"One of the Most Active Organizations in the Nation": Cedar Rapids' Muslim Community, 1920–80

This poster draws upon a broader research project focused on using the local, Cedar Rapids-area press as a key source for understanding the ways in which Cedar Rapids’ Muslims were perceived within the broader community. The broader project engages a careful study of the daily newspapers published in Cedar Rapids from the 1920s through the 1970s, noting that coverage of Cedar Rapids’ Muslims, as individuals and as part of a shared faith community, followed several themes. The study first highlights the challenges that local journalists faced in developing an appropriate terminology for the mosque and the Muslim community associated with it, noting that these challenges mirrored ones faced by the Muslim community itself. In particular, the coverage indicates the increasingly important role played by the mosque – or temple, as it was known for decades – in the community’s religious and social life. Second, it notes that the coverage focused broadly on social and religious activities – notably weddings, deaths and burials, religious activities, and community fundraisers.

This poster visually presents these major themes, employing period photographs and pdfs of the papers’ coverage of non-Muslim Cedar Rapids citizens’ interactions with the Muslim community to suggest how the community was viewed in actuality, as well as in the press. Bringing in excerpts from the article version of this project as appropriate, this poster uses primary and secondary sources as visual evidence that local press coverage of Cedar Rapids Muslims was disproportionate to their numbers, largely positive, and in no way marked them as alien to or different from the broader Cedar Rapids community. More broadly, this poster suggests, drawing upon the larger project, the press coverage highlights the dynamic relationship between local newspapers and religious communities in smaller American cities. How can this argument be made most effectively in a poster format, and what new questions – for further research or for reconsideration of the current project – might this format foster?

While focusing on the particular story of Cedar Rapids’ Muslim community, this poster hopes to engage a wider audience than those exclusively focused on American / Arab-American history or Islamic studies. It also hopes to connect with the 2013 AHA theme of “Lives, Places, Stories” by foregrounding the social aspects of this particular history. As a result, the poster will “conclude” by focusing on a broader implication of this study: that religious and ethnic minorities might have had substantively different experiences depending on the size and socio-political climate of the town or city in which they resided. While in some communities, Muslim immigrants were largely invisible – or, in some cases – unwelcome – to the broader community, Cedar Rapids’ Muslim community – a small percentage of the city’s population – made frequent appearances in the local press. In short, the narrative framing of Cedar Rapids’ Muslim community in the local newspapers argues for a more nuanced approach to studies of religious and ethnic minorities in the mid-twentieth century, including sensitivity to the local context.