Faith Before Foundations
1967 – 1969
“Indeed, the masajid of Allah are only to be maintained by those who believe in Allah and the Last Day…” Surah At-Tawbah (9:18)
### A Beginning Without Walls <a id="a-beginning-without-walls"></a>
In the closing years of the 1960s, Baltimore was a city in the midst of transformation. The civil rights movement had left indelible marks upon American society. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had opened the doors of the United States to people from across the globe. And among those who arrived in Baltimore during these years were Muslims — a quiet, small, determined community of individuals who would, over the course of the next six decades, build one of the most respected Islamic institutions on the Eastern Seaboard.
At the moment of their arrival, however, the newcomers had nothing institutional of their own. They had no masjid. They had no Islamic school, no Muslim community center, no organization to welcome the newly arrived, no cemetery in which to bury the dead according to Islamic tradition. There was no Friday congregational prayer in any formal setting. There was no established gathering place, no regular community calendar, no newsletter, no council. There was, in the fullest sense of the word, nothing — except the faith that these early arrivals carried within them and the quiet, persistent need to express that faith in the company of fellow believers.
These newly arrived Muslims were, by and large, professionals: physicians who had come to practice medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, or to pursue advanced medical training; engineers working in the region’s growing technical sectors; graduate students enrolled at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland; business owners establishing themselves in a new country. They came from Pakistan, India, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey — and from within the United States itself, where African American Muslims had been practicing Islam for decades. Their countries of origin were different. Their languages were different. Their customs were different. But they shared the profession of faith, the five daily prayers, the obligation of Jumu’ah, the practice of fasting during Ramadan, and the conviction that their faith was not a private matter to be practiced in isolation but a community responsibility to be shared and sustained.
### Islam Comes to the Living Room <a id="islam-comes-to-the-living-room"></a>
The community’s earliest Jumu’ah prayers were held not in any dedicated space but in the living rooms and basements of private homes. These gatherings were modest in every conceivable way. A host family would clear their furniture, lay down whatever prayer rugs they possessed, and transform their domestic space into a temporary house of worship. Shoes would be lined up along the porch or hallway. Dining tables would be moved aside. Kitchen chairs would be borrowed from neighboring rooms. A makeshift row would be established, and the assembled worshippers would stand shoulder to shoulder, facing the qiblah, in a space never designed for such a purpose.
Among the earliest and most important of these gathering places was Reed Hall at Johns Hopkins University — specifically its basement, which became the site of some of the first organized prayers of Baltimore’s new immigrant Muslim community. The number of attendees was profoundly small by any later standard: approximately seven Muslims gathering every Friday, led informally by Dr. Mohamed Zein Awad, an Egyptian-born physician whose quiet leadership would be essential to the community’s early development. Among those present in these earliest years were Dr. William B. Greenough — known affectionately as “Buck” — and his wife Quaneta, who arrived in Baltimore in 1967 specifically seeking a community of fellow Muslims, and Dr. Tariq Firozvi, another early stalwart of the nascent community.
### The Sarril Road Circle <a id="the-sarril-road-circle"></a>
By 1968 and 1969, a second circle of early Baltimore Muslims had taken shape a few miles from Reed Hall, around the Sarril Road Apartments in northeast Baltimore, with some families crossing over from the nearby Amberwood Apartments to join them. Among those remembered from this apartment circle were Dr. Mohamed Shami, Dr. Tariq Firozvi, Dr. Javaid Shafi, Dr. Mahmood Thamer, Azim ur Rahman Khan, Nawaz Khattak, and Mohammed Ghazi. At their largest, these Sunday gatherings drew ten to fifteen families, who recited and discussed the Qur’an, prayed, shared meals, and weighed together how best to protect their children’s Islamic identity in a new country. Reed Hall and the Sarril Road apartments were not competing accounts of ISB’s origin but two streams of the same story, converging within a few years into one institution.
Dr. Mohamed Shami, an educator who arrived from Pakistan in 1964 and completed a doctorate in education in 1968, was among the circle’s earliest and most steadfast participants; his recollections, gathered decades later, remain among the most detailed oral-history accounts of ISB’s formative years. Dr. Javaid Shafi, then completing his medical residency at the University of Maryland Medical Center, became one of the community’s most practical early organizers, helping bring people together, raise funds, and move the masjid project forward. Dr. Mahmood Thamer, an Iraqi cardiovascular surgeon, joined the same formative discussions and would later be entrusted with stabilizing leadership during a difficult transition in the early 1980s, chosen precisely because he was respected by all sides as balanced and neutral. And within Johns Hopkins’ own graduate community, a young nuclear physicist named Dr. Ibrahim Syed arrived in August 1969 with his wife and two daughters; he would become the new Society’s first secretary, recording its earliest minutes on a portable typewriter.
Dr. Ahmad H. Sakr, a Lebanese biochemist and one of the pioneering organizers of the national Muslim Students Association, encouraged the Baltimore Muslims to formalize the work already underway. Oral accounts differ on whether he initiated the effort to incorporate outright or lent decisive strength to a process the community had already begun; the most faithful reading of the record is that he served as an influential adviser within a genuinely collective founding process — one more step toward the institution that would be born in September 1969.
These gatherings were not elaborate. They were not formal. But they were, in every meaningful sense, the beginning. Each Friday, in that basement, in those living rooms, in those improvised prayer halls, the foundations of what would become the Islamic Society of Baltimore were being quietly laid — not in mortar and brick, but in the repetition of prayer, the recitation of Qur’an, the exchange of community news, and the simple, powerful act of choosing to remain Muslim in a city where they had no masjid of their own.
### A Community Takes Shape <a id="a-community-takes-shape"></a>
What gave these early gatherings their character — and what would prove to be one of ISB’s defining attributes for decades to come — was the remarkable diversity of the people who participated in them. Physicians from Pakistan prayed beside engineers from Egypt. Graduate students from Sudan sat with business owners from Palestine. American-born Muslims whose faith was rooted in the civil rights tradition joined hands with immigrants whose Muslim identity had been formed in the cities of Cairo, Karachi, Damascus, and Amman. They were united not by nationality, not by language, not by cultural tradition, but by the shared practice of Islam.
This diversity was, from the very beginning, an asset rather than a liability. It meant that the community was never captured by any single cultural or ethnic interpretation of Islamic practice. It meant that the community developed, organically, a broadly inclusive vision of what a Muslim organization in America should be. It meant that the question “What kind of Muslims are we?” was answered from the start with the simplest and most dignified of all possible answers: we are Muslims. All of us. Together.
### From Informal Gatherings to Organized Vision <a id="from-informal-gatherings-to-organized-vision"></a>
By 1967, what had begun as spontaneous gathering was beginning to take on the outlines of intention. The community was small — perhaps a few dozen Muslim families in the wider Baltimore area — but it was growing, and its members were beginning to ask questions that could not be answered by borrowed living rooms and improvised prayer rows. Where would they gather regularly for Jumu’ah? How would they organize Islamic education for their children, who were growing up in American schools with no access to Qur’anic instruction? How would they celebrate Eid in a manner that was both authentic and accessible? How would they welcome new Muslim arrivals to Baltimore — students, immigrants, converts — who needed community as urgently as they needed faith? And — looking further ahead than immediate practical concerns — how would they ensure that Islam in Baltimore would survive beyond their own generation?
These questions, discussed informally after Friday prayers and over community dinners, were the intellectual seeds of what would become a formal institution. Leadership was beginning to emerge — not by formal election, but by natural recognition of those who organized, who communicated, who followed through. Dr. Mohamed Zein Awad was at the center of much of this early organizing, his presence a steady constant in the community’s developing life. Others contributed their time, their connections, their homes, and their ideas.
### Faith Before Finances <a id="faith-before-finances"></a>
It is essential to understand, before proceeding further, what was not present in these early years. There was no budget. There was no endowment, no savings account, no fundraising infrastructure, no grant funding. Resources were extremely limited — donations collected in passing; contributions made from personal finances that were themselves modest. Many of the physicians and engineers who formed the backbone of the early community were themselves early in their careers, not yet established, supporting families and paying off debts of their own.
What these early members did possess, however — in quantities that no financial accounting could measure — was trust. Trust in one another. Trust in the leadership of Dr. Awad and those who stood beside him. Trust in the principle that if they acted with sincerity and consistency, Allah would provide what was needed. This trust was not naive. It was, rather, the product of a deeply held Islamic conviction: that Allah does not abandon those who serve His cause with honest hearts. That conviction would be tested repeatedly in the years ahead. And it would be vindicated.
### The Dream Becomes a Mission <a id="the-dream-becomes-a-mission"></a>
By the late 1960s, the informal community had begun to crystallize around a shared vision that was simultaneously practical and visionary. They would establish a permanent institution — formally recognized, legally constituted, democratically governed, open to all Muslims regardless of background. That institution would provide regular congregational worship, a center for Islamic education, a welcoming home for new arrivals, a framework for charitable service, and — ultimately — a permanent physical home in the form of a masjid. This was a large vision for a small community. But it was, in every dimension, achievable — if the community committed to it with patience, consultation, and faith. By 1969, that commitment was formalized.