In the mid-1960s, Maryland’s universities began to attract students not only from South Asia but also from the Arab world. Among them was Ahmed, a young man from Cairo, who came to study civil engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Ahmed was ambitious, he dreamed of building bridges and roads that could transform cities. But what he struggled to build in those early years was something less visible: a sense of Muslim community.
Life on campus was both exhilarating and lonely. He excelled in math and physics, but the cafeteria was a test of its own, navigating food without pork or alcohol, explaining why he left his friends mid-conversation to go pray, and fasting alone during Ramadan while his classmates laughed over pizza.
Ahmed’s apartment soon became a gathering place. He invited other Muslim students, Egyptian, Pakistani, Nigerian, and sometimes even curious American converts, to share meals. They cooked lentils and rice with borrowed pots and mismatched plates. When prayer time came, they lined up in his small living room, bookshelves serving as the qibla marker.
Ahmed was not an imam, but he became a kind of leader by default. He organized Friday prayers in classrooms after asking professors for permission. He collected donations for a student in need, insisting that helping one another was as important as exams. He even helped draft blueprints, not for a building this time, but for Maryland’s first permanent mosque.
Though that dream would take years to materialize, Ahmed’s vision carried weight. He understood that just as cities needed bridges and foundations, so did faith. His engineering mind saw what others overlooked: that without structure, a community could scatter.
When Ahmed graduated, he went on to work for a large construction firm, helping design highways that crisscrossed the state. Few who drove on them knew that their engineer had also drawn up plans for prayer spaces on campus and dreamed of a mosque in Maryland.
His story reminds us that the builders of our physical world were also quietly building the foundations of our spiritual one. For Ahmed, engineering was not just about concrete and steel, it was about ensuring that faith had a place to stand, and a path forward, in Maryland.