When a Long Island town last month agreed to settle a lawsuit over a mosque’s plans to upgrade its modest facilities, it appeared to end a seven-year fight in which the town had opposed basic renovations at every turn.
Two weeks later, the battle began anew.
By Aug. 29, after a fierce, familiar backlash from residents, the Town of Oyster Bay had abruptly backed out of an agreement with the mosque, Masjid Al-Baqi, that would have allowed the demolition of its buildings and the construction of a three-level structure. Lawyers for the mosque blamed a “fresh wave of anti-Muslim agitation.”
The now-scuttled deal followed years of opposition to the mosque, at local planning advisory board meetings, in emails to town officials and in posts on social media from residents of Bethpage, a hamlet within Oyster Bay. Some criticism cited concerns about traffic and public safety, but some opponents have also used virulently Islamophobic rhetoric.
“There were people who just couldn’t contain their bigotry and racism,” said Muhammad Faridi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “This is not a mega mosque.”
The mosque sued the Town of Oyster Bay in January, claiming that it had violated the free exercise of religion by subjecting it to years of red tape. The town even invented testimony from a fake grandmother, the plaintiffs say. The case will be heard in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., on Oct. 27.
Studies commissioned by Oyster Bay have not found that the proposal would increase traffic or pose a public safety hazard. But despite the town’s own findings, its lawyers maintain that renovations would create a hazard at a busy intersection. They deny the case has anything to do with religious freedom.
“There’s already an existing mosque on the site, which no one is trying to block or interfere with,” Edward M. Ross, a lawyer for the town, said in a statement.
Joseph Saladino, who as town supervisor is Oyster Bay’s top elected official, did not respond to a request for comment.
On Long Island, culture wars have become more common as the area has shifted to the right politically in recent years. The mosque dispute follows a fight over a Native American high school mascot that drew the ire of the Trump administration, as well as an effort by Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, to antagonize a roller-derby team with a transgender member.
Zoning fights like the one in Oyster Bay have become a frequent and ugly fixture of American civic life. In 2000, Congress passed a law specifically aimed at stopping public officials from abusing regulations to create “a substantial burden on the religious exercise of a person, including a religious assembly or institution.”
Masjid Al-Baqi’s plan, first submitted to the town in 2018, would demolish two buildings — converted sushi and pizza restaurants — to make way for a single, three-story mosque for 200 or so Muslim congregants primarily of Afghan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian heritage.
Oyster Bay is a town of around 300,000 people, divided into 36 villages and hamlets. Bethpage, a hamlet about 35 miles east of Manhattan, has a predominantly white population of more than 17,000, according to the most recent U.S. census estimates.
In recent court filings, lawyers for Masjid Al-Baqi pointed to a petition circulated after last month’s settlement, titled “Stop the Mosque,” that garnered around 2,000 signatures, as well as comments on local social media pages.
One anonymous commenter left a racist slur in capital letters on the online petition. Another said the town had become a toxic waste dump and should be left to the Muslims.
Congregants say the mosque, which was created in 1998 from a converted Pizza Hut, needs critical, albeit modest upgrades. Among them are more stations for congregants to ritually wash themselves before praying; more bathrooms; space for after-school and Saturday school programs for children; and a space to hold religious meals during the holy month of Ramadan.
“We want to build a facility that’s more functional,” said Imran Makda, a 55-year-old accountant who has been attending the mosque since 2001 and joined the lawsuit. “We’re not building this so we can increase our congregation size.”
The mosque first met opposition from the town’s Department of Environmental Resources, which it eventually cleared. But then the town threw another wrench in the mosque’s plans, its lawyers say.
In 2022, while the mosque’s application was still winding its way through regulations, the town passed a law that changed the number of parking spots needed for places of worship. The ordinance now required 155 — far more than the 86 the mosque had proposed and what it could accommodate, its lawyers said.
Despite the parking hurdle, by early 2024 it seemed as if the mosque had secured much of the regulatory approval it needed, according to court filings. But before a Jan. 11 planning advisory board hearing in which the plans were expected to be approved, some residents voiced their concerns. Some merely discussed traffic, but some had other motivations.
One resident told a Nassau County legislator, Rose Marie Walker, that Muslims at the mosque did not add value to the community, unlike churchgoers, according to a letter contained in court papers. Another wrote that it was disturbing that men and women had separate prayer rooms in the Islamic faith, while another said the proposed building did not fit into the community’s suburban way of life.
“Are we going to give in and give up our neighborhood?” Diane Storey, another Bethpage resident, wrote to Ms. Walker.
Ms. Walker, who did not respond to a request for an interview, then urged Nassau County’s planning commission to reject the application.
Ms. Storey, 65, a Bethpage resident for 25 years, said in an interview that Bethpage was a “really old-fashioned kind of town,” and that a three-story mosque, which she called a “monster,” would be taller than many surrounding houses.
“I don’t want to sound racist or anything,” Ms. Storey said. “But there’s been a big influx of, I don’t want to call them Indian, but I don’t know where they’re from.”
Other residents said that they were motivated solely by good city planning.
“Most of my concerns are around just traffic and safety,” said Peter Micciche, a Bethpage resident who also is opposed to the expansion of the mosque. “That intersection is a horror.”
In a statement, Frank M. Scalera, the town attorney for Oyster Bay, cited what he said were nearly 5,000 annual “red-light violations” at the intersection next to the mosque as a justification for opposing the construction.
On Jan. 24, Masjid Al-Baqi sued and in April, the Justice Department wrote in a filing that Oyster Bay had treated the mosque differently than secular places, like libraries and theaters. “Oyster Bay’s parking regulations for places of worship are more onerous than comparable nonreligious assembly uses,” federal prosecutors wrote.
For their part, lawyers for the town cited testimony purportedly from a grandmother who said the mosque’s traffic inhibited her from picking up her grandchildren. But according to a July court filing, the lawyers acknowledged that the grandmother was partially an “amalgam” of residents’ concerns.
Under the terms of the settlement reached on Aug. 15, the town would have allowed the mosque to build its intended plan. The mosque’s lawyers would also have been reimbursed for nearly $4 million in legal fees and costs, and the town would have repealed the parking law. At the time, Mr. Saladino, the town supervisor, said in a statement that the settlement “resolves outstanding planning concerns.”
The mosque’s congregants celebrated by snacking on South Asian sweets, said Mujahid Ahmed, 52, a longtime congregant who owns a small business that makes skin care products.
But the settlement still had to be approved by a vote from the town board within two weeks. The board never convened.
In a letter to the judge in the case, lawyers for the town said that the dissolved settlement was only evidence that it had “elected not to succumb to plaintiffs’ litigation pressure.”
During a Friday afternoon prayer services, the mosque’s busiest time of the week, cars and pickup trucks zoomed by the intersection without incident. Children arrived for after-school programming a few hours after the services, as men clad in kurtas mingled on an picnic table outside sipping Afghan tea and eating dates.
The news of the scuttled deal was a massive letdown, Mr. Ahmed said. He is confident that the mosque will prevail in federal court, but said he was dismayed by what he described as open racism from a community in which he had lived for nearly a quarter century.
“We are members of this town,” Mr. Ahmed said. “We are as Bethpagean as it gets.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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