The Islamic Society of Chester County (“ISCC”) was founded in 1978 as an informal network of families meeting in a local YWCA to perform Friday prayers. Seraj, a civil engineer who had emigrated from Egypt to the United States, opened a phone book after arriving in West Chester and called the numbers listed next to Muslim-sounding names. When the stranger would pick up, Brother Seraj asked where he could pray with other Muslims on Fridays. Unmoored in a new place, he created a network of Muslims using publicly posted telephone numbers and creativity. Since there were no local prayer spaces at that time, Brother Seraj rented a room at the YWCA each Friday. The earliest gatherings of the ISCC were characterized by a sense of family, shared food, and storytelling. After the Friday gatherings gained traction, the founding families added a Sunday gathering that welcomed.[1]
The ISCC first came into possession of a stable physical location when it purchased a church in Kennett Square from the Kennett Square Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (West Goshen Township 1988). The Kennett Square location was equidistant from far-flung groups of Muslims in the area. For example, Dr. Saeed Ahmad Usmani, who moved to West Chester from Pakistan to practice dentistry in the 1970s and joined the ISCC in its earliest days, drove fourteen miles multiple times a day to attend prayers, even for the fajr prayer, which occurs in the early morning hours before dawn.[2] Despite its inconvenient location, Muslims drove from as far away as Delaware to attend prayers, a regional spread indicating the dearth of opportunities for congregational worship and socializing for Muslim families in that area in the 1980s. In this atmosphere of scarcity, the impact of additional mosques rippled through communities of Muslims in southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.
In the early 1990s an individual donated land for the construction of a masjid in nearby Delaware. As a result, people who lived near the new masjid stopped traveling to Kennett Square. This development spurred West Chester Muslims to look for a more centrally located space. While members like Dr. Usmani have long been with the ISCC, the attendee population at the ISCC is fluid. This fluidity is demonstrated not only in the families who attend but also in leadership; the board is composed of eleven members, whose terms of three years are staggered so that three members come up for election each year. Democratic leadership by congregants rather than the leadership of a single imam also poses pragmatic challenges to building consensus on a building design. On the other hand, the ISCC is influenced by competition to provide resources to attract families in the region, and dramatic improvements to the current building could do just that.
In 1994 the ISCC purchased its current building: a 2,000-square-foot ranch-style home located in a suburb of West Chester and within a mile of a large synagogue (Kesher Israel) and a large church (Trinity Assembly of God).[3] After the purchase of the current building, the relationship among the ISCC, the township, and the courts slowed attempts to establish a firm foothold in the community. The township initially required the ISCC to build a public sewer and a public water source; these were costly demands, requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment. After the ISCC demonstrated the small size of its congregation, the judge waived the requirement for both. Then a neighbor offered to develop some of their land into a parking lot for use by the ISCC but asked for the land to be transferred into his name in exchange for his labor. The ISCC did not agree. In response the neighbor, in apparent retribution, approached the town council to ask the ISCC to produce proof of occupancy permit for a small house on the property that was used as a Sunday School. The ISCC had not applied to have the building rezoned into a school, as it had done for the main ISCC facility. Presumably, they were then forced to pay to have the building rezoned to answer the neighbor’s displeasure at his failed attempt to trade his development labor in exchange for a portion of the ISCC’s plot.
In the meantime, to save costs, ISCC members contributed manual labor and, presumably, funding to construct the existing parking lot. ISCC members widened the driveway and installed security lighting required by the township regulations. Brother Seraj dug the ditches for the placement of the security lighting, renting the equipment to cut trees before digging the ditches. Dr. Usmani, after spending many hours outside clearing the land for the construction of the parking lot and mandated lighting, fell sick with Lyme disease. The efforts by these founding members of the ISCC, as well as, by his account, Dr. Usmani’s miraculous recovery from the lingering effects of Lyme disease, are materialized in the center’s current property.
By the early 2000s, the ranch-style house was bursting at the seams, particularly during Ramadan and during monthly community halaqas, or religious gatherings for the purpose of study. When the ISCC submitted a request to expand its existing building in 2007, the ISCC attorney warned that the township might deny their request based on having insufficient parking space on hand. Kesher Israel, the synagogue down the road, offered the ISCC access to its parking lots during major community events. Dr. Usmani was careful to secure this assurance in writing for the benefit of their expansion application. However, according to Dr. Usmani, forty neighbors objected to the ISCC building’s expansion.[4] After three hearings, the township finally gave permission. However, neighbors extended the legal process by hiring a lawyer to represent them against the township. The legal battle was so protracted that by the time the case was resolved there was already a need for greater expansions than had been approved in 2007. Although the ISCC finally achieved its legal victory on January 23, 2008, the approval of their application was moot in the face of a transformed community. In the meantime, children playing in the ISCC parking lot after breaking their Ramadan fast resulted in a spate of noise complaints that made ISCC members reluctant to invest in outdoor basketball facilities.[5]
The delay also reflected the difficulty of finding a reliable architect. In 2007 Salim Bootwala was a member of the five-person construction committee, a subgroup of the board dedicated to the new community center. According to Bootwala, this committee initially selected engineers and architects based on price and the social networks of board members. The businesses hired were sole proprietorships, which were less flexible than larger, team-oriented, multi-partner businesses. The board also frequently changed its mind about project parameters, causing difficulties with contractors [6] More than once, the ISCC board members gathered to cajole architects to give updates, only to have architects fall sick or move away.[7] Since the architects used were sole proprietors of their own small businesses, one architect dropping out of the project meant long delays. In the meantime, the membership changed, and additions like Ejaz, who had many connections to mosques in the area, raised the proposal for a basketball court, an idea that took hold among members of the community. The plan for a larger expansion would not be covered by the previous development application, however.
So, in April 2016 the ISCC ignored the previous development application despite its hard-won victory and put forward a new proposal to the West Goshen township planning commission for “the construction of two institutional buildings totaling 26,484 square feet (a mosque and an activity center), and 125 parking spaces.”[8] Ongoing negotiations over how to proceed with the construction of a basketball court continue to balance the local contingencies of financing, taxation, parking access, and noise complaints. The history of the ISCC has been entangled since its inception in the local conditions of Chester County, from access to the local YWCA to local zoning laws. In the recent center discussion, the ISCC’s response to local contingencies has also been inflected by competing visions of the ideal community that fall partially along generational lines.
Notes
1: Usmani, 1/13/20.
2: Ibid.
3: They bought the home for $225,000 in 1994, applying for a differential zoning of the building since it was in a residential area.
4: Usmani, 1/13/20.
5: A. Bootwala, 4/13/20.
6: S. Bootwala, 4/13/20.
7: Usmani, 1/13/20; S. Bootwala, 4/13/20.
8: Paul Farkas, “Letter to Case LaLonde regarding LD-4-16-13740, on behalf of the ISCC, to Manager of West Goshen Township, 25 May, 2016.” The County of Chester Planning Commission Meeting Files, June 8, 2016, 50.