Building a Community Before Building a Masjid
1969 – 1981
“The believers are but brothers, so make peace between your brothers.” Surah Al-Hujurāt (49:10)
### A Home Away from Home <a id="a-home-away-from-home"></a>
For more than a decade — from incorporation in 1969 through the early 1980s — Shaffer Hall at Johns Hopkins University served as the Islamic Society of Baltimore’s principal gathering place. It was not a masjid. It had not been designed with prayer in mind. Its floors were not oriented toward Mecca. Its walls carried no Qur’anic calligraphy. It held within it no mihrab, no minbar, no permanent markers of Islamic worship. And yet, every Friday afternoon, it became one. Through the repeated act of Muslim gathering — through the laying down of prayer rugs, the establishment of rows, the call to prayer, the raising of hands in supplication — an ordinary university hall was transformed, week after week, into something sacred.
This transformation was, in its way, a profound expression of Islamic theology. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ taught that the entire earth has been made a masjid — a place of prostration — for the Muslim believer. Shaffer Hall was proof of that teaching. The Muslims who gathered there did not need architectural grandeur to experience the presence of Allah. They needed only intention, community, and the willingness to prostrate together.
### More Than a Meeting Hall <a id="more-than-a-meeting-hall"></a>
The logistical demands of weekly prayer at Shaffer Hall required consistent volunteer effort. Every Friday, community members arrived early to prepare the space. Prayer rugs were unrolled and arranged in rows. Portable sound systems were assembled. Arrangements were made for wuḍū’. The qiblah direction was established and marked. After prayer, everything was carefully packed away, leaving the hall as it had been found. This routine — repeated across hundreds of Fridays, across more than a decade — was itself a form of communal worship. It required discipline, coordination, and a willingness to serve without recognition.
The adhan, called in those years without amplification in a university building, was nonetheless a powerful presence — a declaration, made week after week in a non-Muslim environment, that Allah is great, that prayer is better than sleep, that the Muslim community of Baltimore existed and gathered and refused to be invisible. In an era when Islamic institutions in America were rare and Muslim voices were largely absent from the public sphere, the simple act of calling the adhan in Shaffer Hall was a form of spiritual courage.
### The Birth of Community Life <a id="the-birth-of-community-life"></a>
The Shaffer Hall years were not only about prayer. They were about the construction of an entire community life — one that would eventually become so rich and varied that no single borrowed hall could contain it. During these years, ISB developed the rhythms and practices that would define it for generations: the Jumu’ah prayer as the community’s central weekly gathering; the Eid celebrations that brought the community together in joy; the welcoming of new immigrants, new students, and new converts who arrived in Baltimore without community connections; the community dinners that served simultaneously as fundraising events and social celebrations; the informal mentoring of younger community members by elders; and the development of the first educational programs for children.
New arrivals to Baltimore — graduate students from Egypt, engineers from Pakistan, physicians from India, medical residents from Sudan — discovered in Shaffer Hall not merely a place to pray but a community that would help them navigate the challenges of immigrant life in America. ISB connected newcomers with housing, employment information, social networks, and spiritual community. This welcoming function — which would expand and formalize in later decades — began in those early years as a simple expression of Islamic ukhuwwah (brotherhood): the instinct of established community members to extend a hand to those who had just arrived.
### Teaching the Next Generation <a id="teaching-the-next-generation"></a>
Among the most consequential activities that took shape during the Shaffer Hall years was the community’s commitment to Islamic education for children. The founders understood — with striking clarity, given how early it was in ISB’s existence — that no institution could survive across generations without transmitting its values, knowledge, and practices to the children growing up within it. Children who grew up in American schools, speaking English as their primary or dominant language, needed access to Qur’anic instruction, Arabic language education, Islamic history, and the moral formation that their parents’ faith demanded — but in a form accessible to their generation and context.
Volunteer teachers — physicians, engineers, professors — gave up their weekend mornings to teach Islamic studies classes. Materials were handwritten or photocopied. Books were donated or purchased at community expense. The classes were modest in their physical setting but ambitious in their aspirations: to produce a generation of young Muslims who were both firmly rooted in their faith and fully capable of participating in American civic and professional life. The seeds planted in those early weekend classes would eventually grow into the formal, thriving educational programs that became one of ISB’s most celebrated achievements.
### Leadership Through Service <a id="leadership-through-service"></a>
There were no paid administrators during the Shaffer Hall years. No professional staff, no executive directors, no development officers. Every function of the organization — from leading prayers to organizing educational programs to managing finances to coordinating community events — was performed by volunteers who held full-time careers and were raising families simultaneously. Physicians administered the organization’s affairs on their days off. Engineers designed systems and solved logistical problems in their spare time. Homemakers organized events and sustained the community’s social fabric. Students contributed their energy and their small financial resources.
This culture of volunteer service — so deeply embedded in ISB’s earliest years — would prove to be one of the institution’s most enduring and valuable characteristics. It established the principle, which remains alive to this day, that leadership at ISB is not a position of prestige or personal advantage but an act of service freely given, trust accepted and discharged with humility.
### A Community Growing Together <a id="a-community-growing-together"></a>
The diversity that had characterized ISB from its founding grew richer during the Shaffer Hall years as the community expanded. Pakistani families prayed beside Egyptian families. Sudanese engineers sat with Syrian physicians. African American Muslims — many of them converts who had embraced Islam through the civil rights movement and its intersection with Islamic thought — worshipped alongside recently arrived immigrants. Students from dozens of countries passed through the community’s life, some staying for a semester, some making Baltimore their permanent home.
This diversity was not always without its tensions. Different cultural interpretations of Islamic practice, different expectations about community governance, different ideas about the role of women in community life — these were real points of negotiation and sometimes of disagreement. But the community navigated these tensions, for the most part, through the same tools that had guided it from the beginning: consultation, patience, deference to shared Islamic principles, and the powerful social glue of a community that genuinely needed one another.
### The Dream Becomes Larger <a id="the-dream-becomes-larger"></a>
By the mid-to-late 1970s, Shaffer Hall was increasingly inadequate to the community’s needs. The congregation had grown substantially. The educational programs needed more space. The community’s aspirations — for a permanent masjid, for a proper Islamic school, for a community center — could not be accommodated within a borrowed university hall. The search for land had become not merely a dream but an urgent practical necessity. The question was no longer whether ISB would have its own building, but when, and how, and where.
### Preparing for a Permanent Home <a id="preparing-for-a-permanent-home"></a>
By the late 1970s, ISB had developed the institutional infrastructure needed to make the transition from borrowed space to owned property: dedicated leadership with a track record of responsible governance; an active educational program with a committed teaching staff; a community of members who trusted their leadership sufficiently to contribute financially to an ambitious vision; and a clear, shared understanding of what the permanent home they were seeking would need to provide. The decade of the Shaffer Hall years had not been a placeholder in ISB’s history — it had been an essential period of community-building, value-formation, and institutional development without which the masjid that followed could not have been built, maintained, or sustained.