The room buzzed with conversation and the aroma of dough frying in oil. We were there to learn how to make roti canai, but I found myself caught instead in conversation with the man beside me — a leader in the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, and one of the founders of the mosque in Rochester, New York. 

He spoke of many things: his childhood in Pakistan, his dream of becoming a pilot, how he arrived in America with almost nothing, and how faith had anchored his life through it all. Then, as the room paused to reset for serving food, he disappeared briefly and returned holding a Quran. Its cover was brown and gold, its weight solid in my hands. 

It wasn’t a gesture of proselytizing. It was something gentler: an invitation to understand more deeply. I was the only attendee who received a copy that day — a gift from a man who had trusted me with his story and wanted me to leave with something more than bread. 

A few weeks later, we met again at a nearby café. After some searching, we found a quiet corner. Between sips of coffee, he showed me a thick commemorative volume: “100 Years of Ahmadiyya Islam in the United States of America,” published to mark the centennial of a story that began in 1920, when Mufti Muhammad Sadiq arrived in the United States and his followers soon organized a mosque in Chicago.  

As I turned its glossy pages, a photograph stopped me: an Ahmadiyya gathering in Athens, Ohio, taken decades before I was born. Athens was just a short drive from where I grew up, yet no one had ever told me this history. That image collapsed the distance I had imagined between my small-town upbringing and Islam’s long presence in America. It hadn’t been far away — it had long been here, part of the same hills I knew. 

The Quran on my shelf now joins a growing library of memory — moments when Muslims opened their lives to me. 

One of those memories took me back to Columbus during my college years. I had become acquainted with an international student through campus cultural programs, and one day he invited me to join him for prayer. I remember pulling into the mosque’s parking lot, realizing it stood just a few steps away from the synagogue I belonged to — the oldest building in Columbus still used as a synagogue. 

The contrast between the two spaces was striking. The synagogue had a stately presence, instantly recognizable as a house of worship. The mosque, by comparison, was a converted home, its small prayer room overflowing. Worshippers stood shoulder to shoulder, their voices rising in unison — a chorus that seemed to carry echoes from every corner of the globe. 

After the service, my friend introduced me to the imam. He encouraged me to keep learning. His words lingered, especially as I began to understand more about how Islam shaped not only the story of America, but also my own in unexpected ways. 

My earliest memory of Islam goes back even further, to high school. I was a senior at William V. Fisher Catholic when our theology class began studying other monotheistic faiths. I suggested to the teacher that we invite Muslim and Jewish speakers to make the discussion real. To my surprise, he agreed and asked me to help with the outreach. 

When the day came, the Muslim speaker didn’t just lecture. He offered students Qurans to take home. I accepted one, as did a few classmates who I knew would soon be deployed to Southwest Asia. I’ve often wondered what it meant to them. I still have that copy — less ornate than the recent one I was given — and I wonder how many others kept theirs. 

Two years later, in college, I signed up for a course called “History of Islam,” taught by a professor I deeply admire. For extra credit, he offered students the chance to learn a line of Arabic from the Quran. I chose the opening words of the Fātiḥah: 

Bismillāh ir-Raḥmān ir-Raḥīm. Al-ḥamdu lillāhi rabbil-‘ālamīn. Ar-Raḥmān ir-Raḥīm. 

“In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to God, Lord of the worlds. The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.” 

My pronunciation was far from perfect, but I still remember the cadence. Saying those words felt like brushing against something vast — a current of devotion flowing through centuries. I never asked a Muslim friend what they would have thought of my attempt, but I hope they would see what it was: an act of respect, born of a desire to understand. 

When I look back at these encounters, I see a thread: radical openness.

I am a convert to Judaism, a faith that, like Islam, calls us to sanctify ordinary life. When I look back at these encounters, I see a thread: radical openness. Each gesture — a gifted Quran, an invitation to prayer, a man who drove an hour to teach Catholic school students — was an act of generosity rooted in reaching across differences. 

That confidence is something our fractured world needs. Too often, religion in public life is reduced to slogans or weaponized in culture wars. But these small, quiet moments remind me that the most transformative expressions of faith are not loud. They are tender, vulnerable, and human. 

Today, that brown-and-gold Quran rests on my bookshelf beside books from my great-grandfather and a Tanakh I purchased in high school. A Christian Bible sits nearby, bought during my senior year of college. In my home, these texts are all neighbors — each bearing witness to ideas that have shaped my life in ways I could never have planned. 

That coexistence, as ordinary as a bookshelf and as extraordinary as human trust, is something fragile and rare. It is a promise worth keeping: that faith can flourish without walls and that friendship can begin with something as simple as a conversation across a table. 

Austin Reid Albanese is a writer and historian exploring overlooked interfaith stories across North America. His essays on Muslim history have appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette and Winnipeg Free Press, and he has written about Jewish history for outlets including Interfaith America Magazine, The Forward, The Washington Post, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.