The First Little Mosque on the Prairie

I am praying. Sort of. My eyes are cast downward, hands held apart, palms up and slightly cupped, as if holding open an invisible book. That this is not going well is hardly a surprise. It has been a long time, and truth be told I was never shown how to do it properly. My stance is awkward and imitative, a cheap copy of what I have witnessed at the odd solemn occasion that intersected our lives. The last time I tried to pray was more than ten years ago, in Istanbul. It was at the Blue Mosque, a structure so indescribably beautiful, so clearly a tribute to humankind’s transcendence, that its existence seemed to render less significant the promise of the divine.

This place of worship is spare. The pulpit, as it were, is off to the side of the rectangular room. Next to the main hall is an antechamber for ritual ablutions, containing a wash basin and jug perched atop a simple wishbone cabinet. A curtain separating the men’s prayer area from the women’s is not evident today, though one was once erected, many years after both sexes, blissfully ignorant of — or perhaps unconcerned with — tradition, had begun praying together. Rugs cover the hardwood; most are worn thin in spots, perhaps where foreheads met floor. Wind whistles through the building. An eerie wail breaks the silence. I am completely alone here — although to the faithful there is no such thing.

This, the original Al Rashid Mosque, is essentially a museum now, its congregation limited to tour bus voyeurs who, having had their fill of Fort Edmonton’s sexier sites, poke their heads through the front doors and wonder how a mosque, of all things, figured in the early history of northern Alberta. Built in 1938 and relocated in 1991 to a berth in the city’s premier historical park, it is the oldest Muslim house of worship in Canada. From the outside, however, it hardly looks like a mosque at all. Instead, its design evokes the early-twentieth-century Ukrainian Orthodox churches that dot central Alberta’s rural landscape. This is not a coincidence: the mosque’s contractor, Mike Drewoth, was a Ukrainian Canadian unfamiliar with Islamic architecture.

In his ignorance, though, Drewoth accomplished something far more meaningful than any aesthetic flourish. Although clearly unintended, his fusion of East and West stands as a metaphor for a made-in-Canada Islam, a pliant and less conservative version of the faith that grew out of the western prairie like a field of tall grass. It was an Islam that forgave the odd trespass and contextualized some of the religion’s more rigid proscriptions as remnants from the past. It was practised here.

Near the entrance, I pick up a book titled Muslims in Canada: A Century of Achievement. It is a textual and photographic record of the early community, their assimilation reflected in the names they had adopted or that were chosen for them. Leafing through its pages, I note that Bedouin Ferran became Peter Baker, while Ali Ahmed Abouchadi and Mahamud Abuali Gotmi were christened Alexander Hamilton and Frank Alex Coutney, respectively. And so on. On one page, however, was a list of clearly Muslim names, direct from the old country, thirty-two in all. These were the founders of Al Rashid, its charter congregation.

One name stands out, initially because of its length: Rikia Mahmoud Saeed el Haj Ahmed. She was known to me, but not by this ostentatious designation. I knew her as Mary Saddy, my grandmother.

Memories of my father’s funeral are hazy, but a few details remain. We decided to have the ceremony at a funeral home instead of the mosque, since the vast majority of my father’s friends were non-Muslim. As the only son, I was asked to help prepare his body for burial, a role I declined because it would have been too painful to fulfill. There was, I recall, some minor wrangling over how Dad would ascend to the hereafter. My immediate family thought it would be fine to dress him in the clothes in which he was most comfortable — white sports shirt, tennis shorts and running shoes — but my uncle felt that those who had agreed to prepare my father’s body would not approve. So Dad was wrapped in a kafan, a simple white sheet, for his final journey.

We also had a difficult time choosing a photograph to place beside the casket. In his more recent photos, the lung cancer that eventually raced through him seemed to have altered his face long before any actual symptoms appeared. In many shots, it looked as though he was forcing his smile, as though death was stalking him and subconsciously he knew it. We had to go back to a trip he and my mother took to Japan several years earlier to unearth a good photograph. Two things had to be Photoshopped out first, though. One was my mother. The other was the large can of beer in his hand.

The first trickle of Muslim immigration to North America began in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, primarily from Ottoman-occupied Greater Syria, a region that included Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. Most of the early immigrants were single men; many, like my paternal grandfather, were teens from villages in present-day Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley who were fleeing conscription into the Ottoman army. The majority of the initial Arab émigrés settled in Montreal; some of the more intrepid went west.

Of these, many were peddlers who travelled throughout rural Saskatchewan and Alberta, hawking wares they carried on their backs. Others were drawn to the north. My maternal grandfather, Bud Alley (formerly Mohammed Khalil Ali Nogedi), became a trader in the small, primarily First Nations outpost of Fort Simpson, nwt, where his competition was the Hudson’s Bay Company. My father’s family ended up in Alberta, helming a mixed farming operation in the south for a while, before settling in Edmonton in the mid-1930s. The 1931 census put the number of Muslims in Canada at 645. If that was accurate, my father’s immediate family accounted for about 1.5 percent of them.