The Al Qubaa Islamic Center is located at 1145 Hampton Avenue in Newport News, Virginia.

It is located in a house which I expect was built in the first decade of the twentieth century and is now strikingly decorated with Moorish motifs.

It is part of the Community of Imam W. Deen Mohammed, the organization of African American Muslims who followed the son of Elijah Muhammad as he led members of the Nation of Islam to embrace Sunni Islam in the 1970s and after. The organization has had many names over the years.

I recently stumbled across this house while riding back my bike back to Hampton from a visit to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza on Jefferson Avenue. Al-Qubaa is currently the closest mosque to the house in which I grew up and is only three blocks from the first house in which my mother lived in as a child.