A Mosque Invisible to Many Is a Target

By Sharon Otterman, Sept. 3, 2010, New York Times.
WATERPORT, N.Y. — The small congregation established a mosque here three decades ago in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and cornfields. In the farmhouse’s simple prayer room, they prayed for many things, including peace and quiet that has never fully come. The local sheriff said some in his county did not even know that the mosque was there. Nevertheless, over the years, burglars have stolen prayer rugs and religious tapestries from the small sanctuary, the only Islamic place of worship in rural Orleans County, which hugs the shore of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Rochester. Vandals have shattered car windows and thrown beer bottles on the lawn. One night about five years ago, the wooden fence in front of the mosque was set afire.

And then, this week, a car filled with local teenagers sideswiped the 29-year-old son of one of the mosque’s founding members, said Joseph V. Cardone, the Orleans County district attorney. One teenager was charged with firing a shotgun into the air near the mosque a few days earlier, after driving by and shouting epithets.

The details of the harassment and the arrests on Tuesday of five teenagers brought reporters and cameras; the ugliness seemed consistent with a number of other suspected anti-Muslim attacks around the country amid an emotional and often-bitter public discussion about whether an Islamic community center should be built in New York City near the site of the World Trade Center.

The events here have left the congregants of the mosque — which practices a form of Islam that emphasizes simple living, prayer and meditation — searching for answers about why the periodic harassment persists.

Muhyiddin Shakoor, 66, a psychotherapist and retired professor at the State University at Brockport [and author of the fascinating narrative about his experiences with Sufism, The Writing on the Water (ed.)] who is one of the founders of the mosque, which is known as the World Sufi Foundation, said trouble seemed to ebb and flow with the national mood but appeared to have grown more mean-spirited in recent years. “It seems whatever is happening for Muslims generally gets projected on us,” he said.

But the events in this county, population 44,000, also suggest how hard it can be to accurately trace the influence of national debates and moods on individual episodes of antagonism.

Mr. Cardone, the district attorney, said he believed the mosque attacks were more an example of ignorance and teenage thrill-seeking than of any specific anti-Muslim fervor. He said, by way of example, that for years a fable had persisted about the mosque, which bears no sign except for the single word “Him” in Arabic calligraphy on its white-clapboard siding: that it is not a mosque at all, but a cult house where mysterious practices occur.

“Me and a couple of friends were going to a friend’s house,” Anthony Ogden, 18, one of the teenagers arrested, said Wednesday, “and we went down that road where the supposed mosque is, beeping the horn, trying to get them to chase us. We were looking for fun, you know, the wrong kind of fun.”

Mr. Ogden, who is going into the 10th grade but is very likely not returning to high school this year, said he had heard it was a cult house where people drank blood. “How many real religious places do you see that do not have a sign stating that it’s a religious place?” he asked.

For the mosque’s members, who are largely American-born professionals, some of whom converted from Judaism and Christianity, the harassment has been a painful invasion of their faith, said Bilal Huzair, 39, one of the group’s imams. “I don’t believe at all that they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said, adding that the harassers shouted anti-Muslim slogans as they drove by.

Each night during the month-long observance of Ramadan, the congregation has gathered for the traditional night prayer in the sanctuary, its single bulb a pinpoint of light under a dark sky filled with stars.

Several times each week, congregants said, the prayer was disrupted by the sound of screeching wheels and cursing, as one or two cars raced back and forth on the gravel road outside.

The congregants became more frightened after the shooting, and when cars appeared on Monday night, they were determined to get their license-plate numbers, because the police had told them not much could be done without that information, said Jacob Zimmerman, a congregant.

They went outside with flashlights as the prayer ended. David E. Bell, the son of a local physician, was struck by one of the cars as he stood on the side of the road. He said it intentionally swerved to hit him; Mr. Ogden, who said he was a passenger in the car, said Mr. Bell had something in his hand that struck the car, a Chevrolet Blazer, breaking its driver-side mirror.

The cars sped away about two miles to a local boat launch, a gravel area surrounded by a low metal guard rail. The teenagers were spotted there by Chad Scott, 35, a Ph.D. student and former Marine who was on his way to the mosque, late for prayers. Mr. Scott said he recognized the cars as the ones that had harassed the mosque on Friday.

He called the police and then returned to the boat launch with mosque members in three cars, hoping to hold the occupants there until officers came. Mr. Ogden said that he and another teenager, Mark Vendetti, 17, got out and started apologizing. Mr. Ogden said he was bruised as a mosque member briefly restrained him there.

Mr. Vendetti, who is accused of firing the shotgun outside the mosque, began talking to Mr. Scott and seemed to warm up to him, surprised that Mr. Scott was a former Marine.

“ ‘I’m a good Christian kid; I go to church every Sunday,’ ” Mr. Scott said Mr. Vendetti told him, adding that two of his brothers were also in the military.

But in the car that allegedly hit Mr. Bell, there was panic. Dylan Phillips, 18, drove around wildly, Mr. Huzair said, at one point nearly striking Mr. Bell, who was there with a tree branch he had brought from the mosque.

One of the teenagers also called the police. Mr. Bell, who said he was defending himself, shattered the back window of the car as it sped past. The teenagers interpreted that as aggression.

When the police arrived, they first interviewed the teenagers, who said they believed the congregants had billy clubs and swords. Instead of flashlights coming down the hill from the mosque, Mr. Ogden said, they saw “some kind of strobe.”

Mr. Vendetti faces the most serious charge: weapons possession, a felony. All the teenagers — Mr. Vendetti, Mr. Ogden, Mr. Phillips, Tim Weader and Jeff Donahue — are charged with disrupting a religious service, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Mr. Cardone is considering additional charges, like hit-and-run and possibly a hate crime. He said he thought that at least some of the teenagers knew that Muslims worshiped there and that they had referred to Islam in their epithets.

Mr. Huzair said he was not sure of the mosque’s next step. Press conferences and events intended to educate residents seemed a stretch for an institution so simple that it has never installed heat or a restroom. “We want to end Ramadan in peace,” he said. (It ends next weekend.)

From Mr. Cardone’s perspective, it is not the job of the mosque to educate the public, adding that its members have been cooperative, law-abiding citizens through the 20 years he had been district attorney.

“They have no understanding of the gravity and sensitivity of this thing,” he said of the teenagers, adding that even so, they would be responsible for the seriousness of their actions.

Along with better education from schools and parents, he said, “part of this is law-enforcement letting people know this is not going to be tolerated.”