For weeks now, reporters have been trying to get Abdulla Champeon to say something he hasn't believed. They want him to be angry, to be the victim. They want him to use that magic word that would vault into every headline and TV newscast: discrimination.
"I've done a bunch of interviews about this earlier, and the reporters - you could tell - they were just trying to lead into it," says Champeon, a loud-voiced, barrel-chested Muslim who represents a recently controversial Islamic center on East Washington Avenue. "They said, 'Do you think they hated you because you're a Muslim?' You could just tell that they really, really wanted me to come out and say it. But I just don't see it."
Early last month, the Sun Prairie City Council denied Champeon's jamaat of roughly 120 Muslims from buying a squat, single-story building in an office park 10 miles north of Madison to use as their new mosque and prayer center. The ruling affirmed an earlier decision by the Sun Prairie Planning Commission, which contended that the Nature's Preserve Office Park - an enclosure of dozens of businesses and hundreds of parking spaces - didn't have enough parking to support the mosque's Friday prayer services.
The decisions have extended the jamaat's lengthy and uncertain search for a bigger, less-decrepit mosque than their current home at 2617 E. Washington Ave. They also aroused local suspicion of religious discrimination, as communities, reporters and broadcast pundits wonder whether Madison had its own Ground Zero Mosque controversy.
Last week, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin entered the drama, pledging assistance following a brief meeting with the jamaat's imam, Salih Erschen. Soglin says he'll soon dispatch city staff to help find a suitable mosque location on Madison's east side for the Muslims in that area.
"This sort of thing has happened before [with other groups] and is not an unusual issue," Soglin says. "They're part of our community, and we're going to try and give them some help."
Erschen expresses a mixture of optimism and doubt, noting the obstacles that remain in the jamaat's search. For one, some donors have rescinded as much as $10,000 because it has taken too long to find a new mosque. Also, Erschen says, the group can't apply for an interest-rated loan because of religious reasons - another complication to an already convoluted quest.
But Erschen makes no claims that anti-Muslim bias is among the obstacles to overcome and seems bemused that this suspicion attended the Sun Prairie adventure: "It was almost like there was a hope in the people's mind to have that kind of intrigue this close to home."
At the time of the initial rejection early last month, you could almost hear Madison's formidable trumpets of tolerance gathering wind. Skepticism and consternation swirled.
The Wisconsin State Journal unleashed a series of dispatches and ran readers' letters on the issue, some tinged with suggestions of religious profiling and foul play. TV reporters also raised the specter of discrimination in their newscasts.
And then John "Sly" Sylvester of WTDY radio took to the airwaves, hurling accusations of religious discrimination like Molotov cocktails.
"We have terrible, terrible parking issues," Sylvester said, each word sodden with sarcasm. "The ways those Muslims park their cars? Constant disruption!"
His rant continued: "There's no logical reason for Sun Prairie to act like Murfreesboro, Tenn.," which exhibited anti-Islamic sentiment last year when area Muslims tried to build a mosque. "There's no reason for Sun Prairie to behave in this way. As a citizen of Dane County, I don't want this community to stain our tolerance."
The people most directly involved in this issue - the east-side jamaat, the Sun Prairie City Council, the management of the office park - reject this analysis. They say the mosque was rejected because of one reason: parking.
Local Muslim leaders say the east-side Friday prayer services typically draw up to 120 people. But Erschen predicts that if recent trends continue - and a new mosque is found - the jamaat may eventually have as many as 500 Muslims flocking to its mosque on Fridays.
Though frequently half-empty, the office park in Sun Prairie couldn't handle that much growth, says Sun Prairie Mayor John Murray. "This was a land-use issue, not a theological issue."
But even among jamaat members, there is suspicion that other factors were in play. One gray-bearded man who declined to give his name for fear of retribution says with a quivering voice that the mosque wasn't rejected over parking, it was discrimination.
"I'm sorry I'm so upset," he says. "I've lived in Madison for longer than 40 years, and I don't want to leave Madison because people need to know that there is discrimination, and other people are scared to say this."
That such accusations would become central to this issue is no surprise. Robert Howard, the UW-Madison professor of communications and religious studies, sees it as an amalgam of disparate forces, including: Wisconsin's current political polarization, U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast, and recent discriminatory spats over mosques in other places.
"In many ways, this controversy is a product of our times," Howard says. "Certainly in the last years, there has been a lot of attention paid to Islam. In that sense, people are paying more attention to it now than they were before.
"And discrimination does happen, so it doesn't surprise me that people would suspect this was discrimination."
On a recent Friday afternoon, the sound of Champeon's Arabic, a rhythmic baritone, rumbles down East Washington Avenue. The call to prayer is both haunting and hypnotic, and soon the mosque swells to capacity - and past. At least 200 people. Maybe more.
When this mosque, the Madison Dawa Circle, opened in 2003, fewer than 10 people came for Friday services. It's still the smallest of the mosques in the Madison area, with most of the roughly 4,000 Muslims in and around Madison either attending the west-side mosque or the one on campus.
But much has changed since 2003. Since then, the Dawa Circle has ridden a surge of attendance from Muslims hailing from Senegal and Gambia. Today, Champeon says, roughly 85% of the jamaat's 120 active members are ethnically West African.
During the service, the door never seems to close, as people continue to enter. The air is thick with the languages of Africa. Every part - from the foyer to the imam in front - is enveloped in prayer.
"The population is always getting bigger," says Ibrahim Drammeh, 19, gesturing outside the mosque. "See, people have to pray outside, and that stuff shouldn't be happening."
But that will continue to happen until another mosque site can be found - with, it seems, a lot of parking.
