‘Muslim Across America’ is a coast to coast road trip in United States by Rasheed Al Rabbi and Rashed Al Junayed.

I’ve surveyed hundreds of mosques’ websites for the past 8 years. The diversity within these religious communities in expressing and embracing their spirituality was startlingly rich, but the manifestation of their expressions of solemn divinity was dramatically absent on the Internet. The disparity between the virtual presence of mosques on the Internet and the Muslim communities’ stands out as an outstanding challenge for greater American to learn about Muslim communities, and thus caught my attention.

Such discrepancy explained the “misrepresentation and misperception” for increasing Islamophobia in the country and often heard complaint “Muslim doesn’t belong here.” Whereas recent historical records reveal that there is no doubt Islam came much earlier before Christopher Columbus arrival in America at October 21, 1492. “Columbus admitted in his papers that on Monday, October 21, 1492 CE, while his ship was sailing near Gibara on the northeast coast of Cuba, he saw a mosque on the top of a beautiful mountain. The ruins of mosques and minarets with inscriptions of Qur'anic verses have been discovered in Cuba, Mexico, Texas, and Nevada.” They many other expeditions like Mans Musa, or Zhu Di’s expedition are among the credible ones. 

Even, When the American colonies declared their independence from Britain on July 4, 1776, the first country to recognize the sovereignty of the United States was Morocco, a Muslim country, which signed the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship to commemorate the event. Friesland, one of the seven United Provinces of the Dutch Republic was the second to acknowledge, and the third was Tippu Sultan, the Muslim King of Mysore State in India. He sent a congratulatory letter and celebrated America's freedom by setting off firecrackers in Srirangapatna.

Misinterpretation of Muslims gets intensified by many myths myth like a Lebanese man in the early 1900’s who got off the ship headed to America when the captain told him that there were no mosques in America. This picture has been changed. There are almost 2100 mosques out there to serve an estimated seven million Muslims across North America. This number is also increasing every day.

This trip takes us from the East to the West across the USA. We attempt to pray each obligatory prayer at a different mosque along the route, close to the Interstates we are travelling on. Each of those mosques were studies systematically, although briefly, via "frames," prescribed by Congregational Handbook. This is a pioneer project for disciplined mosque study across the country, and the cyber mosque sphere. 

While we are travelling 18 different states, we try to collect the stories of first Muslim footprints in those areas. Please stay tuned with us and feel free to share your opinions.