By Mia Khatib
mia.khatib@triangletribune.com
RALEIGH — After months of back-and-forth with Raleigh’s Muslim community, Shaw University has agreed to temporarily reopen the on-campus community mosque, Masjid King Khalid. Mosque board members received key access, and worshippers gathered for their first congregation since the pandemic closure.
“After the last three years, I thought maybe the community was kind of scattered,” MKK Imam Juma Musa told The Tribune. “But as soon as people heard the mosque is open, they showed up in numbers I could not believe.”
The Memorandum of Understanding, which expires after three years, outlines the rights of use and states the parties will engage in good-faith negotiations over the first two months of term to resolve the dispute and determine the mosque’s long-term fate. MKK also agreed to pay nearly $940 a month for maintenance.
“If we’re not able to come to a [mutual] agreement, then we acknowledge that litigation is perhaps the only way,” Attorney and MKK Board member Nigel Edwards said. “From the very beginning, we were very open to contributing financially to the upkeep of those facilities and the utilities; we just didn’t want to be reduced to becoming tenants who could be later on evicted.”
The Islamic Association of Raleigh’s Social and Welfare Committee will cover this cost for the first six months, he said. Raleigh Muslims have also received national attention and support in their fight to save MKK from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR Deputy Executive Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said they have decades of experience helping mosques threatened with closure, but this situation is unique and raises layers of legal issues that remain unresolved. He said this is a larger problem of anti-Muslim bigotry and gentrification, and “it’s part of American Muslim history now.”
“What the University wants to do potentially is to sell that land off and allow it to be replaced with apartment complexes or some other new land development,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of your classic gentrification story… in this case, it was a Black Muslim community being pushed out of their house of worship.”
Many residents like Ford Chambliss, who actively opposed the University’s rezoning request, fear the mosque will vanish if the International Studies Center is redeveloped. And while the future of the building and mosque is still up in the air, Musa said multiple council members were instrumental in Shaw University’s cooperation and the finalization of the MOU.
“That pressure is really the one that bears fruit today for us to be back in the mosque. We got everything we asked for,” he said. “The masjid is not only a place for worship, it’s a place for everything. We meet, we share information… that’s the place children learn how to crawl.”
