Chapter One

If someone visits your city on Friday and is asked, how was it? What do they talk about? Do they talk about the building — the carpet, the bathrooms, the chandeliers, the dome, the lighting? Do they talk about the programs — the daily classes, the prayers, the youth groups, sisters' activities, and new Muslim meetups, the work in the community, the visits by the mayor and the police chief? Or do they talk about the people — how welcoming they were, how involved the people were, how much ownership they had, what the intergenerational connections were? Do they talk about one, two, all three, or none? And which, if any, holds the most weight?

The reference point is the community itself — and the first thing to see is the difference between the place and the people: a masjid is a place, while a community is the actual people. If all too often what stands out is the building and its programs rather than the people, then that is somewhat of a silent failure.

Our issue is that what we often do is look and gauge a community by the facilities, and facilities are what we want, but not necessarily what we need. We look at the bathrooms, the parking lot, the dome, the lighting, the carpet — the things that bring people in. And then we look beyond them at what may keep them there: the youth lounge, the gym, the cafe, the Sunday school, the classes, the dinners, the camps. The reality is that the structure draws people in and the infrastructure brings them back.

One of the reasons some people don't go to some masjids — one concern they have — is parking. That is really a deal breaker. If you don't have a place to park, how are you going to go? And if you do park and you abide by the rules, people end up double parking. There are tow risks and all that other stuff. Those who have families want these bigger places that have the amenities.

Whereas when you look at the sisters' side: do the sisters have a sufficient side? Do they have enough room for them to come and properly worship? Or are they isolated in some overflow area with bad audio, bad technology, barely a bathroom working?

Having visited a number of masjids, it was the people that impressed me. When I went there, I felt like I was home. They were so welcoming, so loving. That's a different environment. But the decoration of many masjids is the building, not the people. Our focus has become building structures and facilities rather than building people.

And are we building like never before? The numbers say yes — but so does the emptiness. The 2020 U.S. Mosque Survey (Bagby, ISPU/ISNA) counted 2,769 masjids — 663 more than the 2,106 counted in 2010, a 31% increase — with 1,025 now purpose-built (37%), up from 30% in 2010. The average operating budget rose to $276,500, up from $167,600 in 2010, and paid staffing grew: 50% of masjids have a full-time paid imam (up from 43% in 2010), and 19% have an executive director. Yet there seems to be emptiness. We have the building. We have the decorations. We even may have the people — but all those things are just form. We don't have the substance. The substance is something within the individual — as Allah says:

9:108 …Surely, the masjid whose foundation was laid on piety from the first day is more worthy of standing (for prayer) in it. In it are men who love to be purified; and Allah loves those who purify (themselves). (At-Tawbah — The Repentance 9:108)

The substance that's missing is the capacity to be formed and to contribute — it feels more like a place where people are rather than a place where people become. People are where they occupy, where they're served, where they consume. People become where they're formed, where they contribute, where they produce. They're being invited to be consumers. They're not being invited to be producers.

Formation is not a slogan — it has a name and a source. The Qur'anic word is tarbiyah, from the root that means to grow, and from Ar-Rabb, the Nurturer. It is the very verb the Qur'an uses when the child prays for the parents who raised him:

17:24 And lower for them the wing of humility out of mercy, and say "My Lord! bestow mercy on them, as they nurtured me when I was small." (Al-Isra — The Night Journey 17:24)

And al-Bayḍāwī defines tarbiyah as "the process of gradually bringing something to its perfection." That is what it means to become: not to occupy a room, but to be brought, gradually, to what one was made to be.

But that is not what we have been building. We put together the structure — the rugs, the chandeliers. We put together the infrastructure — attend this class, attend that event. This is what consumers do. A community that consumes is not necessarily a community that's healthy. We can serve the community with so many things and still feel successful — but it is the overconsumption and the lack of production that makes us sick. We are seeing a kind of spiritual obesity within our communities: we keep consuming what is served to us, and we are not producing.

What are we actually looking at? The people, not the building. And the measure of health — formation, belonging, capacity — is something experienced, not gauged by heads in the room but by hearts.

The proof is in what we actually do — all this infrastructure. As Muslims, religion is important to us and community is important to us. So as a community, we have invested in the structure to accommodate people when they come, and in the infrastructure to serve them.

But just because people are showing up — coming in the front door, putting their heads on the carpet — doesn't mean they've been formed. It doesn't mean that they found a place of belonging, a place where they can contribute, a place where they can develop their capacity. Attendance and activity do not equal formation. Someone can sit through the most advanced university course, turn in every homework, but still not pass the class. If the Friday sermon was a class and we attended it for decades, what grade would we get in terms of formation?

Buildings and paid staff can be a sign of institutional growth, but they do not by themselves establish communal health. And the emptiness is not universal, nor uniform — different masjids in different regions feel it at differing levels.

The 2020 U.S. Mosque Survey also found that masjids are becoming more suburban, with those located in towns and small cities falling from 20% in 2010 to 6% in 2020. Some communities may actually not feel this. So knowing that the prerequisite is having a building — definitely, we need to have a place. But when the building is mistaken for building — building youth, building women, building new Muslims, building capacity, building belonging — that's when we have a problem.

You can feel the difference in a single room — a masjid prayer area that seated five to seven hundred people, and people normally dispersed along different walls. When carpet cleaning closed the main hall, everyone moved into a room that held roughly fifty, with some spillover. The first night was awkward: people were suddenly close enough to make eye contact and greet. By the second night they were talking and lingering; by the third, people brought tea and poured it for everyone. When the carpet was finished and the main prayer area reopened, they greeted one another and returned to their separate sides.

The larger the space, the larger the gaps between the hearts. If there's room to move, clearly there's room to escape. The more room we have, the more we can escape what makes a community. This is not just one community's experience. In the classic study of MIT's Westgate housing projects, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back found that it was not simply how close people lived that made them friends, but where the space forced them to pass — the doorway everyone had to walk through, the path that channeled neighbors into contact (Social Pressures in Informal Groups, 1950). The sheer arrangement of the space shaped who had the chance to connect. Proximity does not force friendship; it creates the opening. Space can give or withhold openings for relationship, but community remains an active practice.

At another masjid, people carried a large kettle of tea across the full prayer hall to pour for someone sitting at the far end, then walked back and came again. The first story therefore is not spatial determinism. Space can help or hinder formation; it cannot substitute for communal character.

We're building, but why are the rates of societal poisons still present, even though we've been building for years? Why are youth leaving Islam? Because the building has been bricks, not people. We've constructed structures externally, leaving the emptiness internal. And these things — the buildings, the budgets, the programs — cannot bring the hearts together. As Allah says:

8:63 And (moreover) He joined between their hearts: if you had spent all that is in the earth, you would not have joined their hearts, but Allah joined between them: Surely, He is Mighty, Wise. (Al-Anfal — The Spoils 8:63)

If we keep building like this, we're just making more room for emptiness.

Hold on to that: whether people are being formed and can contribute, not whether the structure or infrastructure is appealing. Because if building isn't producing people, something's gone wrong. Something's missing. How real, how recent, how widespread is this emptiness — and what are we prepared to find?