In 1991, when Khaleel Faheemud-Deen first stepped onto the camel-colored carpet of Masjid King Khalid, he knew: “This was where I was supposed to be.”
At the time, he was in school at North Carolina State University. He had first heard the adhan when deployed abroad in the U.S. Army, and he would soon take his shahada at the same central Raleigh mosque. Since then, Faheemud-Deen, 61, has spent significant time worshipping within the walls of the masjid. He was married there; it’s his children’s masjid too. His community has a history and spiritual connection with Masjid King Khalid.
“It’s a birthright for us,” he says forcefully.
After more than forty years of serving the local African American and African immigrant communities, Masjid King Khalid may meet a banal fate: shuttered and razed to make way for a high-rise development. The masjid occupies a building owned by Shaw University, one of the oldest HBCUs (Historically Black College and Universities) in the American South. In the past few decades, Shaw has experienced a decline in enrollment and consistent budget deficits. It’s now executing an urban redevelopment plan, dubbed the ShawU District, and Masjid King Khalid may be an unfortunate casualty.
Some in the wider Muslim community claim the university is hostile to Muslims because of its historically Christian background. Others see the dismissal of the masjid as a consequence of a world bereft of godliness. Regardless, if the mosque does shut down, it wouldn’t be the first. A 2020 study by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that while the total number of mosques in the U.S. had increased over ten years, the proportion of African American mosques had decreased; urban downtown mosques have also declined, from 17 percent of the total number of mosques in 2010 to 6 percent in 2020. The study speculates that the challenges facing African American mosques may be attributed to “the decline of African American converts (which constitutes the lifeblood of growth in African American mosques), the inability of mosques to attract and maintain African American young adults, and the overall aging of African American Muslims, many of whom converted in the 1960s and 1970s.” Overall, mosques are becoming more suburban as immigrants gain wealth and move out of cities.
“The [American] Muslim community has largely been homogenized by the immigrant Muslim experience; the Black Muslims have been pushed to the side. [Their] mosques have been underfunded,” says Manzoor Cheema, a Pakistani immigrant and organizer with Muslims for Social Justice, one of the groups that has advocated on behalf of Masjid King Khalid. “When a crisis like Shaw University happens, it allows us to illustrate the forces of racism [and] capitalism that were trying to shut down the mosque.”
Shaw University was founded as Raleigh Theological Institute by American Baptists in 1865 to educate African Americans who could not attend white-run institutions. While the university changed its name and broadened its mandate to other professional training, it references its religious roots through its motto: For Christ and Humanity. In 1981, an international studies faculty member, Urabi Mustafa, solicited a $1 million donation from the Saudi royal family for the establishment of an Islamic studies center with classrooms, a library, and a mosque, which bears the name of the family’s patriarch: the Mosque of the Late King Khalid bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud.
“There was a lot of appreciation [for] the contribution of this classroom building to the school,” says Ihsan Bagby, a former Shaw professor and the author of the ISPU mosque study. “But there has always been a sense that [the mosque] really doesn’t belong here.”
While a mosque’s true value may be spiritual, a property’s worth is rendered in dollars and cents. In 2019, a Shaw University–commissioned study conducted by the Urban Land Institute identified opportunities within its real estate portfolio to improve its finances. The authors estimate that the 2.9-acre plot of land where Masjid King Khalid sits could be marketed for up to $16 million.
The circumstances may be idiosyncratic, but the larger trends in urban development raise the question: What is the raison d’être for a mosque in an American city? To provide space to pray and congregate, to mark weddings and rear children, to mourn deaths, to weep and to whisper and feel held in the thrall of something greater. And yet in the competition for public resources and sentiment, it appears mosques must also be active participants in the political gamesmanship of the secular city.
At publication time, the plan for the ShawU District had yet to be released. The university did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its plans. But aspects of the project were hinted at during a 2023 debate over Shaw’s rezoning petition and subsequent releases. In a webinar that year, officials discussed the need for upgraded student housing and local amenities like coffee shops and restaurants. “What we want to do is leverage our downtown Raleigh location and our real estate assets to foster profitable opportunities,” said Shaw University President Paulette Dillard on the webinar. “It is a request to maximize to the greatest value of the property. We own the land, we are in an amazing location to leverage the land, but it is at our discretion. Ownership is critical to this process.”
In 2015, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., began redeveloping its campus properties. Shaw, with its development partner Hyatt Brown, is following that same playbook now: rezone, rebuild, and maximize its real estate portfolio. The HBCU Community Development Corporation also advises colleges to pursue “mixed-use asset-based” projects, potentially leveraging tax breaks for so-called opportunity zones established in 2017 and meant to attract private capital to high-poverty areas.
Shaw won the fight to reclassify several properties for downtown mixed-use developments with heights up to thirty stories. The city council meetings attracted considerable attention, with groups like Muslims for Social Justice, the public spending advocacy group Refund Raleigh, Black Workers for Justice, and the local chapter of the public employees union packing council chambers and its overflow room with hundreds of people. The North Carolina office of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, dubbed the rezoning petition an “anti-Muslim cash grab and act of gentrification.”
Two years later, Al Rieder, CAIR’s North Carolina representative, is more guarded in his evaluation. He speculates that Shaw wouldn’t plan to rezone if they didn’t have development plans for that property. “At the end of the day, I am perfectly fine with the idea of them rebuilding if there is a strong written legal agreement that the bottom floor will be a masjid,” he says.
But during urban redevelopment, houses of worship, Islamic or otherwise, may not be a priority. Raleigh’s twenty-year Comprehensive Plan lists a number of goals, including pedestrian pathways, housing, transit access, and reduction in carbon emissions; but the presence of religious spaces is assumed, without intervention of city planners.
Speaking of planning conversations, Raleigh City Council member Megan Patton says, “I haven’t seen the topic of religious institutions as a whole come up.” She voted against the rezoning petition because she believed the university hadn’t sufficiently addressed constituent concerns. She says religious institutions are allowed to build almost anywhere, so the council would be uncomfortable specifying where they should be placed. But this presupposes that religious organizations aren’t affected by the same competition for space, parking, and utility usage that businesses in urban cores also vie for. The council determined they legally could not require Shaw to accommodate a specific tenant or service.
“Gentrification is the replacement of a working-class population in a neighborhood by more affluent middle class and upper middle class,” says Víctor Albert-Blanco, a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who has studied how gentrification has affected Muslim immigrant communities in Barcelona and Paris. “On the religious level, it’s possible to see the effects of gentrification by the replacement and demolition of some worship places and the opening of new ones.” This process, however, isn’t necessarily hostile to religious expression, Albert-Blanco writes in “(Re)Thinking Gentrification Processes. The Place of Religion,” his contribution to a 2023 volume on urban space. Newer, wealthier residents may be amenable to religious spaces provided they align with a formally secular, multicultural, and cosmopolitan worldview—shifting away from the primary purpose of a mosque in providing space to pray.
Masjid King Khalid’s challenges contrast with another regional house of worship. The Islamic Center of Cary is an 8,000-square-foot building with a classic qubba dome in a wooded area of a suburb west of Raleigh. Its congregation moved over from a facility in a nearby shopping center after its association bought the land and completed a decade-spanning construction project. In a 2022 tour of the new mosque, organizers showed off the generous spaces reserved for sisters and its basement banquet hall. Local press covered the mosque’s construction, emphasizing its utility for Muslims and non-Muslims alike: “We will welcome all people here from all religions, all walks of life, believers and unbelievers. It doesn’t matter. This is a house of God,” said one member in a 2017 article. It would seem the ability and agency to own and build allows some Muslims to fit an American cultural tableau better than others.
But in an urban setting where space is at a premium, Masjid King Khalid met resistance. The mosque is located in the margins of the downtown corridor and southeast Raleigh, an area of the city that is historically Black and has seen an influx of investment from private developers, according to local reporting. In the zip code the masjid occupies, nearly 3 in 4 residents are renters, yet some recent home listings on Zillow boast eye-watering million-dollar price tags. In its zoning approval, Shaw is limited to 1,000 new residential units—of which only 1 percent, ten units at most, would have rent pegged to the area’s median income, and only for ten years. Council representatives say this is a typical ratio for privately financed development in Raleigh.
In a 2023 interview with Open Campus, Kevin Sullivan, Shaw’s former vice president for real estate and strategic development, says that because the university is retaining ownership of its properties, gentrification can be avoided. However, new development will attract new residents. A rapid shift in housing values and spiking property taxes are already “coming together to create an environment in Raleigh that is really precarious” for existing residents, says a former City Council member, Mary Black.
Masjid King Khalid sits at the center of this change, complicating its ability to serve its congregation or, in political parlance, its constituency. A faith institution is made up of people: if those people cannot afford to live near their church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, then it loses its base of support.
American religious institutions have long-held electoral salience. The establishment of U.S. mosques presented American Muslims significant political battles to practice freely in their own worship spaces. Today, it is within the mosque that political and educational campaigns are held. In recent years, some area mosques have hosted congressional representatives and held teach-ins about the importance of Palestine to the ummah. “We get involved in political activism," says Faheemud-Deen, citing drug remediation programs. “We have had Muslims run for office, we’ve supported them. … We speak up.”
Working within capitalism requires ownership of something with economic value. And to navigate politics, one must have power. Masjid King Khalid lacks the former, and thereby had to acquire the latter through mass mobilization and coalition building. Cheema says the fight for Masjid King Khalid prepared them for another battle that started months later. “Soon after, Palestine took over the whole organizing universe. The work we did on Shaw … helped us to mobilize a lot of Muslims who were not organized in the past.”
Others in the wider Raleigh Muslim community are more circumspect and blame the situation on the chilliness between the masjid leadership and the university administration. “It was a sense of entitlement,” says Imam Oliver Mohammed of the nearby As Salaam Islamic Center. Masjid King Khalid supporters felt “entitled because [they believe] this is a mosque and all mosques belong to the Muslims. [But] if America becomes the land of dawah [inviting others to the faith], you’ve got to build a relationship.”
Masjid King Khalid operates now under a memorandum of understanding that is set to expire next August. Its leadership believes the original gift that established the mosque requires the university to accommodate them. Nigel Edwards, the mosque’s legal representative, says the university has become more engaged in dialogue and asking for assistance in meeting their enrollment challenges. “We didn’t want to paint Shaw University as a villain,” says Faheemud-Deen. He emphasizes the masjid pays for upkeep of the space, and offered to operate the university’s food pantry. “We don’t want to be a leech,” he says. “How can we provide something to you?”
In the imagined urban landscape of tomorrow, many Muslims may be asking the same question.
