In the outer suburbs of Washington, long filled with Christian churches, new and expanding Muslim mosques are changing the religious landscape

Nikita Stewart:

In Woodbridge, a $1.8 million mosque built to hold 1,000 worshipers will open in January. Starting in October, Ellicott City Muslims will pray in a new $2 million mosque large enough to accommodate almost 1,000 people. Mosques from Annapolis to Manassas are growing as Muslims who have migrated to the outer suburbs seek places to worship near where they live.

Some are moving into office buildings and homes -- even into some former churches -- as Muslims establish informal houses of worship called masjids. Close-by mosques are desirable for the Muslim faithful because of the religion's ritual of five daily prayers and Friday prayer services.

"It is difficult to commute for the prayers," said Farzad Darui, manager of the 48-year-old Islamic Center of Washington, the first mosque in the area built from the ground up.

The boom in exurban mosques has resulted from the migration of Muslims to the outer suburbs, as followers of Islam -- just like other suburban emigrants -- seek less-expensive housing and good schools.

"Like all other segments of society, there's a move to suburbia, and Muslims are part of that movement," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington.

As those Muslims establish more mosques, more Muslims are drawn to the area. About 300,000 Muslims live in the region that stretches from Richmond to Baltimore, according to Islamic organizations. In metropolitan Washington, the number of suburban residents who claimed ancestry from a mostly Muslim country jumped 81 percent from 54,295 in 1990 to 98,084 in 2000, according to a 2003 study by the American Communities Project, a Brown University project on population trends.

Let's hope that these new mosques don't become recruitment centers for Islamist terrorism.

Primatology and Immigration in the Times Of London

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