During my Guinness World Record month, visiting 185 places of worship across Chicago in 30 days, I stepped inside six different Islamic prayer spaces. Not one of them looked like the other.
That’s the thing about “lived religion” that a textbook can never quite capture. You can read a definition of a masjid (mosque) in a book, but until you’ve stood inside a five story downtown high rise and then, a week later, taken your shoes off in a restaurant basement, you don’t really understand how wide the range of Muslim worship spaces can be.
Here’s where I went, and what each one taught me.
- The Downtown Islamic Center Five stories tall, right in the heart of the city. This space showed me that Islamic worship can be as urban and vertical as any skyscraper, a full community hub stacked into a downtown footprint.
- Masjid Tabaq Tucked into the basement of a restaurant, this space serves working drivers who need a place to pray between shifts. No grand dome, no minaret. Just a room set aside so that people whose workdays don’t pause could still make time for prayer.
- Loyola University’s Prayer Space Located at a Catholic university, this small prayer space was a quiet lesson in interfaith hospitality. A Catholic institution making room, literally, for its Muslim students and staff to practice their faith on campus.
- Masjid Abu Bakar & Masjid Faizan e Madinah Two lovely neighborhood masjids, the kind of places that anchor a block the way a corner church or synagogue might. These are the everyday, every week spaces where a local community gathers.
- The American Islamic College A multicultural prayer space, open to everyone. This one stood out for how deliberately welcoming it was, built to hold many cultural expressions of Islam under one roof.
A masjid can be a skyscraper, a basement, or a campus room. The architecture changes. The welcome doesn’t.
That’s what I want kids and families to understand about world religions: the building tells you almost nothing about the depth of what happens inside it. A prayer said in a basement carries the same weight as a prayer said five stories up. Faith doesn’t require grandeur. It just requires a place to be still.
What’s the most unexpected place of worship you’ve ever stepped inside? Tell me in the comments.