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- It is a modest square of cinder blocks, perhaps 15 feet on each side, topped with an aluminum dome and minarets. Several hundred yards off the main highway, on the outskirts of a town with barely 200 residents about 60 miles west of Minot, the mosque and cemetery exist much as they always have, surrounded by fields of wheat and corn and grazing lands. In this spot, all the industrial clamor of North Dakota’s fracking boom feels immeasurably distant.
- The marker for J. D. Benson, the husband of a woman raised in a Muslim family, featured a photograph of the two on horseback. The stone for Alex Asmel gave his military service from World War I: private in the 108th Infantry. Abraham Omar (1933-2004) was represented with a photograph of him with long sideburns, a ducktail haircut and a black leather jacket. It could fit into a scene from “Grease.”
- Maybe simply by being there, simply by existing in their undeniably concrete way, the mosque and the cemetery, though little used, serve a purpose. Amid a presidential campaign in which one party’s presumptive candidate calls for a ban on Muslim immigration, a campaign that has coincided with a rising number of bias crimes against Muslim people and institutions, this little plot is a reminder that Muslims were here as far back as the Norwegians and Swedes and Germans and Finns and Poles and Jews among whom they settled.