Facing Mecca : Valley’s Growing Muslim Community Confronts Its Diversity--and a Problem of Cramped Quarters

Shortly before noon every Friday, the Knights of Columbus Hall in Canoga Park undergoes a temporary religious conversion.

Outside the Roman Catholic fraternal lodge, tables are covered with books on Islam, along with pins, license plate frames and bumper stickers urging all to “Read the Quran--The Last Revelation.”

Inside, the hall’s linoleum floor is covered with heavy-duty brown wrapping paper and brightly colored rugs. Green boxes are placed near the entrance to receive donations from members of the Islamic Center of Northridge, which rents the space for various functions.

By 12:30 p.m., the hall resounds with the recitation of the adhan , the Muslim call to prayer. “God is most great . . . I testify that there is no god but God . . . I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God . . . Come to prayer . . . Come to salvation,” a man chants in Arabic while facing east in the direction of Mecca.

Behind him, more than 200 shoeless men seat themselves in orderly rows on the paper. A few dozen women and children are scattered behind them. A woman wearing a pantsuit slips into a bathroom and emerges minutes later in a loose, ankle-length dress, her head and shoulders covered with a scarf.

It is time for salat juma , the Friday midday prayer, the time of the week that devout Muslims are required by their religion to pray communally. And it is a scene that is becoming increasingly common in the San Fernando and adjacent valleys.

Community leaders and academics estimate that there may be more than 20,000 Muslims--primarily first-generation immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa--in the San Fernando Valley area, and they point to a surge in the number and membership of local mosques as proof that their numbers are growing.

The Northridge center, the Valley’s oldest mosque with an official membership of 500 and twice that many informal members, has outgrown its Tampa Avenue location and is looking for a new home. In recent months, two new congregations have started to hold Friday noon services and Sunday religious study classes in rented quarters in Newbury Park and Van Nuys, while another center is in the formative stage in Canyon Country.

“We started with eight or 10 people three months ago. Now we get 30 or so every Friday,” said Naseer Chohan, a founder of the Islamic Center of the Conejo Valley, which attracts Muslims from as far away as Oxnard. “Every week there’s at least two new faces at the center.”

A sizable number of Valley Muslims still prefer to travel downtown to the Islamic Center of Southern California on Vermont Avenue, the region’s largest mosque with a membership of 15,000 families. Ahmed Alfi, an Egyptian-born Encino stockbroker, said: “I know of six families within two blocks of me who all go downtown, simply because that’s the mosque we joined before there were others.”

“Our community is vibrant and increasing,” said Adnan Kehar of Woodland Hills, who came to the Valley 15 years ago from Pakistan and now has his own accounting firm in Beverly Hills. “Muslims were once isolated if they lived in the Valley, but no more. Now we are a real community.”

The next four weeks will be a special time for that community. This evening, Muslims will travel to Griffith Observatory to scan the skies for a glimpse of the new moon that signals the start of Ramadan, a sacred period of dawn-to-sunset fasting and sexual abstinence, self-examination and charity, special prayers and communal meals. Muslims believe that Ramadan is the month in which the prophet Mohammed received the first revelations of the Koran, Islam’s book of Scripture. Because observing the precepts of Ramadan is one of Islam’s fundamental ritual requirements, determining the month’s exact beginning is of singular importance.

Difficult Task

According to Hasan Uddin Hashmi, the religious leader of the Islamic Center of Northridge, the lights of the city and smog often make it impossible to spot the new moon’s thin crescent over Los Angeles, even on cloudless nights.

“We must then depend on a telephone call from Muslims in other areas who have seen the moon,” Hashmi said. “But we go to Griffith Park anyway. It’s a local tradition for us.”

The month of Ramadan will culminate in the celebration known as Eid el Fitr , when 2,000 or more Muslims will turn out for services at the Knights of Columbus Hall, followed by festive meals at home with family and friends.

The Islamic Center of Northridge was incorporated in 1977. Originally known as the Muslim Assn. of Los Angeles, the mosque grew out of gatherings held in private homes by a handful of Pakistani and Indian families interested in coming together for the Friday noon prayer and establishing a place where their children could learn about Islam.

The families first moved to a rented space at a Sepulveda private school before purchasing a facility in Northridge. They moved to the current Tampa Avenue location, a converted three-bedroom house now too small to meet the congregation’s needs, in 1982. After neighbors complained of parking problems caused by a growing membership, the Friday noon prayer and other major mosque functions were moved late last year to the Canoga Park Knights of Columbus building.

New Site Wanted

The center is seeking to purchase a 2.5-acre site north of the Simi Valley Freeway at Encino Avenue and Rinaldi Street. But obtaining the conditional-use permit required to operate a house of worship in that area, which is zoned residential-agriculture, could be a problem because of objections from neighbors, said a spokeswoman for Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson.

Mohammed Mohiuddin, who heads the mosque’s building committee, said more than $1 million is being raised to build a new center. “We will only build where it is feasible and there is no opposition,” he added. “We want to be good neighbors.”

Indians and Pakistanis still predominate at the mosque, accounting for more than 50% of its membership. But over the years, the congregation has grown with the inclusion of people from a host of nations--Albania, Afghanistan, Iran, Bangladesh, Burma, China, the Philippines, Egypt, Syria, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Turkey.

A few American-born blacks, once followers of the black Muslim movement that was formally disbanded in 1985 in favor of participation in mainstream Islam, have also joined the center, and there are a few Anglo-American converts.

According to mosque leaders, the Indian and Pakistani families who founded the Islamic Center of Northridge were headed by highly educated professionals drawn to the area by jobs at the computer and aerospace firms that dot the West Valley. Some of the later immigrants, particularly those from Iran and Afghanistan, came as political refugees and often were less well-off.

Cultural differences and national allegiances are potential causes of division among Valley Muslims, but community members say their common faith binds them.

“We are all Muslims no matter where we are from. That is what is important,” said Aqeel Rahman of Van Nuys, a 28-year-old black who converted to Islam with his mother when he was a child.

Yvonne Haddad, a University of Massachusetts professor of Islamic history and the author of a book on American Muslims, said Rahman’s statement reflects the “Americanization of Islam.”

“The more recent Muslim immigrants, and of course the converts, have a self-identity that is more religious than nationalistic. They see themselves as Muslims first, not Syrians or Indians,” she said.

“It’s very much like what happened to the Jews. They came here as Russian Jews, Polish Jews, Spanish Jews, et cetera. Now they as well as outsiders see them only as Jews. A growing number of Muslims are seeing their religion in the same way. For them, the mosque community has become an extended family.”

Politics Put Aside

In an effort to get along, Valley Muslims say they have tried to put aside any political differences they might have brought from their homelands, at least while attending mosque services and classes.

The unwritten “no-politics rule” also helps defuse what Muslims say is an unwarranted perception that Islam is a faith that encourages extremist views, a perception fueled by the uproar over author Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.”

Todd Lydick, a 22-year-old Pierce College student who was brought up “a devout Episcopalian” but is now one of the few Anglo converts at the Northridge center, said his family in Texas calls him a terrorist.

“I don’t encounter much bias, but people don’t show themselves face-to-face. I know behind my back people say things,” he said.

At a recent Friday prayer service, Dr. Abdul R. Abukurah of Northridge delivered the weekly sermon in which he said Muslims should have ignored “The Satanic Verses” instead of getting involved in the public debate over Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death. “By not ignoring it, we have given it some stature and allowed the publisher and writer to make much money. What does it matter what this man says?” asked the Jordanian-born internist and kidney specialist. Teen-agers struggle with misperceptions, too. In 1984, a study funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities found that the strict commitment to Islamic ideals by the immigrant generation tends to reverse dramatically among their children and grandchildren. Teen-agers interviewed at the Islamic Center of Northridge underscore the daily conflicts they encounter trying to remain faithful to Islam in the face of American culture’s prevailing mores.

Fourteen-year-old Humaira Malik of Canoga Park spoke of wanting to be a cheerleader until she realized that it would be impossible because a cheerleader’s uniform is immodest by orthodox Muslim standards. Others mentioned that their peers think that it is odd that Muslims do not date. One mother noted that her husband had to go to her child’s school to persuade officials to excuse their daughter from wearing shorts in physical education classes.

“No one wants to be a blue daisy in a field of yellow daisies,” said Malik, who was born in Pakistan. “But I’ve realized in the long run it is best. Some Muslim kids do get sucked in by American culture, but the ones who don’t give in to American culture do best in life.

“We’re really pioneers, living as Muslims in a new place, and it can be difficult at times.”