sah@cs.brown.edu (Saadia Husain) (04/08/90)
On Friday March 30 at about 1:30 am, a fire was set at the Islamic
Center of New England in Quincy, Massachusetts. The local police and
fire officials are pretty sure that it was arson, and are conducting a
thorough investigation along with the FBI.
The fire was set in two separate places in the older section of the building
and the fire chief says that there may be traces of an accelerant. We've
never had any such problems at the mosque, except for an isolated incident
about 12 years ago when some teenagers broke the glass dome.
No one was in the mosque at the time, although Ramadan is a time when the
mosque is very busy. The imam had left at midnight and had locked the
doors securely. Some people feel that an intruder may have entered
during Isha prayers and hidden somewhere until the imam left. When the
alarm went off, the fire station called the imam (who lives next door)
and asked whether he had pressed it by mistake. They fire trucks arrived
soon afterwards. Muslims living nearby arrived as early as 2:30 am when they
heard about the fire.
Upstairs, the Center has four classrooms, three offices, a small library,
two wudu rooms, and the prayer hall. The fire started near stairs leading
from a side entrance upstairs to the hallway outside the prayer hall.
The stairs and the wudu rooms were totally gutted.
Miraculously, fire doors protected the prayer hall and the Qurans and
expensive rugs inside. Aside from water from the fire hoses, the prayer
room and connected library are intact.
The door leading to where the classrooms and offices are was open,
so the smoke and heat headed that way instead of into the prayer hall.
Even in places untouched by the actual fire, the heat damage was so
extreme that you could see half-melted computers. The plastic tacks
on the bulletin boards outside the classrooms were melted into little
frozen drips of plastic. The fire fighters had to break all the windows
in the classrooms to let the smoke out of that part of the building.
The whole area is blackened with smoke. The offices also sustained
smoke and water damage.
Downstairs the Center has a kitchen, three bathrooms, an office, a large
social hall, and a room which is partitioned into classrooms. This last
room and the kitchen have heat and water damage. The social hall
and office and hallways mainly have damage to the ceiling and are pretty
wet.
We are pleased that the local media coverage has been very good.
By 6am Friday morning all the local radio and television stations
were carrying the news. Some people awoke to their radio-alarm clocks
broadcasting the news that their mosque had been burned, and jumped out
of bed imagining that they were having a bad dream.
We have heard from an Arab reporter who was there yesterday that
the fire was covered in some newspapers in the Middle East too
(Kuwait and Bahrain, I think)
By Sunday, the news had spread by word of mouth and radio
announcements that a gathering of Muslims would take place outside the
Center at 1pm on Sunday. About 400 people showed up including those
who regularly attend on Sundays and concerned Muslims from other mosques
from as far away as Worcester and Springfield, MA. It was a cold, gloomy
day, yet all these people were willing to bear the low temperatures
and stand outside next to a giant dumpster with scorched ceiling insulation
and burned chairs sticking out. Those who went into the mosque found that
it was even colder than outside, since the electricity had been cut off.
As the cameras from local news stations rolled, a press release was read,
summarizing the events and asserting that we will Insha'allah rebuild
our Center as soon as possible. The imam asked for support from all the
Muslims in the area, and amid shouts of 'Takbir' it was evident that everyone
was deeply moved as they viewed the boarded up windows and scorched walls.
Then the Zuhr prayer was held in two shifts on the cold floor of the
social hall downstairs since the entrance to the prayer hall was blocked.
The center is covered by fire insurance. But I'm not sure if this will
cover all of the estimated $500,000 in damage. The Islamic Center will
gratefully accept any donation you can spare. The address is
Islamic Center of New England
470 South Street
Quincy, MA 02169
Thank You,
Ramadan Mubarak,
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Saadia Husain Brown University
sah@cs.brown.edu Box 1910
Providence, RI 02912
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