For more than a decade, Anjuman Gulistan e Zahra (SA) has had the blessing of serving the Ahlul Bayt (AS) as a community in the greater Maryland area. We are indebted to the communities who have supported us by allowing us to share a space with them. As a small community of Shia Muslims, we are lucky to have found one another to navigate being a minority Muslim group in the west. Since the beginning, our organization has worked to create a sense of belonging for community members who are otherwise far from their home countries and cultures through the unifying message of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Through hardships and celebrations, this community has always come together to support one another. This was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, when multiple community members committed to cooking and distributing food in the name of the Ahlul Bayt (AS) for various Islamic events.

Though our community is unified in spirit and belief, our lack of a shared space continues to manifest into difficulties as we grow. With no space to store things and having to constantly work around communities in their respective spaces, we find it difficult to achieve our mission. Furthermore, the constant travel and late program timing to successfully share a space puts a strain on our community which consists of busy families. Though we are blessed with a nimble, adaptive community, we want to have a haven for our community members to be able practice their faith without the stress of accommodating to the constant changes that come with not having a space of our own. It is not fair to our hard-working community members, who must constantly assimilate, to also do so in their place of worship. This lack of space is especially harmful to the youngest members of our community, who deserve the stability of a center they call their own.

Although our community is wealthy in love and understanding, we cannot cover the costs of a new space while sustaining our current programming. We hope to get a center that provides us with the space we need to have programming in the service of the Ahlul Bayt (AS). Please help us in achieving this goal! Any contributions are more than welcome and will go directly to the cost of a new space.