Area Religious Leaders Lend Support to Hamden Mosque

Despite a persistent cold rain, religious leaders from the New Haven region gathered Friday at a Hamden mosque hit for the third time in two years by vandals.

Last weekend, when returning from a funeral in Tampa, Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan came home to some bad news: the Dixwell Avenue mosque named in his honor had once again been defaced with an obscenity.

"I don't know if it is a hate crime," he said Friday as leaders from Interfaith Cooperative Ministries surrounded him at the Abdul-Majid Karim Hasan Islamic Center in a show of support for the Islamic mosque. 

"We all stand here together with the Iman Hasan and it is an honor to do that," said Rabbi Herbert Brockman of Congregation Miskan Israel.

"This is an important time for religious communities because for many today, religion is too often seen as something that divides people," he said. "We believe that religion can and should be a force to unite us, not divide us.

"What happens to you here happens to all of us," he said, "that the desecration of your holy space of worship is a decsecration of our churches, our synagogues, our temples and our meeting houses.

"The future of our community is in in our hands," he said, "and in people of faith especially have the responsibility and capacity chose between love and hate and between war and peace. 

"It's a rainy, cold, raw day, but we are standing here in the warmth of one another," said Rev. Rochelle Stackhouse, pastor of Church of the Redeemer in New Haven. "We are called to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, and that is why I'm here today.

"The word written on the side of this building is written in the language of hate, the language of rudeness, the language of division," she said. "We are here today to say we speak another language -- the language of love -- and I would ask whoever wrote those words to come and learn from us how to speak a different language and write different words." 

Police continue to investigate last weekend's incident. Hasan also has been the victim of similar vandalism at his Hamden home.