(Middle East Eye) Iowa. It’s known as America’s breadbasket. The nation’s heartland. A state of farmers, wheat and cornfields. The rural Midwest.
It’s also so much more than that.
A sparsely populated state of just 3.1 million people, Iowa is home to some of the oldest Arab and Muslim communities in the country. Immigrants from modern-day Lebanon and Syria settled here in the late 1800s.
In Cedar Rapids, a quiet city on a small river that feeds into the Mississippi, they constructed America’s first Muslim house of worship — the Mother Mosque of America.
The white and green building stands proudly, nearly 90 years after it was built, as a witness to the nation’s diverse history.
