Explore How the First Muslim Immigrants Developed A Community | Toledo Stories | Full Film

Watch the full Toledo Stories: Islamic Toledo.
Islamic Toledo explores how the first Muslim Immigrants arrived early in the last century and developed a thriving and established community. Today, more than 20 nationalities live in the Toledo region and have found personal and financial success, a freedom of religious expression, and a new welcoming home.
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[@hmk26]

Imam Khattab was kind to everyone he met, including me. Too young to pass away. He was a great Imam. One of the best.

[@radi2986]

Wish you guys woulda did a documentary on my father Hassan Cheaib when he was still alive . He was a Lebanese immigrant lived in north Toledo for 62 years

[@radi2986]

The first mosque was on Bancroft street

[@plaistowbill]

I think many of the Lebanese Muslims who migrated to North America had very little knowledge of the basics of Islam nor did they have an interest in actually practicing the faith. Muslims, mostly Lebanese, lived in my city over 40 years before building a mosque. They used a big an old house as a community Center. There was a tiny room in the back of the house that was used by the few who wanted to pray. One night in 1961 the house burned down. It was then that community leaders decided that it was time to build a mosque.
By the 1960s there were a few thousand Lebanese Muslims in my city. From the early 1960s until the early 1980s a typical Jumah prayer attended less than 20 people. Sunday was the day that that saw about 150 attend a late morning lecture in the Mosque basement followed by Zuhar prayer in the main floor prayer hall. We didn’t have a full time Imam until the 1980s. Jumah prayer and the Sunday service was led by a guest Imam from Detroit or a few local men - a carpenter, a storekeeper and a university student (later became a dentist). In the 1960 and 70s, on Sunday morning, while the adults listened to a sent their children toe “Sunday School” in the mosque basement . In those days there were 5 or 6 people who had performed Hajj and one Hafiz of Quran.
It wasn’t until the mid 1970s that the community established a Muslim burial section in a local nondenominational cemetery. Before then, those who passed away were buried wherever space could be found in one of several cemeteries. By the 1990s the community established a dedicated Muslim cemetery in a rural area outside the city. Though most Lebanese Muslims worked in jobs that did not violate Islamic law, there were quite a few who operated restaurants or shops that sold alcoholic beverages or food containing pork products or worked at a local brewery. Some of these men were considered community leaders and somewhat knowledgeable about Islam.
I don’t remember Islamophobia being an issue in my city despite there being thousands of Lebanese Muslims. When I was a child, Muslims were not especially devout. It seemed that integration and assimilation was important to the Lebanese Muslim community before the 1980s. Besides adopting non Arabic first names (Mike, John. Robert, Mary, etc) there was a significant amount of dating and marriage with non Lebanese people. It wasn’t unusual to have Lebanese boys marrying girls of European backgrounds. Lebanese girls also married non Lebanese men, but at a lower rate than the boys.
By the 1980s the community began to be more religious on account of an influx of immigrants from India, Pakistan and the Arab world. Immigrants who arrived after the 1980s tended to be both well educated (doctors, engineers, etc) and quite religious. That lead to friction between themselves and those who arrived decades earlier. The newcomers began to demand changes in the way the mosque was operated. Eventually other mosques were established to accommodate the demands of the more religious and ethnically diverse community.

[@d.n.8919]

Remember though- the Salafi and Wahabbi movements only started to really gain traction around the 1980’s, when Saudi Arabia’s oil industry became a powerhouse and, by extension, when Saudi Arabia began to have a far greater influence on the Muslim world than it had previously (the Saudi government I mean-obviously, Islam began on that same land, but not under the current government). Immigrants coming to the U.S. from the Muslim world were almost certainly influenced by the conservative sects, whereas Muslims already well established in America were less influenced by the Saudis just because of the geopolitics at play. Before the 1980’s, most Muslims around the world, even in the Muslim world, were typically less “strict” than they are now. There are many videos showing life in various Muslim countries in the 1950’s and 1960’s and most women weren’t wearing hijabs, for example. Even Iran, which is at odds with the Saudis and with Sunni Islam, had its own revolution, resulting in a conservative and backwards version of the Shia sect.