Center City’s only mosque is buying a home of its own, after years of praying inside a Catholic church’s back room

Friday prayer began with the clanging sound of a waste removal truck emptying a Dumpster in the alleyway, drowning out the imam’s words.

Upward of 200 Muslims head down a dingy alleyway behind St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church every week, where they enter a spare room, remove their shoes, and kneel down on a patchwork of faded prayer mats. The shoes stacked by the kitchenette in the back tell the story of the congregation: hospital Crocs, wingtips, work boots, and a kaleidoscope of sneakers, from pristine Air Jordans to kicks with worn-out soles.

Gathering for Friday prayer is an important practice in Islam, and to the surprise of many, this is the only masjid in Center City. Prayer starts at 1:15 p.m. sharp — Dumpster noise be damned.

“We have strict start and stop times, because they have food carts, they have surgeries they have to go to, and we want to make sure people don’t lose their jobs,” Mohammed Shariff, 39, the mosque’s energetic leader, said on a Friday last month.

But the days of austere, cramped conditions could soon be over. The Center City Mosque is under contract to purchase a permanent home at 13th and Walnut Streets. The acquisition would allow the mosque to grow, provide multiple prayer services each day rather than one a week, and integrate the Muslim community more visibly into downtown life, Shariff said.

But there’s a catch — to the tune of $280,000.

Although a deposit has been paid, the mosque cannot take out a mortgage — as riba, or interest, is forbidden in Islam. So Sharif and other mosque leaders have been appealing far and wide to raise the funds to purchase the property outright and perform renovations. They are hoping to meet a $600,000 fundraising goal, which would allow $50,000 to be set aside for renovations, by the end of the year.

There is no urgency that’s forcing the mosque out from behind St. John’s, but Shariff said that the opportunity to grow the Muslim community feels more urgent than ever in light of the war overseas.

The ongoing bloodshed in Gaza lingers heavily over the Center City mosque community, some of whom have relatives in the Palestinian territories. During a recent Friday prayer, mosque leaders spoke about the killing of innocent civilians — but also the destruction of dozens of mosques, in the Palestinian territories and around the world.

“Muslims have to see this. That’s our house of worship,” Shariff said. “As Muslims, we have to build, we have to break the dynamic of our religion and our houses of worship being destroyed across the world.”

Philadelphia is home to a bounty of mosque buildings in outlying neighborhoods, but there is no brick-and-mortar space in the heart of the nation’s sixth-largest city.

“Twice I’ve had young Muslim men ask if they could come into the church and pray on Fridays, not knowing that we have a mosque that meets here,” St. John’s Pastor Thomas Betz said.

The Center City Mosque dates back about 30 years, when Muslims who worked downtown would organize small Friday prayer groups in municipal parking lots, on less-trafficked sidewalks, or behind an old Dunkin’ Donuts.

The popup Friday mosque, thanks to an interfaith agreement with St. John’s since 2010, was an answer to an obvious problem.

“For people who live and work downtown, there is nowhere to pray,” said Darwish Mustafa, 63, a Palestinian-American cell phone repairman who has been a member of the mosque since 2008.

Shariff, who works as a real estate attorney, founded the mosque’s nonprofit, House of Peace and Enlightenment, in 2019 to raise funds to secure a larger space for the mosque. But he has faced years of roadblocks. Some property owners expressed hesitancy about renting space for a mosque, he said. In other cases, the spaces would require too much money to retrofit for the mosque’s needs.

The space on Walnut Street checked every box on their wishlist, he said. The centrally located one-story commercial building, formerly a Nuts to You, offers room for larger men’s and women’s prayer spaces and washing areas. If they can raise additional funds for renovations, the goal is to build upward of three stories, sealed with a stained-glass facade. The funds would also pay for licensed security during a time of rising Islamophobic threats and high anxiety at both Muslim and Jewish gathering places.

“We just want our small little slice, so that Muslims can feel that they have a place to come and pray … and non-Muslims can come and learn about Islam from us, instead of learning about Islam from what they see on YouTube, or on the news,” he said.

At a time when many places of worship fret over weighing into political waters, the Center City Mosque has put the ongoing war in Gaza at the forefront of its mission.

Toward the end of his sermon the Friday before Thanksgiving, Ustaz Habib Maiga, one of mosque’s five rotating imams, gestured toward a number of guest observers and three Inquirer journalists in the back of the mosque and said it was his duty to speak out about the killing of civilians in Gaza.

“We pray for them,” he said, calling for peace in the region. “What’s happening is so sad. This is not supposed to happen. The international community is watching.”

Shariff stressed that the mosque is not making political attacks against Israel. Rather, he said, he too is called to speak out against injustice. “We pray for Israel and we pray that there’s peace in Gaza,” Shariff said. “Ultimately, it’s our Islamic obligation to let people know about any injustice happening — in Gaza, in Sudan, in China, in India, at the Mexican border.”

Darwish, who was born in a small Palestinian village called Mukhmas in the West Bank, said that he condemned Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7 just as much as he has denounced the ongoing siege in the blockaded Gaza Strip. “Any time innocent people are dying, no Muslim supports that,” he said.

Few mosque leaders said they were hopeful about the conflict overseas. “We’re tired,” Mustafa said. “It’s been 75 years of people living in refugee camps. We need a solution.”

The first permanent mosque in Center City may seem unrelated, but it is perhaps the only answer they have within reach.

As the worshipers rushed out after prayer, mosque leaders reminded everyone to be generous. A volunteer security guard held a donation box by the door, where some dropped in wads of folded cash before heading back to work.

“This is not a masjid,” he said, poking fun at the dreary prayer room. “Nothing is free in America.”