Mott Haven Herald

Archbishop of Canterbury visits St. Ann’s

Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by Bernard L. Stein.

The Archbishop of Canterbury visited St. Ann’s Church on Jan. 27 to gain an understanding of the work the the Episcopal Church does with the poor.

Rev. Martha Overall, the pastor of the Mott Haven church, showed Archbishop Rowan Williams the church’s Wednesday food pantry.

She told the archbishop, who is the symbolic head of the Anglican Church worldwide, “We are really the poorest of the poor. Since we are open all the time, we are the community church,” according to the Diocese news site.

The archbishop was in New York for a theological conference. During his visit he met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

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Melrose friary campaigns against pre-marital sex

Posted on 07. Dec, 2009 by Chris Prentice.

About a hundred young Latino men and women sang hymns, feasted on empanadas and promised to abstain from sex on a Sunday afternoon in October at St. Crispin’s Friary on East 156^th street in Melrose.

The pledge is part of the Corazón Puro (Pure Heart) program, a year-old initiative of the Catholic Church.  The pledge aims to encourage abstinence and reduce teen pregnancy, a problem in the South Bronx, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in New York, and one that has hit the city’s Latino communities particularly hard. (more…)

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African Muslims sink roots in Mott Haven

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Sergey Kadinsky.

In the midst of the Ramadan fast in September, a small group of men sat on the floor in an empty store that used to be a pharmacy. They were clustered around a small laptop computer, watching Anthony Quinn’s classic film The Message, about the birth of Islam.

A green awning outside the storefront announces Mott Haven’s newest outpost of Islam, the Masjid Ebun Abass on the quiet corner of Alexander Avenue and 141st Street, buffered from the traffic of Third Avenue by a Greenstreet triangle.

A symbol of the Bronx’s newest immigrant group, the mosque “is one of the biggest, and it’s in Mott Haven,” said Mamadou Kamara. Kamara is an assistant imam, the Muslim term for a spiritual leader.

Before the congregation leased its quarters, Kamara would travel to a mosque in Harlem to worship, and sometimes found himself praying in unlikely places. “When I do it on the street, I don’t care who cares,” said Kamara. “I once prayed in the Times Square Church.”

Most of the members of the congregation are West African. Their place of worship is a simple affair. A stepped podium for sermons, a bookshelf, and a poster of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca are the only physical signs of Islam in the mosque’s interior. Painted parallel lines on the carpet indicate the direction of Islam’s holiest city.

Brothers Ali and Habib Trawaly, who are respectively its imam and president, founded Ebun Abass a year ago.

“It was a considerable effort to bring about the mosque,” said Ali Trawaly. At the time, the only other mosque in Mott Haven was at 369 E. 145th Street, an anonymous century-old townhouse, where the only outward sign of Islam is a heavily barred green and white metal fence.

Starting a new congregation “was all about the kids,” said assistant imam Abdurahman Juwara. “They did not fit into the other masjid,” he said, using the Arabic term for mosque.

“We have over 160 kids here,” said Banusi Maha, 45, another of the founding members of the mosque. “We teach them to respect people.”

If it weren’t for the mosque, Maha fears, the children would instead be watching television and learning nothing.  Instead, behind a makeshift curtain, children work on their school assignments and study the Quran.

Maha works an early morning shift as a cook at the Jekyll and Hyde Club, a theme restaurant in Midtown. Having worked as a chef in his homeland, he simply walked into the restaurant and asked for the job.

Like Maha, most members of the congregation hold blue-collar jobs, working long hours for little pay.

“Financially, it is difficult,” said Juwara, who emigrated from Gambia and has lived in the Bronx for 15 years.  “We have a basement, but we don’t have the money to develop it,” said Kamara.

In contrast to the imposing, domed Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper East Side, which was largely financed by Kuwait, Masjid Ebun Abass did not receive funding from any foreign government. “If we had that kind of money, we’d buy the building,” Juwara said.

“This is us: we work in car washes, factories, and drive taxis,” said Degumeh Sillah, 60, an African art dealer.  A Bronx resident since 1972, Sillah expressed pride at the religious transformation of the area. “The mosque on 166th Street,” he said, “that’s a former nightclub.”

Still, his mosque struggles to pay its $5,500 monthly rent. “With electricity, water, and teacher’s salary, that comes to $8,000,” said Sillah.

But the leaders of the congregation remain confident and determined.

“We are looking for a place to buy,” says Omar Trawaly, a cousin of the imam whose  three sons attend classes at the mosque. He said that the landlord has given the mosque two months to consider buying the space. “For sure, we don’t want to be renting,” Trawaly said.

Local Africans often speak of making money and returning to their homelands, but months turn to years. Where it was once acceptable to pray anywhere, there is now a growing need for permanent institutions, including mosques.

“Before, we didn’t think of establishing masjids,” said Soulemane Konate, secretary general of the Council of African Imams. “It’s not easy for Africans to survive in this country, but we’re not leaving.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

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Mosque focuses on Muslim unity

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Sergey Kadinsky.

In contrast to its quick early growth in the Middle East, the spread of Islam in West Africa was gradual, members of the Ebun Abass mosque point out. Merchants and traveling scholars brought the religion with them.

“They first asked people to accept that there is no god except Allah,” said Djounedou Titikpina, founder of the African People Alliance. “It was very flexible, and little by little, they upgraded their Islam.” Titikpina immigrated from Togo, a country where Christians, Muslims, and adherents of native faiths, generally maintain peaceful relations.

Islam acts as a uniting force for a variety of ethnic groups in West Africa, where everyone prays in Arabic and observes the same fasts, viewing themselves as a single ummah, or community.

To promote local Muslim unity, Soulemane Konate, secretary general of the Council of African Imams founded the Harlem Shura, a council that acts as a bridge between African immigrants and African American Muslims.

The theme of Muslim unity is reflected at Masjid Ebun Abass. Among its non-African members is Adbul Rauf, a Puerto Rican convert who works at the nearby Lincoln Hospital. “Everything you see here is created by Allah,” Rauf said, adding that in his heart, “I was always a Muslim.”

An Islamic lifestyle is a far cry from the Latino cuisine he grew up with, in which pork is abundant and alcohol is permitted.  Habib Trawaly praised the few converts. “When they enter Islam, their hearts are pure,” he says.

The mosque’s attitude towards converts hearkens back to the gradual spread of Islam in West Africa.

This attitude is also evident in the rejection by the local congregation of terrorism. “Islam does not teach force,” said Musa Pokum, a decorative painter. “We know in Africa; we teach to respect people.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

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