Abdus Salam has lived in Wallingford for 22 years. To attend prayer services on Fridays, he travels either to the mosque at the Islamic Association of Greater Hartford, in Berlin, or to the Islamic Center of Hamden. It would mean a great deal to him to attend prayer services in his hometown, he said, and his children are "very excited" about the prospect.

Salam's 16-year-old daughter, Farah, will be a sophomore at Sheehan High School this fall. Son Fardin is a 10-year-old pupil at Parker Farms School. During the school year, the children are not able to attend Friday prayer services because going to Hamden or Berlin takes too much time away from school.

If a proposed mosque in Wallingford wins approval, that will change.

"My daughter and son are so excited because there's no place easy to go," said Salam.

Tariq Farid's proposed mosque on Leigus Road has met fierce resistance from nearby residents, who cite traffic and parking concerns and feel a nonresidential building does not belong in their residential neighborhood.

At a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting in May, opponents arrived with signs reading "No mosque on Leigus." And one resident wrote to the commission and the mayor expressing worry about Islamic treatment of women.

The situation in Wallingford is not uncommon, said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington, D.C.

"Often we see underlying bias and fear of Muslims coming into the neighborhood," said Hooper. "So it's not an unusual circumstance at all."

Craig Fishbein is a Wallingford attorney who lives near the proposed mosque site. He is among the leaders of a coalition of residents opposed to further nonresidential development on Leigus Road. In an opinion piece that appeared in the Record-Journal on June 26, Fishbein said many of those supporting the application did so because they did not want to appear to be bigoted.

Those who are opposed to the project are still reeling from the experience of Mortgage Lenders Network moving into the area. (The huge office building remains empty.)

There is no "hidden agenda" to the opposition to the mosque proposal, Fishbein wrote.

"It is very easy to sit on the other side of town and point a finger claiming 'prejudice' when you won't be affected by the traffic and parking," he wrote.

"We're not saying no mosque in Wallingford," said Fishbein the other day. "We're saying: plan. We don't want to see it on Leigus Road." Fishbein said he also feels Tariq Farid has not been up front about how much activity will go on at the mosque.

"It's really a tough issue," said David Roozen, a religion and society professor who is director of the Hartford Seminary Institute for Religion Research. "I'm sure there's a combination of motivations."

Mosques in the U.S.

While mosques are typically "just places of prayer" in other parts of the world, in the United States they've taken on roles similar to that of other religious congregations, said Roozen. That means they've also become centers of community and ethnic fellowship, he said.

"So as they grow they can present more programs," he said, "which is typical of other congregations."

The change in U.S. immigration laws in the 1960s brought more Muslims to the country, particularly more affluent Muslims, said Roozen. The faith was typically regarded by outsiders with "ignorance and indifference" until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he said.

Gauging the growth of the Muslim population and mosques in the United States has been an elusive task. This summer, a coalition of organizations, including the Council on American- Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, will embark on a "mosque census" to compile information about America's Muslim community.

Hooper, the CAIR spokesman, said there are about 2,500 mosques, "big and small," in the United States. The Tri-State Muslim, a newsletter serving New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, estimates 1.3 million Muslims in the four-state area, about 20 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population.

Attempts to gather information can be controversial. When the FBI ordered field supervisors to count the number of mosques and Muslims as part of antiterrorism efforts in 2003, the initiative was denounced as racial profiling by civil rights advocates and Arab-American leaders.

American misperceptions about the faith are also not uncommon. While Arabic is the language of the Quran, for example, the largest Muslim population is in Indonesia. Two other large, non-Arab countries, Pakistan and Iran, also are mainly Muslim. Assuming all Muslims are Arabs is like saying all Catholics are from Rome.

"Most Americans are extremely ignorant about faiths other than their own, and often don't know very much even about their own," said Roozen.

"We're their neighbors"

Wallingford's Abdus Salam came to the U.S. in 1981. The 57-year-old Salam was born in eastern Pakistan, which in 1971 became Bangladesh, where his father worked in the Justice Department. Salam is the president of the Bangladesh Association of New Haven.

Salam was taking part in six months of engineering training with a Long Island company when he decided he wanted to remain in the U.S. He found work in East Haven, at the Twin Pines Diner, starting as a dishwasher and working his way up to cook. Since 1987, he's been a cook at the Neptune House Restaurant & Diner, in Wallingford. He became a U.S. citizen in 1990.

During his first years here, Salam said, there was no place in Connecticut to go for Friday prayer, which Muslim men are under obligation to attend. For the faith's major holidays, he traveled to a mosque in New York City.

Salam has been taken aback by the vitriol behind opposition to the mosque proposal.

"We're their neighbors, we're not from out of town," he said. "My daughter was born in this town."

He views the mosque as a way of enhancing interfaith relations in town. "If you love your faith, you respect other faiths," he said.

Farah Salam said she feels she could arrange her class schedule to attend prayer services on Fridays, with 20 minutes for the service and 10 minutes or so to get to the mosque and back.

Asked about the role of women in Islamic society, the 16-year-old mentions a hadith, which is a saying or report of a deed attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which says that under the mother's foot is the gate to heaven.

"If your mother's not happy with you, Allah's not happy with you," she explains.

It's to honor his mother that Tariq Farid wants to establish the mosque in Wallingford. Her efforts played a pivotal role in his entrepreneurial career, which started with a small flower shop and today is a multinational business.

Once a place is designated a mosque, it can never be anything else, he said, so his effort is a way of honoring his mother, who died in 2005, in perpetuity.

"That's why it's such a wonderful thing to do in the name of someone," he said. He is also establishing a learning center in Hamden in his mother's honor, the Salma K. Farid Academy.

The Berlin center

On a recent early Friday afternoon, cars converged at the mosque of the Islamic Center of Greater Hartford, which is on the Berlin Turnpike. The parking lot filled with dozens of automobiles, and some cars parked along the roadway separating the center from the neighboring batting cages and a miniature golf course.

Muslims are required to reserve five times a day for prayer, and Friday is the special day of public prayer. As they enter the mosque, they shed their shoes.

Men gather in the main room of the mosque and offer individual prayers. Women and small children head to a balcony area. The segregation is a way of protecting women, said Farid. They either pray behind the men or in a separate area.

The more formal part of the proceedings begins under the leadership of an imam, or guest speaker, who delivers a message based on the teachings of the Quran. This is followed by the prayer ritual in which the men form lines and, on occasion, drop to their knees, pressing hands and forehead to the ground.

Following the service, which lasts approximately 20 minutes, some in the gathering linger for discussion, but it does not take much longer than an additional 20 minutes for the parking lot to clear.

Fishbein says that Wallingford officials and others observing activity at the Berlin Islamic center in an effort to gauge the potential impact of a mosque in Wallingford have witnessed considerably more disruptive traffic.

Lingering in the parking area that afternoon, Tariq Farid said his mosque would serve about 30 families, about 90 to 100 people.

"It's going to be a family mosque," he said.

Farid said he took the word of those who said they objected to his proposal because of traffic and parking concerns.

"If they say it's not religious, I believe them," he said. "Otherwise, I'd be going against everything I've been taught."

"There's due process," he said, "and within that process the application has to be judged."

"Some kind of prejudice"?

Ponn M. Sabra is the administrator of the Salma K. Farid Academy in Hamden, which is looking to start in September as a full-time learning center for children from 3 to 12 and an after-school center for those up to 18. It will be the first Islamic academy in New Haven County, she said.

Born and raised in Meriden, Sabra is the daughter of a Buddhist father and a Catholic mother. She was raised a Catholic and attended Saint Joseph School, in Meriden, and Mercy High School, in Middletown, graduating in 1991.

Sabra, who is also an author, earned a degree in biology from Providence College and in 1998 received a master's degree in public health from the University of Connecticut. After getting her master's degree, she converted to Islam.

"The very essence of Islam is there is only one God, and that god is God," she said. "I always believed that, and Muhammad is the messenger, the very last messenger."

Sabra, a Meriden resident again after moving from Toledo, Ohio, said "traffic is really a moot issue" when it comes to the proposal in Wallingford.

"We anticipated opponents, we didn't expect 'No Mosque,'" she said. "When you choose that word, its equivalent is saying no church or no synagogue.

"When they chose to use that word, it's hard to feel that there wasn't some kind of prejudice."

"I'm amazed that you can think we're doing anything less than noble," she said.

jkurz@record-journal.com

(203) 317-2213

Complete Coverage of Wallingford Mosque Controversy