In 1963, a Detroit community pledged their own homes to build a mosque, and the president of Egypt sent a gift. This is its successor, in Dearborn, Michigan.
This is the Islamic Center of America, on Ford Road in Dearborn. Its story begins in the Detroit area in 1949, when local Muslims looked for a religious leader from the Middle East. They invited Imam Muhammad Chirri, from Lebanon, to lead a new society, the Islamic Center Foundation Society.
The community built a mosque on Joy Road in Detroit, on land bought from the Ford Motor Company. Members pledged their homes as collateral. It opened on 20 September 1963, and the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, gave a gift. The center is described as the oldest purpose-built Shia mosque in the United States.
By the 2000s it had outgrown the Detroit building. In 2005 it moved to its present home on Ford Road in Dearborn. The architect was David Donnellon and the cost was about 14 million dollars.
The new mosque covers about 120,000 square feet and holds more than 3,000 worshippers. It has one large dome, about 150 feet high, and two minarets, with calligraphy decorating the domes.
The old Detroit mosque is now the Az-Zahra Center and still holds prayers. In 2011, hundreds of people of different faiths stood together at the center in solidarity.
Some call it the largest mosque in North America, but we found no source that supports this, and the same Wikipedia page calls it the second-largest Shia facility after a centre in Toronto.
