Building Hearts, Minds, and Generations
“Read in the name of your Lord who created.” Surah Al-’Alaq (96:1)
“The best among you are those who learn the Qur’an and teach it.” The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Sahih al-Bukhari
### A Masjid Comes Alive <a id="a-masjid-comes-alive"></a>
The founders had not struggled for two decades to construct a beautiful building. They had built a place where faith would be lived — not merely performed on Fridays and set aside for the rest of the week but woven into the fabric of daily existence: into how children were educated, how families navigated difficulty, how neighbors were treated, how the community cared for its own vulnerable members, how Muslims engaged with the broader society of which they were a part. A masjid that was only a prayer hall would have been a failure by the founders’ own standards. Masjid Al-Rahmah, from its earliest years of operation, was something far more comprehensive than that.
### The First Generation of American Muslims <a id="the-first-generation-of-american-muslims"></a>
By the mid-1980s, the children of ISB’s founding generation were growing up in American schools, speaking English as their primary language, navigating the particular and sometimes challenging identity of being simultaneously Muslim and American in an era when neither American culture nor American Muslim institutions had developed the robust frameworks for that dual identity that exist today. These children needed education — not only the education they received in American schools, which was excellent in many respects but silent on the content of their faith — but Islamic education: Qur’anic recitation, Arabic language, Islamic history, Prophetic biography, moral formation, and the intellectual tools needed to live as practicing Muslims in a secular society.
The question of how to provide that education — effectively, consistently, and at scale — was one of the most important organizational challenges ISB faced in the years following the opening of Masjid Al-Rahmah. The community’s answer to that challenge was one of its most consequential and enduring institutional achievements.
### Every Weekend Became an Investment <a id="every-weekend-became-an-investment"></a>
The Sunday School — the Islamic education program that became one of ISB’s most celebrated and enduring institutions — was already in embryonic form during the Shaffer Hall years. With the opening of Masjid Al-Rahmah and the availability of proper classroom space, it expanded dramatically. Children gathered each weekend to study Qur’anic recitation, Arabic language, Islamic beliefs and practices, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and the formation of character according to Islamic ethical teaching. The curriculum evolved over time, shaped by the needs of each generation of students, but its core aspiration remained constant: to produce Muslim Americans who were simultaneously deeply rooted in their faith and fully equipped to participate in American civic and professional life.
The teachers who staffed these weekend classes were among ISB’s most selfless volunteers. Physicians who spent their weekdays treating patients gave up their Saturday and Sunday mornings to teach Qur’an. Engineers who spent their weeks designing systems taught Arabic grammar to children who found it both challenging and fascinating. Professors, business owners, homemakers, and retired professionals all contributed their knowledge and their time, asking nothing in return except the pleasure of seeing the next generation grow in faith and knowledge.
### Teachers Who Built More Than Lessons <a id="teachers-who-built-more-than-lessons"></a>
Among those whose commitment to teaching left the deepest mark on the generations they served was Mahmood Sajjad, whose decades of dedicated educational service embodied the Islamic concept of ṣadaqah jāriyah (a continuous, ongoing charitable act whose benefit endures beyond the giver’s lifetime) in its most literal and beautiful form. The students he taught — children who sat before him in weekend classrooms absorbing Qur’anic recitation and Islamic knowledge — grew into physicians, educators, community leaders, and parents raising the next generation of Muslims. The chain of knowledge he helped extend continues, invisible but unbroken, through every student his students have taught, and through every child those students’ children will one day raise.
### The Guidance of Imam Mohamed Adam El-Sheikh <a id="the-guidance-of-imam-mohamed-adam-el-sheikh"></a>
The educational life of Masjid Al-Rahmah during these years was shaped profoundly by the presence and teaching of its first Imam. His khutbahs — delivered each Friday with a scholar’s precision and a pastor’s warmth — blended Qur’anic wisdom with practical guidance for Muslims navigating the challenges of life in America. He spoke about family, about the education of children, about the responsibilities of Muslim professionals, about the importance of honesty in business dealings, about the Islamic understanding of citizenship and civic responsibility. He did not treat the American context as an obstacle to Muslim life but as a field of opportunity — a place where Muslims could demonstrate the best of their faith’s values to a watching world.
His greatest pedagogical legacy, perhaps, was not any specific lesson he taught but the culture of learning he created within the masjid — a culture in which curiosity was welcomed, questions were honored, scholarship was respected, and the pursuit of knowledge was understood as an act of worship. In that culture, children grew up understanding that being Muslim meant loving learning.
Between Imam Adam El-Sheikh’s two periods of service, Imam Mohamad Bashar Arafat served as Resident Imam and Outreach Director from 1989 to 1993, extending the masjid’s culture of learning outward into the interfaith and civic engagement that would come to define ISB in later decades (see Chapter 9).
### Ramadan: The Month That United Hearts <a id="ramadan-the-month-that-united-hearts"></a>
Each year, the arrival of Ramadan transformed Masjid Al-Rahmah into something even more vivid and alive than its usual self. The masjid filled to capacity for Taraweeh prayers as worshippers recited the Qur’an together deep into the night. Families prepared ifṭār (the breaking of the fast at sunset) meals and shared them in the community space — tables laden with dates and water, with the dishes of a dozen different culinary traditions, with the food of Egypt and Pakistan and Syria and Sudan and America all present simultaneously, expressing in the language of cuisine the same message that the prayer rows expressed in the language of worship: that the community’s diversity was its richness.
### Eid: A Celebration of Gratitude <a id="eid-a-celebration-of-gratitude"></a>
The Eid celebrations that Masjid Al-Rahmah hosted in these years became touchstones of community memory. Children arrived in new clothes, faces bright with the particular joy of a child who knows that this day is different, that this day is special. The takbīr (the declaration “Allahu Akbar” — God is great) echoed through the prayer hall and out into the Maryland morning. Photographs from these early Eid celebrations preserve what cannot be reconstructed by words: the genuine, uncomplicated happiness of a community that had found its home, that had its place of worship, that was living — generation by generation — the promise the founders had made.
### Nurturing Excellence <a id="nurturing-excellence"></a>
Among the educational traditions established during these years was the institution of Qur’an recitation and memorization competitions — opportunities for young Muslims to demonstrate and deepen their mastery of the Qur’an before a supportive community audience. The Third Annual Qirā’at Competition is particularly noted in community records, with Imam Mohamed Adam El-Sheikh standing alongside respected community leaders including Dr. Syed Habib Ashruf as both participant and judge. These events served multiple functions simultaneously: they motivated students to invest deeply in Qur’anic learning, they celebrated achievement in a public and communally meaningful way, they connected older and younger community members around shared educational aspiration, and they reinforced, in a very visible and joyful form, the message that knowledge of the Qur’an was one of the most valuable things a Muslim could possess.
### From Weekend Classes to Permanent Institutions <a id="from-weekend-classes-to-permanent-institutions"></a>
By 1987, the community’s investment in Islamic education had matured beyond weekend instruction into something more permanent: Al-Rahmah School, a full-time Islamic day school combining rigorous academic instruction with Islamic studies and character formation. Its founding transformed Masjid Al-Rahmah’s campus from a masjid with a weekend program into a genuine center of full-time Islamic education — a milestone the founders of 1967 could scarcely have imagined from their borrowed living rooms. The community’s Qur’anic education likewise continued to formalize during these years, culminating by 1999 in the establishment of a structured Tahfizul Qur’an program under what became Al-Rahmah Qur’an Academy — placing systematic Qur’an memorization, long a cherished but informal aspiration, on a permanent institutional footing.
### The Measure of Success <a id="the-measure-of-success"></a>
By the mid-1990s, the children who had been among the first students of ISB’s Sunday School program were graduating from universities, entering professional life, beginning families of their own, and — in many cases — returning to the masjid not as students but as teachers, volunteers, and community leaders. The measure of the educational investment made in those early years was visible, human, and moving: a generation of young Muslim Americans who carried within them both the professional credentials to succeed in American society and the Islamic knowledge and character to serve as exemplary Muslims within it. The founders had planted seeds. The harvest was becoming visible.