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Interfaith Alliances in the Valley

For millennia, people have used religion to divide, as well as unite. Current national rhetoric and hateful discourse stemming from fears of terrorism has often equated Islam, the religion of a quarter of the world’s population, with a slippery enemy. But this negativity is far from universal. In this first of a two-part series about local interfaith relationships, WMRA’s Christopher Clymer Kurtz reports that over the years many people and churches in Harrisonburg have reached out to show support for minority religious communities.

[Pre-service at the Islamic Center]

 

In 2002, at the request of the Islamic Association of the Shenandoah Valley, the Reverend Ann Reed Held found herself in a room with 13 representatives of the Association and the FBI, which was looking for information about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

 

ANN REED HELD: They said, We need someone to vouch for us, that we are peace loving, we're not terrorists.

 

When Held, now retired, came to Harrisonburg in 1990, at the start of her quarter-century pastorship at Trinity Presbyterian, local Muslims were already using her church’s facilities for Friday prayers and, later, a Saturday school for children. This was little publicized until toward the end of the decade, when they issued a public invitation to a Ramadan celebration at the church--around the time of the war in Kosovo, which Held thinks could have been an influence when someone, on the day of celebration, called the church with a bomb threat. There was no bomb, but Held remembers that day:

 

HELD:  Shook me up when it happened, but they were all kind of, yeah, people make these kind of threats, it's no big deal.

 

But in Harrisonburg, negative responses like the bomb threat are big deals--because they have ended up strengthening feelings of interfaith support. One Islamic Association member remembers Trinity Presbyterian’s support at the time of the bomb threat as “steadfast.”

 

By the end of the nineties, the Muslim group was able to build and move into its own meeting place, which is still active.

 

[Sound of Friday prayer at the Islamic Center]

 

Dr. Ehsan Ahmed heads the economics department at James Madison University. He has lived in Harrisonburg since the early eighties and was a founding member of the mosque.

 

EHSAN AHMED: When we built this place we wanted to be really low key. We were expecting to be low key. And then comes 2001, and the entire attention was on us Muslims in the local community.

 

After the 9/11 terror attacks various church groups communicated concern. Some people even volunteered to spend the night at the mosque.

 

AHMED: Really the local support from the local community was pretty strong. And I think that's not only strengthened our community, it reflects on the local community, how friendly they were.

 

Fast forward a decade to 2012, when someone painted derogatory graffiti on the mosque. This was days after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Whether or not that was a factor, as before, Christians and the broader community responded.

 

HELD: It was a huge outpouring. That was very heartwarming, I think, for the Muslim community to know that we were in solidarity. It was a hate crime. No, this is not what we're about, and we're glad you're here, and we're going to stand with you.

 

AHMED: They talked about their tolerance and how really this did not reflect the views of the local community, and that is true. It was an isolated incident. It was not consistent with what we have experienced in this community.

 

Support from local churches for a minority religious community is not unique to the mosque. Rabbi Joe Blair serves both the Temple House of Israel in Staunton and the Beth El Congregation in Harrisonburg. Blair tells of one instance from five or six years ago, when anti-Semitic leaflets were left at the synagogue.

 

JOE BLAIR: Churches and individuals came around and wound up collecting those and tossing them out and then let us know about it. It's not the first time it's happened. That was just an example of them knowing this was going to be disturbing and taking care of it and then afterwards being kind enough to let us know that it was going on. They did what they could and they were very supportive in that way and I appreciated that immensely. Whether it meant a big deal to them or whether they thought it was a huge effort, it meant the world.

 

Not all churches participate in interfaith support.

 

HELD: In the Christian community there certainly is a wide spectrum of people who are not comfortable in interfaith dialogue. Some are maybe putting their big toe into it. I've been blessed that the church I served always afforded opportunities for that.

In recent months, in the midst of tension and anti-Muslim backlash following the December shootings in San Bernadino, and terrorist attacks in Europe, some church leaders sent a letter of solidarity to the mosque, and in January the Interfaith Association held its meeting there. The organization has released a call for action stating, in part, “we intend to work together to stop ... fear of strangers from taking over the hearts of our institutions and members of our community.”

Christopher Clymer Kurtz was a freelance journalist for WMRA from 2015 - 2019.