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Mosque fire
Mosque fire
VICTORIA — Five days and more than $1 million in donations later, the grounds of the Victoria Islamic Center were busy Thursday.
A demolition crew picked up an overturned dome that had fallen from the mosque’s roof, destroyed in an early morning blaze Saturday. Imam Osama Hassan stood in the ash picking out singed pages from several Qurans while Irfan Qureshi, a board member, rolled out a sign that read “Rebuilding with Love.”
While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, mosque members made a deliberate effort to keep the focus on the outpouring of support from the community, rather than the possibility that the fire was deliberately set, an act that could have much broader implications of anti-Muslim sentiment in this small southeast Texas city.
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“We’re not focusing on the obvious damage,” Qureshi said. “It is what it is, whether it’s an accident or someone did it. Instead we want to look at what people of different backgrounds were able to do.”
Even though several area churches, including a local synagogue, offered up their space to the mosque’s congregation, leaders decided they wanted to get back to their own property as soon as possible, to give members a sense of continuity and normalcy.
With the mosque structure uninhabitable, Qureshi and company relocated the five daily prayers to a temporary building next door. But without water and electricity, they had to improvise. They brought flashlights and LED lights to light up the room during the early morning and nighttime prayers. They brought in bottled water so people could wash up before prayer.
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The blaze came a couple of weeks after a mosque under construction in Lake Travis caught fire, yet two separate fundraisers for the fires have had dramatically different outcomes. While Lake Travis has raised 16 percent of its $400,000 goal, Victoria has surpassed its original $850,000 goal by a couple hundred thousand. Qureshi doesn’t know why the two have had such different results.
Some speculated that perhaps the executive order issued by President Donald Trump last week that severely curtailed immigration from seven Muslim majority countries and led to protests throughout the nation could have played a factor. Also, the day after the Victoria fire, a gunman stormed a Quebec City mosque, killing six people inside.
Qureshi said news from Quebec City “sent chills” through his body.
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“We have to be even more vigilant,” he said. “It’s not just a hypothetical anymore.”
frahman@express-news.net
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