Sixteen-year-old Hiba Calsy is the only Muslim student in her grade at Broken Arrow Early College Academy. She just started wearing a hijab last year. So far her classmates have been kind, but in her wider community the hate is on the rise.
What Happened in Broken Arrow?
For years, Calsy and her family have been compelled to make regular hour-long drives back and forth to their nearest mosque just to pray. In 2014, hoping to ease overcrowding at that facility and provide a closer faith home for its congregation, the Islamic Society of Tulsa purchased 15 acres in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. This past December, planning commissioners for the city (finally) narrowly approved a request to rezone the land for a mosque, medical clinic and retail center. City councilors reversed that decision in January, voting 4 to 1 against the project after a meeting that drew more than a thousand residents. News footage shows folks lining up around the block waiting to attend the heated meeting.
What Do the City's Own Records Show?
Councilors said the decision to retract their approval came down to concerns over traffic and stormwater capacity, in addition to conflicts with a comprehensive plan that didn't yet call for commercial development on that stretch of road. Opposition organizer David Oldham has maintained the fight was always about infrastructure, not faith, and pointed to genuine concerns about a two-lane road that residents say can't handle much more growth.
Emails later obtained by the local outlet Tulsa Flyer paint a much different, much messier picture. One resident sent a message to Mayor Debra Wimpee alleging that violence statistically erupts when Muslim populations in Europe surpass two percent of a country's population, and asked her to help keep the project out of the neighborhood. Wimpee wrote soon after, agreeing with the resident and indicating that she hoped the planning meeting would draw enough opposition to change the outcome.
A second resident emailed councilwoman Lisa Ford invoking a decades-old conspiracy theory that Muslim immigrants were building a voting bloc to eventually take over American cities; Ford replied that she agreed with everything the resident had raised. Separately, a caller to a nearby city planning office threatened violence against any official who voted to approve the mosque, a threat serious enough that police were alerted.
What Happens Next?
The Islamic Society and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sued Broken Arrow in federal court on Aug. 3, arguing the denial violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act along with the First and Fourteenth Amendments. CAIR attorney Meghan Murphy said city leaders "did not want Muslims here, so they made up a reason."
The Justice Department opened its own investigation into the denial in July. Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma's attorney general, has since asked the Trump administration to call off that federal inquiry, calling it a federal overreach into a local land-use decision. Drummond is currently running for governor of the state. Not to be outdone, his opponent in the primary Mike Mazzei reportedly took to the stage at a recent church event to declare that, were he elected, he would "govern with a Christian worldview", designate CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization, and mandate police training to combat "Sharia violence."
Compared to all the arguing around it, the project itself (based on the plans) is pretty modest: a two-story, 23,000-square-foot worship and community center paired with a smaller retail building, a food pantry and a medical clinic organizers say will stay open to anyone nearby, regardless of faith.
For now, it will remain an empty field. Meanwhile, the Tulsa mosque recently added a third Friday prayer service to keep up with demand.
Is This Just Broken Arrow?
Far from it. Across the country, Islamic congregations are duking it out with town zoning committees with what seems to be increasing frequency, and volume. A Long Island congregation faced similar accusations that a town kept moving the zoning goalposts to block its mosque, a case ULC covered here. When ULC first wrote about the Broken Arrow vote back in January, it fit a pattern our coverage of Muslim life in America has tracked for years: anti-Muslim sentiment has continued its creep into town councils.
Hiba Calsy, for her part, seems to be as tired of the legal back-and-forth as she is of the long drives to pray in Tulsa. "We're just looking to worship," she said. It's a modest ask wrapped in a constitutional fight, and it will likely take a judge to settle it.
Where should the line sit between a city's right to manage its own zoning and a faith community's right to build a place to gather? And when officials say a vote was never about religion, how much should their own private emails count as evidence otherwise?
0 comments