The Mega-Mosque Era: How Radical Islam Is Reshaping America

Behind America's expanding network of mega-mosques lies a broader campaign of foreign influence, ideological expansion, and political Islam.

The Islamic Institute of America recently opened the Imamain Al-Hasnain Mosque in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. With its golden domes and a $20 million price tag, the 60,000-square-foot complex is now one of the largest Islamic institutions in North America.

The founding director, Sayyed Hassan Qazwini, said the vision was to create a place that serves people’s daily lives. But Americans must ask \ what “daily life” means when it is bankrolled by foreign interests. This is Michigan—not Najaf or Baghdad—yet much of the funding behind the complex comes directly from an Iraqi government notorious for tyrannical rule. The goal, I suggest, is not integration into American civic life but the expansion of state-backed religious authority at the expense of constitutional liberties.

There are now nearly 4,000 mosques across the United States, with more than 70 percent built since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. For many Americans, the contrast is sickening. The extremist ideology behind the deaths of nearly 3,000 people has continued to expand its institutional presence in the nation it deliberately targeted.