Hadith: An Unbeliever in the Mosque

"You're going where?" my mother had asked when I called her from my cell phone, telling her that I was visiting the largest mosque in San Diego County. My mind had been wholly made up however, I was already on the I-15 and was halfway between my apartment and the Islamic Center of San Diego.

"I'm going to the biggest mosque in San Diego," I reiterated to her, much to her disbelief. There was a moment of silence as she let the thought roll through her mind, and I could imagine in my own way what she was thinking. Living in Louisiana, her only outlet to Muslims being what she saw on the news or read on the internet, she had had little exposure to Muslims in person, with the sole exception of Mehran, the Shi'ite Persian who had married my step-grand mother's daughter. He was not exactly the kind of man to speak as a representative of Islam to someone who had not had much exposure to the religion, that's for sure.

In all my mother didn't know what to expect from my going to a mosque, the only thing she could expect was that her son had one day called her declaring his desire to go down to one to do something as seemingly imprudent as asking Imams their stances on terrorist factions. Naturally I had no actual fear of my well-being by going down there, the Islamic Center of San Diego is a prestigious building that models itself as a source of free information on the religion, constantly participating in Catholic-Muslim Dialogue Conferences and the like. However there just seemed something potentially imprudent about a nineteen year old white Protestant, notebook in hand, stepping into a mosque and asking a number of seemingly risky questions.