Interview with Evelyn Hamdon, on: Edmonton's first mosque and early Muslims

The main area that we are going to be looking at is some information around the historical facts that you know of, around the first mosque in Edmonton.


[The first mosque] in Canada! And perhaps there is some basis to the claim that it was the first mosque in North America. There is another mosque, another group of people collecting to pray, I think in the central United States, Ohio area, Michigan area, but there is also thinking that it was not a free standing mosque and this was actually a free standing building dedicated for the purpose only. We felt fairly confident in this community to say that it was the first mosque in North America, but absolutely it was the first in Canada.


You were saying that this was in the early 1930’s.


It was constructed in 1938 and actually it was moved. The location that most people would be familiar with where it was sitting at was actually its second location. Its first location was at 101 Street and 108 Avenue and then it was moved to 111 Avenue just behind the Royal Alexandra parking lot. It has been moved twice in its’ lifetime. Then again it was moved to Fort Edmonton Park. The Royal Alexandra Hospital needed that land, we were hoping to acquire the land that the mosque was sitting on 111 Street, and they did need it for parking space. The mosque had sat empty for years, because in the meantime there had been another larger mosque built in the north end. It was negotiated with the community and the community allowed them to acquire the land but that meant that the mosque would be demolished. The women of the community and the Council of Muslim Women were determined that this should not happen that there was historical significance and so the group of women that were then involved in that organization began the long hard struggle to raise the money. It was really expensive to move. They raised the money to move the mosque but [they had] to find a place for it to go. Both of those things were a journey of many, many, many years. While there was lots of cooperation and support from the community there was no doubt that it was lead by the woman of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women.


If I could go back to the original mosque and the second site, could you tell me about the first, who came up with the idea to build the first originally.


It was a very small group of people and I am probably not going to be able to remember all the names. What I will do is give you someone that can give them to you and fill in all the missing families. I will tell you from the perspective of my family. My mom’s family and dad’s family were both part of those founding families. From my perspective I know that when my grandparents came to Edmonton from Fort Chippewa and they had emigrated from Lebanon, eventually ended up in Fort Chipewyan in northern Alberta. They finally moved south to Edmonton in the early or mid thirties and they obviously became connected with the Lebanese and Muslim communities, it would have been Syrian and Muslim community at that time. The broader Arab community, which was Muslim and Christian, and they realized that they longed for a place that they could meet together, not just for prayer, but to have a place that would be a cultural gathering place. It was a small group of people, and all immigrants, so I have so much admiration for their capacity to kind of be engaged in civic life in a way that was extremely consistent with, and congruent with the community at the time. They met with the Mayor, who I think at that time was Mayor Fry, and worked with him to acquire for a very small amount of money to purchase the land that the mosque was originally built on. They raised money in this tiny community; everybody gave what little they had. Remember it was depression time and we are talking immigrants, and they raised the money and bought the land. They thought, “okay we have the land so we are well on our way”. They began, like we did to move it, they began to fund raise over years. They had suppers, potlucks and box lunches and my grandmother used to tell wonderful stories about how they would go on road trips. Usually other men in the community would get in a couple of cars and drive the country roads of Edmonton and Saskatchewan, knocking on the doors of not just Muslim families but any Syrian or family, it was before Lebanon became Lebanon so that time it was Syrian. They would be knocking on the doors of families and saying, “In Edmonton we are building a Mosque, surely you would like to contribute to that. It was kind of remarkable, people really did sort of come together and after many years of fundraising they were able to begin construction, which was also a long process.


There is an interesting story of the construction because they hired an architect and a builder who himself was Eastern Orthodox, so he was Ukrainian Orthodox. If you go look at the Mosque at Fort Edmonton and then you travel the back roads of Alberta and look at the some of the small Orthodox churches you will see a striking similarity. Recently I was somewhere, I don’t know if it was a wedding or what, but we went to a church and it was an Orthodox service and I said, “Oh my God, I am in the Mosque. Apart from a few small changes, because we don’t have pews (it’s all space), he designed it based on [what] he understood a house of worship to be, and a beautiful building it was. Really the only difference it the top of the minarets were crescents and moons. And really other than that they would be no, obviously no eastern crucifixes at the top. So those small sort of symbolic differences it’s essentially that structure that served our community for fifty years. I think it wasn’t until the eighties that they built the bigger center in the north.


So how large would the Mosque have been?


You know I probably have that square footage because we had to know that to move it, probably about 1200 square feet. It was small; it had a small foyer for shoes and coats, because we take our shoes off when we enter. There was the sanctuary, the place where we pray, and then a small office for the community leader, sort of at the back of that a library and office. A very, very small space, but the community was relatively small and you didn’t mind being squished in and being cozy.


Do you have an idea of how large the community was?


At the time of the building of the Mosque it was really just a handful of families, they may have been twenty or thirty families. At that time because it was such a small community there really was no distinction between Muslim and Christian. Once the Mosque was built it was where the community gathered. In fact one of the articles I have for you refers to the fact that because there are three broad religious groups that were indigenous to the area that we call Lebanon now drew Christians and Muslims and it would have been those three main faces groups, and of course various denominations. All of those people gathered at the Mosque at that time, because it was a cultural gathering place not just a religious gathering place. My family speaks longingly and fondly of the parties and dances, there was an old piano downstairs, a bit of a stage, you would have your three piece band, it was whoever could play something came.


What a wonderful gathering place.


I think it really was. I want to for just a second to go back to the fundraising; it is interesting to know that Helen Pall, one of the City of Edmonton councilors that we visited when we were trying to get permission to move to Fort Edmonton Park, was a member of the Jewish community in Edmonton. My grandmother had said that the Jewish community, which was also small at that point in time and very “other” within this mainstream Canadian context, were very financially supportive of the building of the Mosque. Counselor Pall told a story of when her Dad would receive out of town guests, particularly when they were members of the Jewish community, they would take them on tours of the high spots of Edmonton and cultural markers, they would drive past the Mosque and say ‘we also have a Mosque here.’ The Synagogue had also been built at that time. So it was truly a multi-cultural effort, the effort to build that Mosque and the connections, and the solidarity that enabled it too be built went across all kinds of what we consider traditional lines, religious lines, across ethno-cultural lines, across socio-economic lines.


So those times, these kinds of efforts, those community building efforts were much more than the construction of the building where people would go alone to pray, they were symbolic, I think, of so many other things. They were symbolic in the hope that this country could embrace and incorporate and experience an experiment in how diversity can work. We had our place but our place was open to other people and other people came to that place. And that is certainly something I remember all through my growing up years, is that the Mosque, that basement, that social place was a place where all kinds of people came for all kinds of reasons to do all kinds of things. So it wasn’t just for the community, for a very precise or circumscribed community it was for “the community of Edmonton”.


Going to back to the time it was being built, that multi-year process of going out into the community to look for funding, to look for political support; I won’t say that they was no resistance to it, there was of course resistance and I’ll talk about the parallel resistance that we had when we moved to the Fort. This was different, this was a pretty unknown commodity both Arabs and Muslims in this quite European environment. We shouldn’t pretend that they were never any hostility or animosity or fear of the other. I think in some ways the process of going out into the community, and this is where I give my grandmother… (who for all intents and purposes was an illiterate peasant woman who came from a very small village in a very rural area of Lebanon and wasn’t educated in either in her language or English. She taught herself English, became literate in her second language and not only became literate in the sense of reading and writing but became politically and civically literate) I give her credit in going out into this new world and helping to break down barriers; I don’t think it was intentional, I think it was a by-product of breaking down barriers by engaging the whole community in this project of building the Mosque and she was so passionate about it. She couldn’t possibly believe that anyone wouldn’t be as passionate as she was, and if you would have known her you would have known she was a feminist, long before that word had ever been conceived of, and she certainly believed woman belonged in a leadership and she took a leadership role out of that belief system. She also believed if you wanted to get things done you had to go out to people, you had to talk to them, you had to build bridges, and you had to break down barriers; she believed that social space was the way to do that. She went out and drove the Liberal Ladies Association and the Eastern Star, which I think was probably faith based, but it didn’t matter to her, they were woman who were organizing and that’s where she wanted to be. She created networks that enabled her to engage in the support that she needed.


Who built the Mosque?


The community. Some of the founding names of the (I need to send you or get you the names of the people) we have the Hamdons, the Safvins, the Alley family, the Awids, the Fadies, and the Darwish family. There were the founding families. You will hear people reference the founding families with Christian Lebanonese names. They supported the community, the religious component of the community. The Mosque was built, it was consecrated, it was dedicated and what I think is so interesting is and it is not in any of this literature and it is absolute fact. My grandmother insisted that the person who was Master of Ceremonies be fluent in both languages, she felt that was important because the opening, the dedication ceremony was open to the entire Edmonton community. There was a Mayor in a small town near Edmonton that was Lebanese but he was Christian and she insisted (probably over the objection of many people) that he be the Master of Ceremonies. I will get you his name. There are people mentioned in all of these articles that played a religious role, but I think there is something beautifully symbolic in the fact that for her it was always about communication, it was always about connecting with people and in her mind it was critical that the person that stood before the whole Assembly was able to engage everybody not just one portion of the people there.


The Mosque, the community grew and flourished in the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. I mean that Mosque really served the community until it got to be really quite large. In the seventies there was quite an explosion in the Muslim population in this city. You need to remember at the time the Mosque was built it was culturally quite homogenous, it was really very Lebanese [and] Syrian; quite Middle Eastern. In a way it was quite homogenous. There was not a lot of diversity. Because Lebanon is multi-faith, [that] wasn’t unusual, there was no sense of diversity in the fact that some Lebanese were Christian and some were Muslim, that was really kind of irrelevant, it was a small seen as a small issue in the community. We need to remember that the population became more complex over the years. Obviously migration from the Indian sub-continents and from Asia increased, which brought a broad diversity of Muslims into the community. From further in the Middle East, from Iran, from Africa; we have to remember that Muslims are all around the world. Over the years as migration and immigration changed in Canada obviously that had a huge impact on the growth of the Muslim community everywhere. It wasn’t people just coming from Lebanon increasing the community, it was all over. So obviously, one 1200 sq. foot Mosque was not going to meet the needs of that community any longer. Needs were beginning to be identified differently as populations changed. So what do we need? Do we have cultural faith with our religious faith, and how do we define a faith that is appropriate? Anyhow, over time other Mosques were built, we have to remember that linguistically all of those groups are different and you want to hear a service in your own language. You don’t necessarily want to hear the service in Arabic, which is what you were used to hearing an Arabic-English service at the Al-Rashid Mosque. You would want to hear your service in Urdu or Punjabi or Gujarati or whatever your language would be. Dialectically it would be complicated, so Mosques were built to meet legitimate and diverse needs and, even as that’s happening, the Middle East population is exploding and expanding, lots of reasons for that. The Al-Rashid Mosque became too small for the community, way too small. Fundraising began again to build the new Mosque in the north end of Edmonton. I think what happened in the immediacy and in the enormity in the task of building something as big as the Canadian Islamic Center, which was the subsequent Mosque to the Al-Rashid Mosque. Remembering the past feels a bit like a luxury when you are in survival mode, so that how the Mosque I think felt abandoned essentially, I mean it was still owned by the Canadian Islamic Center, it was stilled owned by the community, there was still some rudimentary attempt at maintaining the basic structure, but it wasn’t used for anything; it literally sat empty for years. For those of us who have personal connection to it...


I need to give an addendum to the founding story; the first official use of the Mosque was my grandmother’s daughter’s marriage, her first child to be married. It was her dream of course, she used to say I need to have a place, one day these children will get married and they have to have a place to be married. All of our family, all of our aunts and uncles were married in that Mosque.


You grew up there?


It’s where I grew up, we spent every Sunday, its where we spent a lot of evenings, and weekends, gatherings, parties, there was always a youth group happening, its where we had our sock hops. It was where we spent our time. For those of us where this was just a place you went once a week, it was the center of our community and suppository of history, our physical connection to our past that was really tough. The thought of moving it when the community at large was focused at building something else… Where do you go now, and how do you find the funds to take this job on? I was trying to remember how much money we raised.


So you, yourself were involved in that?


Yes, at that point in time I was a member of the Canadian Council of Muslim Woman, little did we know that this weird parallel would happen. My cousin Karen was the President of the Canadian Council of Muslim Woman through that entire process. I am grateful and her executive at that time said okay we have to do something; she is truly I think cut from the same cloth as my grandmother, I often see my grandmother in her because she is truly a leader of the people not for any reason except her compassion, focus and vision of compelling in people, to see what she sees and to trust where she is going. So she really lead people, and with this group of Canadian Muslim Woman she began to catalyze action, I should really mention Lila was instrumental in a lot of ways. First of all she is a founding member of the community, she is an elder of the community, she tells beautiful stories of when she came to Edmonton from Saskatchewan and joined prayer next to my grandmother. Lila had founded the Canadian Council of Muslim Woman, this was her vision, her dream and it is across Canada to this day. It is a vehicle for engaging Muslim Woman in civil society; it is a political aspect of the broader Canadian culture. CCMW, with Karen as its president and Lila for the president of the national board (so we had the national organization and the local chapter) took this on for a number of reasons, as a testimony to the hard work of Muslim woman, who showed us how Muslim woman could be both Muslim and active in Muslim society. They took it on as an activity that was of historical importance, not just for Muslims. We thought it was important for the broader Canadian context, and a local Edmonton context. In terms of preserving diverse history of Edmontonians, Albertans and Canadians; so let us not forget that it is not just a euro-centric history that we need to preserve. There were a lot of other people here building Canada from the ground up. On the grounds, I might add, are the First Nations People who were here first. We are all immigrants, we are all colonized, if we are going to remember totality of history let’s remember that too. So CCMW saw it as very consistent and congruent with their mandate to take this on, it wasn’t about critiquing policy or helping write policy or engaging women in citizen education, but just as the act of building a Mosque was an experiential learning activity about participating in broader society, so was the act of saving it. An absolutely experiential learning opportunity for how to engage with contemporary political and social systems to preserve this Mosque, and boy did we learn a lot.


Evelyn is going to read a bit of the history that she has on the Mosque.


Dr. Lila Fahiman, the founder of CCMW, saw the fiftieth anniversary approaching that was really the catalyst, I remember that now, for what they wanted to do. They did not want the Mosque demolished on its fiftieth anniversary, she had a vision that we would save it. In the 1980s she began working with CCMW in catalysis action around saving the Mosque. The she went to the National to get their support in 1988. [She told them that] Chapter wanted to take this on, [and that we were] going to need cross-Canada support. They absolutely said’ we are behind you.’ There was a Mosque sub-committee struck of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, Edmonton Chapter and they worked until it was preserved.


It may have been moved in the late 80’s but we had all the restoration to do and I think that was a complication as the restoration went on for years after that. We raised the money to move it and a documentary was made of that. There was a documentary film, I thought it was very moving, “Al Tasmim”, Karen has a copy of it made by Selwyn Enterprises Inc. A documentary film maker came and he filmed the actual footage of the move, there is footage of all kinds of things, there is footage of the re-opening, it is an absolutely beautiful and moving testimony.


Do you know how… why Fort Edmonton?


Well that is a whole other story; this is very political. I don’t know if you want this on your web site. I’ll try to be as diplomatic as I can be. Fort Edmonton Park is where the history of Edmonton seems to be situated. We recognized that there seemed to be certain bounds about dates that had been imposed, but that had been pushed a little bit too with some of the other restored buildings that transgressed those rigid bounds a little bit, so there seemed to be some flexibility. For us, if you are talking about historical buildings, we are talking about the historical importance of the first Mosque in Canada which we happen to be so lucky to have in Edmonton. [It is] about to be demolished and [we] have a group willing to save it, raise the funds and have if preserved. Where [are we] are going to have it preserved? It made perfect sense to have it in a place that preserved historical buildings as a way of preserving the history and evolution of Edmonton.


I won’t say that the proposal was welcomed with open arms at Fort Edmonton; there was a lot of resistance, no need to go into the details about that resistance. That is where experiential learning and hands-on learning took place in terms of how do you engage with the political system that is civic policy. Jan Reimer was the mayor at the time and she was extremely open to hearing our case and made many, many visits to Counselors to seek their support. We had support from people like Helen Pall, she was a gift and she advocated on our behalf tirelessly as did Jan Reimer as did other Counselors. We had many, many meetings with the board at Fort Edmonton and their Executives, we were encourage to consider to moving the Mosque to that area up on St. Albert Trail where there are several houses of worship from other faith traditions. What we were trying to explain was that this was not going to be an active house of worship, it was a historical building and it seemed to us to make more sense that it should be preserved as such. It was too small to serve any particular community and we wanted it to be a part of the living history. I think we thought it was important to remind the broader community that other groups were part of the building of Edmonton.


We resisted the gentle pressure to relocate to that stretch on St Albert Trail and finally we argued to many friends and allies within city council at that time, and [found] some nice support from the bureaucracy of the City of Edmonton because Fort Edmonton Park is a part of that bureaucracy. We had some support from some people in Parks and Recreation. Lila Fahiman and Karen Hamdon I just don’t think can receive enough credit for absolutely being unflagging in their persistence and never letting any of us give up and never doubting that it could be done. I was just reading that the rededication was in 1991 at Fort Edmonton and it went on to say that Lila [went] back to the National [Board] and said ‘it’s not over women we have to do the basement now’. Even though the basement was not going to be used for catering or whatever there were certain standards that we had to meet. The Canadian Council of Muslim Women has done all that, there have been no funds, and the City of Edmonton has not been held responsible for the maintenance of that Mosque, which has all been up to the community. Although it is there, to the best of my understanding it has never been incorporated and enfolded into any kind of parks infrastructure, so the community remains responsible for its maintenance. There have been ongoing issues and expenses; there was just getting the basement done and that’s why it felt like it went on forever. That was another huge job, and it was demanding. My job was to work on logistics’, with respect to material for reconstruction. There are some pretty strict guidelines; like with Fort Edmonton with about how you restore something and all of those things are expensive. Finding someone who could do windows that were authentic was a nightmare; we had to go to B.C. to find someone who would retrofit historical glass into the broken pane, finding light fixtures – some of the light fixtures had been damaged over time. It was just all those things that we would never ever think about; it was not easy to find and it was expensive. I was always the bearer of bad news, “do you know how much its going to cost to do these windows”? No money, constantly raising the money; to find out something about nothing anything any of us knew about; this was pre renovation days, I would be a bit better at things now. We had one person from the community take on the architectural design; as a volunteer I get it, when you have a family to support and you are doing something as a volunteer, your volunteer work has to come second, there is the harsh realities of life. Everything took longer than we would have liked; everything was more complex because everybody was a volunteer, the architect was a volunteer, eventually we had to find a sub-contractor that could give more time but she was still a volunteer. When you have a sub-contractor that is a volunteer and you have workers that are supposed to be on site; for anybody that has ever done renovations, you always need somebody to be there because there are a million questions everyday. When you are doing a historical restoration if you make a mistake you can’t just live with it because you are meeting somebody else’s standards.


It actually started in 1988 and I think it is ongoing until this day. Our dream would be that a group of people who are perhaps retired who could take it on, a standing sub committee, to just oversee the day to day operations.


The Mosque is in Fort Edmonton now, it is open, how was that ceremony?


That was a beautiful ceremony, I was there, I will tell you – what was really moving for me was at that point in time, that was after the first Gulf War had broken out and I had become a member of the Arab-Jewish Women Peace Coalition. We had had sisters from the Coalition with us at that rededication; which to me was very moving because it parallels the fact that there was a point in time when the Arab and Jewish communities were really close in this city. I felt like my grandmother was smiling on us, that those women were with us that day.