Quincy, Massachusetts: How Shipyard Families From Lebanon and Syria Built New England's First Mosque on South Street

Drive south on South Street in Quincy, Massachusetts, past the triple-deckers of Quincy Point, and you reach a modest building on a hill not far from the old Fore River Shipyard. It does not look like the domed mosques many people picture. But the Islamic Center of New England at 470 South Street holds a special place in the story of Muslims in this region. When it opened in 1964, it was the first building in New England put up to be a mosque.

The people who built it were not newcomers. They were the American-born children of shipyard workers who had arrived from Lebanon and Syria more than half a century earlier.

Eight families and a shipyard

According to the history committee of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, the story begins with eight Muslim families who came to Quincy at the turn of the 20th century, drawn by jobs at the Fore River Shipyard. The committee names the patriarchs and the years they arrived: Abdullah Abraham (1895), Ameen Sulieman (1908), Toufic Derbes (1909), the brothers Ismail and Abduh Hassan (1909), Ali Eldeb (1913), Selman Allie (1913) and Mohamed Omar (1914).

They settled in Quincy Point among other Arabic-speaking immigrants, many of them Christians. A 1990s Patriot Ledger history of the community says that at first the newcomers were bound together by nationality, and only later began to organize by religion. Before there was any mosque, many Quincy Muslims prayed in the basement of Ma's Lunch, a Quincy Point restaurant popular with shipyard workers. A State Department profile of the community says Mohammad Omar Awad volunteered as imam, leading prayers for the small group.

Thirty years in a house on South Street

In 1934 the families formed the Arab American Banner Society, a charitable, cultural and social organization. The name itself said something: these were Muslims putting down roots and claiming an American identity. Mass Moments, the Mass Humanities history project, notes that the society held services and religious classes in an old house on South Street for about thirty years. Children learned the basics of the faith there, families gathered for Friday prayer, and the community marked Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha together.

Building a real mosque took a generation. The ISBCC history says the money came from the founders' American-born adult children and from decades of fundraising, with much of it given by Christian and Jewish neighbors, customers, clients and students. The leaders had never seen a mosque themselves, so they modeled the way the center was run on the churches and synagogues around them.

By the early 1960s the second generation had decided to build. In 1964 the Islamic Center of New England opened on South Street, on a hill overlooking the shipyard where their fathers had worked.

A new wave, a full-time imam and hard years

Almost as soon as the doors opened, the community changed. Immigration law changed in 1965, and the State Department profile says the small Quincy congregation roughly tripled in the decade after 1964. Students, doctors, engineers and their families arrived from across the Muslim world.

In 1982 the center welcomed its first full-time imam, Talal Eid, a Lebanese scholar trained at al-Azhar University in Cairo. He would lead the community for many years. The Patriot Ledger reported that by the 1990s the Quincy mosque counted families from 26 countries.

Those years were not always easy. The same Patriot Ledger report records that in 1990 an arson fire caused more than $500,000 in damage to the mosque. A plan to build a second mosque in Milton fell apart the next year after local opposition. Imam Eid and other members told the paper that for every bad encounter, they could count many more acts of support from their neighbors, including other faith groups.

Sharon, and the community today

The community kept growing. ICNE says it opened a second center in Sharon, Massachusetts in 1993, at what is now 74 Chase Drive, to serve the many Muslim families moving to the southern suburbs of Boston. An Islamic school followed in Sharon in the 1990s.

Today ICNE runs both the Quincy and Sharon centers. Its weekend schools in both towns teach Quran, Arabic and Islamic studies to children from kindergarten through 12th grade, and the center offers services such as nikah (marriage) ceremonies and janazah (funeral) prayers. For prayer times, Jumu'ah details and programs, check the center's website at icne.net or call the Quincy center at (617) 479-8611.

Why this story matters

Many Muslim families in Massachusetts today pray at large centers in Roxbury, Cambridge, Sharon, Worcester and beyond. Most of those communities trace their growth to students and professionals who arrived after 1965. The Quincy story is older and quieter. It is the story of factory families who were Muslim and American at the same time, long before most of their neighbors knew what a mosque was, and who built one with help from the people next door.

If you are in Quincy, Massachusetts, stop by South Street, say salaam, and remember the shipyard families who made it possible.

Have a story about your town's masjid or Muslim community? Send it to Mass Halal Journal at masshalal.com.