09/12/2026
A Mosque, a Church, and the Same Memory
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Love is a very deep feeling. When we love someone, even the thought that someone has disrespected that person can hurt us. Memory can work in a similar way. Some memories become so deeply held, and sometimes so painful, that we feel a responsibility to protect them.
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This morning, I learned about something that had happened yesterday, only a few hours before the September 11 memorial service I attended here in Stroudsburg.
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During Friday prayer at the Stroudsburg Islamic Center, a man drove around the mosque in his pickup truck with loud music playing and confronted people outside. September 11 was clearly very much on his mind. From the exchange, it seemed that what troubled him was the sight of Muslims gathering for worship on that particular day. To him, apparently, there was something inappropriate about it.
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One of the imams tried to explain that there was nothing unusual taking place. Muslims gather for congregational prayer every Friday. He compared it to Christians gathering for worship on Sunday. This was not a gathering organized for September 11. It happened to be September 11, and it happened to be Friday.
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That small misunderstanding says more than it might seem to.
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For the people entering the mosque, the scene required no explanation at all. It was Friday prayer. But from outside, with a very different set of associations already in place, the same scene had acquired another meaning entirely. An ordinary act of worship had become, in someone else’s mind, almost an act of disrespect.
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At one point the man began speaking about Jesus. The imam answered him simply:
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“We love Jesus.”
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I have kept thinking about that response.
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From what I could see, the man seemed to believe that he was defending something that mattered deeply to him. The memory of September 11 mattered to him. His religious convictions seemed to matter to him as well. Yet the meaning he attached to what he was seeing rested, at least in part, on things he did not know about the people standing in front of him.
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That is part of what makes the encounter so interesting to me. A feeling can be sincere and the understanding behind it can still be mistaken. We can care deeply about a memory, a country, or a faith while our picture of the person in front of us remains incomplete.
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A few hours later, another scene was unfolding in the same town.
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At First Presbyterian Church in Stroudsburg, people of different faiths and different outlooks gathered for a September 11 memorial service. Prayers were offered, and people who had lived through that day shared their memories and what they had witnessed. Christians, Muslims, and others remembered together a tragedy that had wounded an entire society and remains part of our shared memory twenty-five years later. A good number of Muslims were among those present.
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This morning, after learning what had happened at the mosque, I found myself thinking again about something Mr. Kemal, a member of the local Turkish Muslim community, had said during the service. The terrorists did not only hijack airplanes on September 11. In another sense, they also hijacked Islam. They committed an act of terror in the name of a religion and, in the minds of millions of people, attached its name to something horrifying. Such violence cannot be justified by Islam, nor do I believe terrorism of this kind can be justified by any genuine religious commitment.
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Learning about the incident at the mosque made me see last night’s gathering somewhat differently.
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Only hours earlier, a man had looked at Muslims entering a mosque and apparently concluded that their worship was somehow incompatible with honoring the memory of September 11.
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That evening, Muslims were sitting beside their Christian neighbors in a church, honoring that very memory with them.
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What interests me most is the distance between what we sometimes imagine about one another and what we might discover if we actually meet.
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A passage Fethullah Gülen wrote in 2010 came back to me as I thought about these two scenes:
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“At a time when resentment, hatred, and hostility have darkened the face of our world, let us once again, with all sincerity, speak of love and dialogue. Let us… open the doors of our hearts to everyone.”
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This is why knowing one another matters. We may disagree on certain issues, but that is very different from building our picture of another person out of things that are simply not true.
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Sometimes understanding begins with something as simple as learning why Muslims gather at a mosque on Friday. At other times, it comes through an unexpected point of connection, as when the imam answered, “We love Jesus.”
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And sometimes it takes shape in quieter ways.
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As the memorial service ended last night, it was almost time for the evening prayer. I knew I would not make it home in time, so before leaving I asked Pastor Beth if there might be somewhere in the church where I could pray.
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“Of course,” she said.
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She immediately found me a room.
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And so, after joining Christians, Muslims, and other neighbors in remembering the lives lost on September 11, I prayed my evening prayer inside a Christian church before heading home.
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I do not think knowing one another requires us to care less about what we believe, or to pretend that our differences are unimportant. It means knowing one another well enough that our differences are real differences—not stories we have constructed about one another.
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Yesterday, one person saw Muslim prayer and felt that it did not belong.
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A few hours later, a church quietly made room for mine.
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Semih Kiyma
(Shared here with encouragement from a couple of friends at the Poconos Interfaith Council.)
