A Tour Of The United States, One Mosque At A Time

April 08, 2015
Chicago

A filmmaker and a stand-up comic get in a automobile with a “half-baked

It sounds like a commencement of a farce. But a men, Bassam Tariq and Aman Ali, are Muslim Americans, and their 30 days of transport spanned a month of Ramadan, a time when Muslims fast, urge and give to charity. Their efforts resulted in a visually overwhelming “30 Mosques

(Scroll down to see photos from a “30 Mosques” project.)

“The goal was to tell engaging and constrained stories about Muslims in America,” Ali, a 29-year-old stand-up comic, told The Huffington Post. “There is no monolithic story of a community.”

There are during slightest 2,106 mosques in a United States, according to a 2011 report

The following year they took a plan on a road, visiting 30 mosques in 30 opposite states during Ramadan. In 2011, they did it all over again, covering a 20 states they hadn’t gotten to a year before.

Ali, with his hermit Zeshwan, has given embarked on a new artistic plan to share a stories of Muslim Americans — a array of brief documentaries on a YouTube channel “Homegrown Homies

“This was an eye-opening experience,” pronounced Ali, who was innate and lifted in Ohio and comes from an Indian family. “I suspicion that a account of Muslims in America was Arab and Indian… But we found communities like North Dakota where a Muslim village been there given a 1700s, communities founded by Muslim slaves.”

What Ali and Tariq stumbled on was a well-documented though little-known story of Muslims in a United States, a story that dates back the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism

But Ali’s projects are reduction about tackling or responding to extremism, he said, and some-more about pity a some-more finish account of what it means to be Muslim — a account that many people, including some immature Muslim Americans, competence not know about.

“Weâ€™re a kick-ass community,” he said, “and we wish to showcase this.”

Scroll down to see photos from a “30 Mosques” project.
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