque is still a work in progress. Straw covers the yard so that grass can grow. The front entrance is framed by unpainted wood, signs of a partially finished mudroom for members to leave their shoes before entering the mosque.

GLIA purchased the building last year after raising nearly $200,000 to cover the mortgage and renovations. Eventually, the group hopes to build a larger mosque on the one-acre plot of land, Maqsud Ahmad says.

But for now the bare bones prayer hall will do.

w For more information about the mosque or the Greater Lynchburg Islamic Association, visit http://www.gliaweb.org