New York:
The Masjid Manhattan occupies a narrow basement with bare pipes snaking along the ceiling. The congregants who filled up the mosque near City Hall on Thursday night were mainly men, from South Asia, West Africa and the United States, and a few women -- who prayed behind a partition. The feast provided for breaking the Ramadan fast, spicy curry over rice, came in plastic takeout containers from a nearby restaurant.
A few blocks away, at the Masjid al-Farah, the scene was somewhat different. Men and women sat together. The worshipers, devotees of the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism, came from an even wider array of countries and included a young man with multiple piercings and a shirt identifying him as an employee at Jivamukti Yoga. The mosque, in a two-story building sandwiched between two bars -- the neon-lighted Tribeca Tavern and the nouvelle-brasserie-type Cercle Rouge -- has a pristine, high-ceilinged, white-painted interior decorated with stained glass and Arabic calligraphy.
The fast-breaking meal, or iftar, included baby spinach and goat cheese and aloe vera water passed around by the mosque's female leader, Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, who declared, "Good for the digestion."
One mosque is conservative, and the other is reputed to be among the most progressive in the city -- making the downtown Muslim community a quintessentially New York combination of immigrants and native New Yorkers, traditionalists and spiritual seekers.
But what the two mosques have in common -- besides the sense of celebration and camaraderie that comes at the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, in which Muslims fast from sunup to sundown, give alms and focus on self-improvement -- is that both have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site.
Masjid Manhattan, on Warren Street, four blocks from ground zero, was founded in 1970. Masjid al-Farah, formerly on Mercer Street, moved to its present location on West Broadway, about 12 blocks from ground zero, in 1985. Both mosques -- essentially one-room operations -- routinely turn people away for lack of space.
When Masjid al-Farah moved into the neighborhood, the local Muslim community was tiny, said Sheikha Fariha. But it has expanded exponentially, especially with Muslims who work in the area, she said. Both mosques now welcome doctors, street vendors, real estate agents and service workers. The imam of the Masjid Manhattan has a day job in a nearby post office.
Lately, some of the spillover has been absorbed by prayer services held in the vacant Burlington Coat Factory store two blocks from the trade center site, by Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf, a longtime prayer leader at Masjid al-Farah. He plans to turn the site into a Muslim community center and mosque bitterly opposed by critics, who call it a "ground zero mosque," and which was backed by President Obama on Friday night. The uproar has perplexed, even alarmed, those who have long practiced Islam amid the neighborhood bustle of churches, government agencies, corporations, delis and sidewalk vendors.
Mariama Diallo, originally from Guinea, hurried down the stairs into Masjid Manhattan after finishing work at a nearby computer shop, knowing that if she tried to make it home to Queens before praying, she would miss the Maghrib, or evening prayer, and the breaking of the fast.
She spread out her prayer rug and was still praying when the imam's call signaled the end of the fast. Just then, Shari Kareem, a student studying early childhood development at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and her mother, Seema, arrived. They took swigs straight from a gallon of Poland Spring water, helped themselves to dried dates and offered some to Ms. Diallo.
On the men's side of the mosque, there was a minor moment of added excitement: a couple of arrivals, looking for free food and acting erratically, stepped clumsily across the mats on the floor where the food was laid out. The men deemed them to be high on drugs and firmly escorted them out.
Ms. Diallo said she came to the United States wanting "honest work -- anything where I don't have to cheat." Not having had much time to immerse herself in the politics of her new country, she pronounced herself deeply puzzled as to why anyone would feel threatened by what goes on in a mosque.
"We have to pray to God. You're following the religion," she said. "You want to pray because it is in the book that you have to pray, and someday you will die."
Referring to 9/11, she said that she, too, had "bad souvenirs." (A native French speaker, she meant memories.) She remembered with awe a visit to the twin towers, lamented the deaths there, and said: "Killing people is a sin. Building the mosque over here, I don't think that has to do with killing people."
At Masjid al-Farah, Ali Mansour told of how he had drifted away from Islam as a young man in Egypt, but found it again through Sufism when the mosque started ordering from his deli down the block. He liked its "progressivism," he said, adding that friends in Egypt sometimes tease him that American Muslims are "out of your mind" because of their nontraditional approach.
"Because this is a new country, it rejuvenates and revolutionizes everything," he said. "Food, industry, philosophy and even religion."
Soon, Sheikha Fariha started the zikr, the Sufi ritual of chanting and prayer, inviting the congregants to still their minds and drop "into the vastness of the heart that has no boundaries."
"La illaha illa Allah," they chanted again and again, turning from side to side in unison. "There is no god but God."