Paul Bass Photo
Sister Lu, center, with the masjid’s Shah and Ahmed at WNHH.
After Lu Rifai started losing her eyesight, she also lost the chance to hear the call to worship summon her to prayer five times a day.
She missed it. It would take decades of building a new life, on a new continent, before she’d return to a masjid, or Islamic place of worship. Decades, too, to feel at home again.
Now that she does, Rifai spends much of her time helping other immigrants to the New Haven area find a spiritual home.
“I knew how it felt” not to have one, she said.
Rifai is the outreach coordinator for the Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan Islamic Center just over the town line in Hamden (formerly on Carmel Street in New Haven). The congregation honored her at an awards luncheon this past week for her outreach hard work and success.
There’s an inspiring story behind her arrival at that position, in which she overcame blindness to become a shepherd not just for religious seekers, but for blind students and job-seekers.
Rifai described her journey during an episode of WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Two other elders of her congregation, Carrie Ahmed and Al Hajj Yusuf Ibn Shah, described theirs too.
Ahmed grew up in Georgia in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1960s and ‘70s. She was drawn to Islam through members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) who sold produce from a back-to-the-land settlement called Elijahville; the Nation’s political response to the disappointments of integration and the civil rights movement, its black nationalist message of self-empowerment, attracted her. After moving north, Ahmed converted to Islam in 1976 and joined New Haven’s NOI temple on Shelton Avenue. Soon after, the spiritual leader there, Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan, switched from NOI to the more traditional and more universalist Islamic branch led by Wallace Deen Muhammad. The congregation, including Ahmed, made the switch with him.
Yusuf Shah also began his Islamic journey in the NOI. His father founded temples with Malcolm X and served as head of NOI’s Fruit of Islamic security apparatus. His father switched over to the more traditionalist and universalist branch when Shah was 14; when Shah settled in New Haven as an adult, he joined up with Hasan’s masjid and has played an active lay leadership role. He also represented New Haven’s West River neighborhood for years on the Board of Alders, where he delivered the first-ever Muslim divine guidance at a meeting.
Unlike Ahmed’s and Shah’s Islamic journeys, Sister Rifai’s began in traditional orthodox Islam. But she, too, had to find her way to the New Haven area masjid. That journey began in Tanzania.
Prayers Persevere
Rifai loved growing up in Tanzania, she said. “I loved the water, the blue water” of the island community where she was born. When her family moved inland, she loved the Muslim community, the predominant religious community there. “When you walk around the town, every four or five houses you find a masjid,” she said.
From her home, she could hear people calling through loudspeakers from three or four different nearby masjids calling out the set time for prayer five times a day. She found that comforting. She liked the structure. “It makes it very easy to practice, because everybody’s doing the same thing.”
While young Rifai clearly heard the calls, she was having a harder time seeing what was around her. In 1975, when she was in seventh grade, her parents decided to send her to stay with an older sister in New York so she could receive help from medical specialists.
New York was culture shock. “I missed waking up hearing the calling of the prayer. That was very important to me,” Rifai recalled. And she missed the food. “The food in Tanzania, everything is fresh. Like my parents everyday would go tot he meat market. I never had any frozen fish until I came here. I didn’t like it at the beginning — frozen meat, frozen chicken…”
And she didn’t have a masjid to attend. She and her sister prayed at home.
Rifai adjusted, and then some. The specialists determined that she would continue losing sight; their prescription was to learn how to live with blindness. She did. She remained in Mount Vernon, N.Y., with her sister, learning at a rehabilitation center. She did lose lose her sight. And she gained the ability to read and type without it.
“It was a challenge going through vision loss. I knew I could not control it,” Rifai recalled. “But I think my faith made me stronger an believe. I said, ‘OK, I know I won’t be able to see. But Allah will open another door for me.
“I read the Koran a lot. You don’t give up when you go through hard times; that’s a test Allah gives you, an obstacle. You try to overcome it.”
Nor did Rifai find a masjid in Rockland County, where she entered Dominican College after earning her high school equivalency. She would celebrate Ramadan and other holidays with another sister who had also come to the U.S. to study. She didn’t find a masjid when she earned her masters at Boston College, where she specialized in rehabilitation for the blind. She didn’t find one in Pittsburgh, where she worked with the adult blind for three years, or in Jacksonville, Florida, where she trained community college students in Braille and using computers. It’s not that no masjids existed; her community consisted more of the people she encountered in the rehabilitation field.
Back Home
There were masjids in West Haven and New Haven when Rifai moved up here for a job training blind vets at the VA Hospital to seek jobs and live independently. But she still worshiped on her own; she hadn’t found her way to an Islamic community.
That changed 12 years ago.
“I was talking to somebody. I said, ‘I’ve been living in different places, and I haven’t found a masjid.’ She was aware of the Abdul Masjid Islamic Center; she knew the man. She made the contact. That’s how I got involved.”
People received her warmly at the masjid. No longer was she praying alone. There were no five-times-a-day loudspeaker calls. She didn’t need them; she found what had been missing since childhood. “I just knew I belonged,” she said. She may have been thousands of miles from her birthplace, but it “felt like home.”
Rifai had other friends — from Tanzania, Kenya, and other nations — living here who also had failed to find a new Islamic community. She figured they must “feel the same.” She became a go-to person for those people, their friends, their friends’ friends, leading her to the coordinator position at the masjid. She has since retired from the VA. Her role at the masjid doesn’t pay a salary; it pays deeper dividends.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear Rifai, Ahmed and Shah describe their journeys on the WNHH “Dateline New Haven” episode. (At 43:45 in the file, Shah describes the experience of delivering the alders’ first Muslim divine guidance.)
To learn more about Islam, click here for a recent episode of “Mornings with Mubarakah” where she and guest Donna Auston, PhD candidate at Rutgers University, discuss the history of Black Muslims in America.
