Mooresville Mosque Confronts Fear and Hostility

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Hadia Mubarak’s hands shook as she parked her silver Toyota Highlander a few blocks from Mooresville Town Hall on September 8.

She was headed to a commissioners meeting in the rapidly growing Iredell County town. Opponents of a new mosque had packed an August meeting to denounce it with words Islamic and interfaith groups across the state quickly deemed anti-Muslim. 

Mubarak, an associate professor of religion at Queens University in Charlotte, had signed up to speak, hoping to defend her faith to those she felt misunderstood it. 

Before locking her car, she said she left voicemails for her two teenage children: “I love you very much. Always keep your faith strong in your heart.” She did not tell them she was thinking of Deah Barakat and Yusor and Razan Abu-Salha, three Muslim students at Triangle campuses shot dead by a neighbor in Chapel Hill a decade ago, she said. 

“I’m American. We were all attacked on 9/11.” 

Hadia Mubarak, Queens University associate professor

“I felt scared for my life,” the American-born Mubarak told The Assembly, recalling that night. But she felt she owed it to her community to speak up. 

She walked through a large crowd of people outside town hall, conscious of her bright red hijab, which matched her blazer. A video that she took captured a blonde woman yelling: “They were real kind to us on 9/11, right?”

“My country was attacked,” Mubarak responded. “I’m American. We were all attacked on 9/11.” 

Islamic Center Has Legal Right to Build

Since it opened in 2011, the Islamic Center of Lake Norman has rented space in a brick building now shared with a dance studio and a tax company. Charlotte has multiple mosques, but the Lake Norman congregation is the only one in the city’s northern suburbs. 

Less than 1% of adults in the Charlotte metro area are Muslim, according to a 2023-24 Pew Research Center study. But as the Charlotte area has grown, so has the number of people—dermatologists, engineers, employees at Lowe’s corporate headquarters nearby—who worship at the Lake Norman center.

In August, as attendance topped the building’s capacity of about 100, members began holding two Friday prayer sessions, said Zahid Khan, a board member who has lived in Mooresville since 1993.  

The center in 2019 spent approximately $350,000 on 5.5 acres a few minutes down the road to expand. This spring it cleared land there for two buildings—a 2,691-squarefoot prayer hall and a 2,235-square-foot kitchen and office building—and 52 parking spaces. 

So far, the center has raised $1 million of the $2.5 million needed to complete the mosque, Khan said. He expects it to be ready for use by December 2027. 

As is the case with any place of worship in Mooresville, the Islamic Center did not require the town’s permission to build a new home on property already zoned for that use. 

Members like Amr Soliman, a pharmacist who lives in Mooresville, look forward to having more space not just for worship but for Sunday school, sports, and picnics.

“We rent a store in a strip mall,” Soliman said. “You can’t really do anything there. We just meet and pray.”

He said he hopes some of the hostility will have subsided by then. 

Growing Opposition in Mooresville

Dana Tucker, the town commissioner whose ward hosts the land, said he has fielded questions and complaints about the new mosque since he joined the board in December. Opposition intensified once people started to see equipment on the site in the spring, he said.

In early August, a members-only Facebook group critical of the mosque called Mooresville United was launched. Text visible to nonmembers reads “LKN MOSQUE TO BE BUILT. TRAFFIC IS A MAJOR CONCERN. Let’s keep Mooresville safe, informed & involved.”

Five mosque opponents spoke at the public-comment session of the commissioners meeting that month. Traffic was mentioned, but some comments, captured in a town recording of the meeting, were extreme.

“People are terrified. They’re on edge.”

Al Rieder, Council on American-Islamic Relations

Town resident Rivera Douthit, an unsuccessful GOP primary candidate for lieutenant governor in 2024, said she feared that the town could become the next Dearborn, Michigan. That city, she said, “has been taken over completely by Islam.” Or New York City, where residents elected their first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. 

Cheryl Pletcher said she represented the town’s Concerned Women for America prayer action group, which promotes “Biblical values” in public policy, according to its website. She accused Muslim men of marrying girls “ages 6 to 10” and voiced worries about local children, noting that the new mosque was being built next to a middle school.

“The expansion of this evil ideology may be legal, but is it beneficial to the women and girls in our community? I say no to Sharia rules in Mooresville,” Pletcher said. 

Her speech drew half a minute of approving hollers and raucous applause from dozens in the audience. Some stood and raised signs reading: “Protect our kids. Protect our community. Protect our property values.” 

Pletcher and Douthit did not respond to several interview requests from The Assembly.

Hostility to Muslims On the Rise

The anti-Muslim comments did not surprise Al Rieder, manager of the state’s Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter, an advocacy group that represents 119 mosques across North Carolina. 

Since the chapter’s founding in 2023, CAIR-NC had received maybe one report of a credible violent threat against a mosque each year. This year, that number rose sharply; seven mosques reported threats. 

“People are terrified,” Rieder said.“They’re on edge.”

The Islamic Center of Lake Norman has received several anonymous threats in the past few months, Khan said. One person left a voicemail saying, “Just as fast as it gets built, it can burn down,” he said.

Cornerstone ARP Church, located across the street from the Islamic Center of Lake Norman’s rented location, identifies itself as a theologically conservative and evangelical denomination. Last month, it began promoting Sunday sessions called “What Americans Need to Know About Islam.” 

“Why do we need to learn about Islam?” a man who identified himself as Pastor Joseph asked at the first session, which was posted on YouTube. “Well, of course, you remember the terrible Boston bombing and the Boston Marathon. As we’ll see later, these men did it because they were Muslims and because they thought they were pleasing Allah.” 

The mosque’s board hired a security guard in late August and asked local police to monitor its current space, Khan said. Tucker, the town commissioner, told The Assembly that he and other town officials met with representatives from the Islamic Center of Lake Norman to plan for extra security measures at the September meeting after they voiced concerns about their safety.

While antipathy toward mosques in the U.S. is not new, it’s normally couched under concerns about traffic or parking, said Nathan Lean, an assistant teaching professor at NC State University who studies Islam in America. What’s different now, he said, is that more people with power are openly making extreme accusations.

“Well, of course, you remember the terrible Boston bombing and the Boston Marathon. As we’ll see later, these men did it because they were Muslims…” 

Joseph, Cornerstone ARP Church pastor

When prominent politicians like President Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Florida U.S. Rep. Randy Fine say “really horrible” things about Muslims, “It has a tendency to cause other people to feel licensed to say the same kinds of things and to take the same kinds of positions,” Lean said. 

A September Pew report found that 42% of the 12,574 U.S. adults who responded to a survey said Muslim Americans have a negative impact on this country. Perceptions of Islam today are more negative than they were immediately after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the report found. In 2026, 51% of U.S. adults surveyed said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, compared with 25% in 2002. 

Soliman, the pharmacist, has lived in Mooresville since 2013 and seen it change. The town’s population grew 11% from 2020 to 2025, according to census data. 

He is sympathetic to longtime residents thinking the town has become too crowded and lost its small-town charm. But after watching the August and September town commission meetings online, he can’t understand the blatant misinformation he believes is driving some people’s fear about the mosque.

“I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Soliman, 55, who has lived in the U.S. since he emigrated from Egypt at 5 years old. 

Trying To Connect, Despite Differences

More than 100 people attended the September commissioners meeting, filling two rooms and spilling outside of town hall. 

Mubarak said she tried to introduce herself to a man wearing a large cross around his neck. He shook her hand, she said, but would not look her in the eye and avoided her attempts at conversation. 

Mubarak, who researches and writes about Islamophobia, watched people pass around flyers with false interpretations of her religion. One, visible in photographs taken at the meeting, said there were three stages of jihad, ending in total domination.

“I’ve never seen it this bad.”

Amr Soliman, Islamic Center of Lake Norman member

Her 15-year-old daughter, who wears a hijab, plays soccer in a park in Mooresville that is just a few miles from town hall. They had a game the previous week. She didn’t understand how the same town could host such hate.  

Before members of the public were allowed to speak at the September meeting, then-Mayor Chris Carney asked that both sides be civil. “We’re neighbors; neighbors can disagree,” he said. “Some of us might disagree strongly tonight. I’m asking all of us to do it with respect.”

When Mubarak’s name was called, she began by describing her childhood in Florida’s Bible Belt. The Christian people she grew up with lived the teachings of Jesus Christ “by loving their neighbors and welcoming the strangers,” she said. 

Her father was their cardiologist; her mother cooked them food from Jordan. As children, Mubarak and her friends, who were Christian, bonded over “their shared devotion to God.”

“Today, however, I’m witnessing a different kind of America: an America where neighbors no longer smile at one another but instead fear one another,” she said. 

“What kind of America do we build when we teach our children to fear people who look different or pray differently than them?”

Close to half the people in the room cheered, a town video shows. 

Of the 29 people who spoke for an allotted three minutes each about the mosque that night, 17 opposed it. Twelve supported it, including a rabbi from a nearby temple and a representative of the progressive advocacy group Indivisible Lake Norman. 

After the people finished, the man who had avoided talking to Mubarak at the beginning of the meeting turned to her, she said. 

“I’m Christian,” she said he told her. “I would love for you to become Christian because I think it’s the right way, but I would never force it on you.” 

“I know,” Mubarak said she responded. “I would never force my religion on you, either.” 

She told him she had read the Bible, and he said he would be interested in reading the Quran. She gave him a recommendation for a website he could read it on. 

In recent weeks, opposition to the mosque has been less visible. No one spoke about it at the town’s October meeting. 

But the Facebook group warning against the mosque is still active; recently someone tacked a yellow “Jesus saves” sign onto a tree at the center’s construction site.

And Cornerstone ARP Church added a long statement to its website on Monday, which the pastor said in an email was its response to The Assembly’s multiple attempts to make contact. 

“Let us clearly state our position: We do not have a problem with Muslims but Islam has a problem with us,” the introduction reads, followed by several examples of text from the Quran that read hostile to Christians and Jews. 

Lean, the NC State expert, described it as  “literal readings” of the Quran that misinterpret the text and lack important context. 

“I would imagine that, like so many who readily malign Islam, this church and its pastor would be unwilling to have Christian scripture mined for its violent content and reflected as wholly representative of all 2.5 billion Christians in the world,” he said. 

The Islamic Center of Lake Norman is working to create more spaces for dialogue. It is hosting an interfaith dinner this weekend, and has invited some people who oppose the new mosque. The pastor of Cornerstone ARP Church and several of its congregants have RSVP’ed yes, Khan said. 

Mubarak said she will attend. 

“This is a really important time for us to open our doors to the public, our neighbors,” she said. “For them to see who we are.”