‘This Could Have Been Their 9/11 Moment’
A generation of young American Muslims is coming of age in a time when a mass shooting at a mosque is horrifying, but not surprising.
NEW YORK CITY—The prayer space at the Islamic Center at New York University is like any other college conference room: big windows, tall ceilings, retro carpeting. But when it’s transformed for Friday prayers, called jummah, there’s a certain familiarity to it too: rows of tape showing worshippers where to sit, a line of chairs dividing women from men, people sitting cross-legged and chatting. This prayer space is similar to the two mosques, thousands of miles away in New Zealand, where 49 worshippers were killed and scores of others were injured by a gunman on Friday.
For Mohammed Hojaij, a junior at NYU who serves on the board of the Muslim Students Association, that’s what was
