The Mosque

Much more than a place of worship, this Ohio building is a symbol of belonging, a marker of endurance that anchors a community to its adopted home.

Shamila Chaudhary’s piece reflects on how the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo became a cornerstone of belonging for immigrant families, offering not just a place of worship but a space to build community, identity, and resilience. It argues that staying rooted—especially in difficult times—is a powerful civic act, a form of commitment to shaping American futures rather than withdrawing from them.

This essay is one of 26 that forms our Out Of Many, One anthology. We invited people from across disciplines to share with us their thoughts on how the ideas of American Universalism can shape our nation moving forward.

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By Shamila N. Chaudhary

Foreign policy professional

In the northwest corner of Ohio, where the highways braid together and the horizon stretches without ambition, two minarets rise. They don’t dominate the skyline—they interrupt it, gently. Their silhouette might belong to Istanbul, or Lahore, or Beirut. But they stand in Perrysburg, surrounded by cornfields and strip malls, holding their ground with quiet clarity.

The Islamic Center of Greater Toledo arrived in the early 1980s, but its roots run deeper—into the loam of migration, memory, and longing. To outsiders, the mosque may seem like an import. To those of us who grew up here, it’s a landmark of return.

My parents came to Toledo from Pakistan in 1980. I was two. My mother says the sky in Ohio reminded her of Punjab—wide, unbothered, endless. The fields were familiar, too, but the stillness felt different. In Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq had just begun to narrow the public imagination, reshaping the country’s identity under the weight of state religion. In America, Jimmy Carter—a peanut farmer with a preacher’s cadence—was wrapping up his presidency. We had fled one kind of certainty for another: from the rigidity of ideology to the mess of democracy.

Crossing over meant leaving things behind—extended family, the grammar of communal life, a sense of place so deep it had no name. What we found instead were the bare tools of American living: mortgages, school buses, job applications, polite neighbors. No village. We had to build one from scratch.

The mosque gave us our scaffolding.

Before the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo opened in 1983, the Muslim community worshiped in a modest building on East Bancroft Street—functional, improvised, like so many early American mosques. But by the late 1970s, it was no longer enough. A larger, more diverse congregation had arrived—Pakistanis, Indians, Lebanese, Syrians—bringing not just numbers but a hunger to be seen.

They bought up farmland. They made plans. They wanted more than a building; they wanted permanence. They hired a Turkish architect, Talat Itil, whose design blended the aesthetics of Ottoman domes with the scale of the American Midwest. The result: a 40,000-square-foot structure of white brick, topped by a dome that refuses to collapse into metaphor. It is simply there—full and expansive.

Inside, we stitched together a new kind of belonging. The weekend school was part religious instruction, part cultural negotiation. Our teachers gave lessons in the Prophet’s life, while we passed notes about pop songs and movies. We held fashion shows and poetry nights in the multipurpose room. There were Girl Scouts, bake sales, whispered crushes in the hallways.

The cafeteria became our town square. We sat for hours over Styrofoam plates of kibbeh and zaatar bread, learning how to speak across generations and accents. We grew up in English, joked in broken Urdu, dreamed in a syntax that didn’t quite belong to either.

The mosque taught us the slow choreography of coexistence. It also taught us to pay attention.

When war broke out in Bosnia, we welcomed refugees into our congregation. Later, Afghans and Iraqis arrived. Palestinians had long been part of the fabric. After 9/11, we stood on uneasy ground, watching suspicion coil around us. But we stayed. We spoke out. We made room. And when other communities—Jewish, Sikh, Hindu—faced their own moments of scrutiny, we stood with them too.

This wasn’t just resilience. It was civic formation, brick by brick.

I think about that now, when people talk about leaving the United States. Over the past two decades, I’ve heard it more often—friends, colleagues, even strangers at dinner parties, fantasizing about other passports, safer shores. Sometimes it’s fear that drives the fantasy. Sometimes it’s grief. Sometimes it’s boredom dressed up as principle.

I understand it. But I’m also wary. Because I grew up in a place where departure was never just a personal choice. It was an event, a rupture. And because I learned something at the mosque that stayed with me: presence matters more than preference.

This country isn’t static. It doesn’t stay one thing for long. And while its arc may not bend automatically toward justice, it responds—slowly, unevenly—to pressure, to labor, to staying power.

Leaving is one answer. But so is staying. Especially when staying means speaking, insisting, showing up again and again, even when the room grows cold or hostile.

We live in fractured times. Institutions wobble under the weight of contradiction. The loudest voices are often the least curious. We’re tempted to disappear into our corners—to retreat into the comfort of the like-minded. But democracy was never supposed to be a quiet agreement. It’s a loud, messy, unfinished conversation.

What remains to us, in this moment, is not clarity. It’s commitment.

That doesn’t mean grand gestures or perfect principles. It means tending to the places we’ve built—our schools, our neighborhoods, our libraries, our sanctuaries. It means recognizing that civic life doesn’t start with elections or end with outrage. It begins with the slow work of listening. It continues in disagreement. It survives in the fragile, necessary muscle of trust.

The Islamic Center of Greater Toledo isn’t just a place of worship. It’s where I learned that staying is not passive. It’s an act of insistence.

I still think about those minarets—how they stand in the middle of the fields, tall and improbable. They don’t explain themselves. They just remain. A quiet architecture of belonging, of presence. A reminder that we are here. And that we’re not leaving.