San Ramon, July 31: Everyone worked hastily to open the renovated San Ramon Valley Islamic Center in time for the holy month of Ramadan, which begins at sundown Sunday.
Workers were still laying down carpet in the prayer hall on Friday morning, hours before hundreds of local Muslims arrived for the expanded mosque’s first Friday Prayer.
Volunteers also had yet to glue all the ceramic tiles into the mihrab by the time Tahir Anwar delivered his sermon in front of the arched prayer niche.
For the visiting imam, the architecture was not as important as the faces in front of him — members of the multiethnic, multigenerational and fast-growing Muslim community of the Tri-Valley suburbs.
“If anyone has a doubt Muslims are doing well, think again. Look around us,” Anwar told the congregants Friday. “It’s not just about the building, it’s about who we are.”
Longtime members were beaming at the mosque’s reopening, proud of a center that has grown from 30 families to roughly 400 since its founding in 1992. The room was a sea of business suits and T-shirts, kurtas and jeans. Hina Khan-Muktar was a little teary-eyed when she entered the hall.
“You can feel the blessings, the abundance,” she said. “Growing up, every mosque the first generation tried to do was bare-bones, minimal. This next generation has an eye for beauty, for colors.”
The founding members of the mosque were South Asian immigrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh whose first local prayer gatherings happened in someone’s home. The center’s coming of age mirrors the growth of South Asian residents in the region — the Pakistani-American population in the Tri-Valley grew from about 300 to 1,300 in the past decade, and the Indian-American population, of whom a minority are Muslims, has reached 20,000 in the five-city region, according to the census.
“We grew with the city. The city itself has grown so much,” said Sophia Hassan, 33, who says she stood out as a Muslim in her youth but now feels at home in the city of 72,000 people. “San Ramon’s very different now, it’s a very different city from when I grew up.”
Good schools, tidy streets, a glut of new houses and a welcoming reputation brought hundreds of Muslim professionals to San Ramon. For some, having a well-regarded mosque at the center of town — one that caters to families — helped seal the deal.
“The school system, the education system here, is very attractive to this community,” said Sohail Siddiqi, a member since 1997. “The growth of the city has been very well-planned, well-structured.”
Meticulous city planning has its challenges. Mosque leaders learned that recently when they asked to expand their Friday afternoon capacity from 325 to 541 people and add some Sunday school classrooms.
Secluded inside the Crow Canyon Commons Office Park, the mosque doesn’t look like one from outside — local ordinances require its exterior to match all the others in the office complex. That makes it nearly invisible every day but Friday, when cars clog the parking lot for the afternoon’s Jummah prayer.
With a growing congregation and not enough space to fit them all comfortably, mosque members spent $1.7 million to buy and gut an adjacent print shop to expand into. They began the renovation in mid-April, using a banquet hall for prayer services in the interim.
The Planning Commission gave the mosque a temporary permit to operate at full capacity during Ramadan, but is using the month as a trial run. The center has hired a traffic consultant, recruited volunteer parking valets and persuaded a few dozen families to carpool to reduce the congestion.
At a time when mosque construction has roused xenophobic tension in other parts of the country, the mosque members have found it refreshing that city leaders’ biggest concern has been traffic on Camino Ramon.
San Ramon Mayor Abram Wilson was among the impressed visitors who stopped by the reopened mosque at Friday Prayer. Wilson said he has watched the center develop since its founding 19 years ago.
“When you walk in, you get that feeling of contentment,” he said.
–Agencies