Tahir Zafar, an investment banker with his own consulting firm in Princeton, knows the importance of giving back to the community.
He spent three years on West Windsor’s Human Relations Committee and volunteers his time in various community service activities organized by the Institute of Islamic Studies New Jersey (IIS), based in East Windsor, which range from soup kitchen work to participating in interfaith programs.
Zafar and other members of IIS want to expand their programs and open their doors to the community in which they have been heavily involved — they just don’t have the space to do it; let alone, the space for their own programs.
Members of IIS — which has proposed construction of a mosque on Old Trenton Road that will be reviewed by the Zoning Board on Thursday, April 7 — say a new facility would provide the space needed by any religious group to carry out its activities.
IIS wants to develop 7.17 acres of currently vacant land at 2030 Old Trenton Road into a house of worship for its congregation. The plans would require a use variance because the property is currently located in the RO-1 zone, which only permits research and office uses.
IIS plans call for a facility that includes a house of worship, multi-purpose hall, offices, a daycare facility, kitchen, adult social area including a kitchen and housing for its spiritual leader, and a health care facility.
The proposed site is near Windsor Center Drive in East Windsor and Dorchester Drive/ Dantone Boulevard in West Windsor.
The proposed two-story building would have a footprint of 15,000 square feet. On the first floor, there would be a prayer hall of about 3,500 square feet and a similarly sized multi-purpose room with seating for about 170 people. There would also be smaller rooms, including an office, conference room, library, clinic/exam room, and food preparation room.
The second floor would feature an open Sunday school area of about 5,000 square feet and eight classrooms with 16 desks each (for a total of 128 students). There would also be smaller rooms, including housing for the Imam (high priest), two guest rooms, an office, and food handling room.
The 7,000 square feet of space IIS now has on the first floor of a building in a commercial complex on Princeton-Hightstown Road cannot accommodate the youth programs, community programs, and even the free medical clinic it plans to open to the community — in addition to its religious services.
The site on Old Trenton Road not only gives them the ideal space needed, it is located within West Windsor, where most of their members choose to live because of the township’s diversity.
“Half of our members’ kids have graduated from school,” said Zafar. “They don’t have to stay here, but everybody loves it so much, nobody wants to move out, even with the high taxes. We are close knit, and this is the place for us to live. That’s the kind of attachment we have with this town.”
To become a part of West Windsor’s community, however, may be a challenge, as some residents within the community have already expressed concerns about traffic, a loss in tax ratables, and a number of other issues in letters to this newspaper (see page 2).
But that is not stopping the IIS members from trying. “People will have their concerns; that’s alright,” said Simin Syed, a lawyer who also lives in West Windsor. “We’ve done all the evaluations.”
“How we look at it is everybody’s entitled to our opinions — each and every one of us,” she added. “All the points have been brought up, and we think we can explain all of that. All of this will be discussed in great detail before the Zoning Board.”
Syed, Zafar, and other IIS members have taken the approach that they want to be good neighbors, which is at the core of their beliefs.
“An integral part of our faith is to give back to everybody,” said Syed. “In Islam, your neighbors have the biggest rights over you. We want to respect them, and we want to respect our religion by respecting them.”
Part of their outreach to neighbors will include working with them on their plans for the mosque. For starters, the mosque building that they want to construct does not include a dome and is as simple as possible. “It’s more for practical purposes,” said Syed.
As such, the decision to locate the mosque on the Old Trenton Road site came after years of study — about seven or eight years, said Zafar. To be done right, the site needed to be at least 5 to 7 acres and be buildable land without environmental constraints, he said. After looking at a number of properties in the area, the West Windsor location served its needs best.
At the same time, IIS officials point out, the use of the site is less active than what has already been approved in the past for a gym, spa, and cafe. The former owner, Brian Brouda — with whom IIS is under contract for purchase — received Zoning Board approval in 2004 to construct a two-story, 53,153-square foot health and fitness club at the same site. The site would have included a cafe, spa, beauty salon, and a 208-car parking lot. Those plans were never developed.
The mosque would be smaller (30,000 square feet versus 53,000 square feet), with more parking.
“We looked at all the potential sites, and this was the only thing close” to what they needed, said Zafar. “Hopefully, the township will be kind to us.”
Zafar, Syed, and others involved at IIS hope this is the case and are willing to work with officials to get it right. “We’re not like, ‘We want to do our thing, and we don’t care about anybody else,’” said Syed. “After a very thorough search, we decided on that property, and we want to do everything to work with West Windsor. We want to make the residents happy.”
The IIS’s original community center formed in 1995 in a small space of about 700 square feet. “As West Windsor grew, more and more Muslim families were moving to the area,” said Syed. “As they were moving in, this became a very local place for them to congregate.”
For Syed, IIS became an integral part of her life when she moved to West Windsor in 1996. Her father, who graduated from Columbia University in the 1950s, was a dean of social work at the University of Kentucky, which helped form her desire to give back to the community. Her mother had a master’s in library science and public administration.
The mosque became a community center and a gathering place for Syed and other IIS members. IIS has an interfaith partnership with St. Anthony’s, a Catholic church in Hightstown, and with a local Jewish temple, and holds various interfaith events with both. “These people are our friends,” said Syed. “They encourage us coming there, and we encourage them coming in.”
IIS members got involved in efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Indonesia, the earthquake in Haiti, and other causes. “Most of our members are professionals — physicians, IT computer professionals, bankers, and more,” said Syed. “Everybody wants to give back, so it will be part of our community center, which will be open to the public.”
Once the new mosque is up and running, the goal is to have a free medical clinic for the community. Since many of the IIS members are physicians, they will volunteer time and supplies to help run the clinic, said Zafar.
A very important part of opening the new center, though, is also improving its youth programs. Saima Usmani, 18, a senior at High School North and a volunteer teacher of second and third grade students at IIS, said the 125 children who take classes range in age from 5 to 14 years old.
Currently, students are forced to sit on the floors in the room used for prayers because there is not enough space for chairs and desks for the once a week class that lasts a few hours.
This year, she began a youth club at IIS that performs plays. “The problem with that is we have no real space to perform,” and it would be out of IIS’s budget to rent additional space. “We had about 15 to 20 kids involved in it, but due to the fact that we do not have a place in the mosque to perform, we had to cancel it,” she said.
Usmani moved to East Windsor with her family in 1998 when she was 6 years old. Her father is a rheumatologist and also a volunteer on the board at IIS, and her mother is a pharmacist. The family moved to West Windsor in 2001.
“What I really like about the program is that it builds confidence,” said Usmani, who was also involved in running a youth fundraiser that resulted in over $6,000 in donations to the Eden Institute.
IIS also tutors students in both English and math — and that is open to all youth, both members and the public. In fact, the IIS also has a partnership with Kaplan that brings SAT courses to the current mosque for all members of the community at a discounted price, but that class fills quickly.
“They offer them on a Sunday morning,” added Syed. “For people who don’t want courses after school because their kids are involved in activities, this is the ideal situation.”
Zafar, who moved to West Windsor in 1995, said there has been a need for more of a youth center for IIS’s programs, and that IIS officials have been hoping for one and telling the youth for about 10 years now that they can hopefully have one soon. “Hopefully, the next generation won’t have to go through that,” said Zafar, whose father was a principal and whose mother was a writer.
For adults, the mosque also helps people who have lost their jobs, with services like counseling and monetary loans.
The mosque also holds interfaith programs at its own location, including a Thanksgiving feast open to the community, as well as Mother’s and Father’s Day picnics in the summer, said Noshin Ahmed, another member of IIS. Ahmed, a doctor who does oncology research for a local pharmaceutical company, moved to West Windsor in 1996. Her father is a retired diplomat from the United Nations.
Ahmed said Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh has visited the mosque for one of its interfaith events.
When it comes to bringing outside community members to the mosque, though, their mosque is not what they expected. “There are so many people who want to come, but we don’t have a mosque,” he said. “They have a picture in their minds of what they see on television, which is a big mosque. We call ours a makeshift mosque.”
IIS member are hoping they can invite more people to spend time with them if the mosque is approved for construction.
“West Windsor is an awesome, awesome town,” said Syed. “It comes back to the same point — we want a place here that lets us be deeply rooted here.”
Zafar says he understands that “people have a fear of the unknown,” but he hopes IIS can add value to the community.
Syed echoed the sentiment. “We want to be a part of their lives,” she said. “We don’t want to be known as ‘those people.’ We want to be part of the community. We want them to know we will grow, and they will benefit from it.”
