What Makes A Mosque

- Davide Mastracci

IT’S A FRIDAY afternoon in April 2016 and I’ve boarded an elevator in an office building in downtown Toronto. The doors close, and we start to climb.

When I step out, El-Farouk Khaki, one of Unity Mosque’s founders, greets me. “You look exactly like your photos,” he says. Khaki has Googled me; strict safety concerns require a vetting of anyone who asks for the mosque’s location. We step into the boardroom where the community holds its prayers, and Khaki is surrounded. He’s been on vacation with his husband and mosque co-founder, Troy Jackson, and it’s clear he’s been missed.

It’s no surprise Khaki is adored by congregants. Unity Mosque wouldn’t exist without him. Part of a network known as the El-Tawhid Juma Circle, which includes similar havens around North America, Unity Mosque is Khaki’s attempt to showcase Islam’s beauty. Founded in 2009, the egalitarian group aims to provide a welcoming place of worship and community, particularly for women and for queer and trans people. (Queer is a reclaimed term that covers lesbian, gay, bisexual and other individuals who don’t identify as hetero sexual; trans is a descriptor that includes those whose gender identity doesn’t conform to the sex they were assigned at birth.) For many, this is the difference between abandoning Islam and finding spiritual fulfillment.

KHAKI, WHO WORKS as a refugee and immigration lawyer, has lived in Toronto since 1989. He spent his childhood in Vancouver, where his family moved from England, having fled Tanzania as refugees in 1971, when he was seven.

For Khaki, coming out as gay was a process of self-discovery that began at 13, but he hadn’t encountered any queer Muslims before coming to Toronto. “Intellectually, I knew I was not the only one,” he says, “but that had always been my reality.”