Local Muslims United in Distress Over Iraq Violence

After Friday-night prayers, inside a modest mosque behind a McDonald's on Murchison Avenue in Pomona, nearly 400 Muslims were gathered for a rare town hall meeting on the situation in Iraq.

They were Shiites and Sunnis, men, women and children from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds from throughout Southern California. But, inside Ahlul-Beyt Mosque, a Shiite house of worship, those labels appeared not to matter.

What united them appeared to be the wrenching pain they were experiencing as Muslims over the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite site in Samarra and the violence that followed. They were also united as Muslims watching events unfold from the United States.

"We are Americans," said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. "The question is, what can we do about the situation from here?"

As the night progressed, and in the days to follow, the answer would prove elusive. But on this night, Feb. 24, many attending agreed that the meeting itself was an important step.

"Unfortunately, it takes such a tragedy to bring Muslims together here in Southern California," said Imam Moustafa Al-Qazwini of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County in Costa Mesa.

Yet, good can come of what perpetrators meant for evil purposes.

Al-Qazwini, a Shiite, is a member of a prominent family of Islamic scholars and activists in Southern California and Detroit. As he put it, "One of the goodnesses of the tragedy is that we see tonight in this place -- and in other places throughout the world -- Sunnis and Shia getting together, expressing their outrage against this crime."

In the mosque, men and women sat or knelt on a green-carpeted floor, the sexes separated by a low, green curtain partition. A number of teenagers were there too, some checking their cellphones as the discussion wore on for hours.

The mosque was full, so latecomers stood in the courtyard, straining to hear the proceedings through open windows.

During the meeting, the air thick with emotion, people vented their anger, shared their pain and, again and again, pondered -- in English and Arabic -- their role as American Muslims.

Hamida Desuqi, an African American, suggested that Muslims remember how blacks changed the hearts of Americans by marching peacefully during the civil rights movement.

"We as Muslims have to learn to protest