The Masjid Manhattan occupies a narrow basement with bare pipes snaking along the ceiling. The congregants who filled up the mosque near City Hall on Thursday night were mainly men, from South Asia, West Africa and the United States, and a few women — who prayed behind a partition. The feast provided for breaking the Ramadan fast, spicy curry over rice, came in plastic takeout containers from a nearby restaurant.
A few blocks away, at the Masjid al-Farah, the scene was somewhat different. Men and women sat together. The worshipers, devotees of the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism, came from an even wider array of countries and included a young man with multiple piercings and a shirt identifying him as an employee at Jivamukti Yoga. The mosque, in a two-story building sandwiched between two bars — the neon-lighted Tribeca Tavern and the nouvelle-brasserie-type Cercle Rouge — has a pristine, high-ceilinged, white-painted interior decorated with stained glass and Arabic calligraphy.
The fast-breaking meal, or iftar, included baby spinach and goat cheese and aloe vera water passed around by the mosque’s female leader, Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, who declared, “Good for the digestion.”
One mosque is conservative, and the other is reputed to be among the most progressive in the city — making the downtown Muslim community a quintessentially New York combination of immigrants and native New Yorkers, traditionalists and spiritual seekers.
But what the two mosques have in common — besides the sense of celebration and camaraderie that comes at the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, in which Muslims fast from sunup to sundown, give alms and focus on self-improvement — is that both have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site.
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