MS Free Press: “It was around 1 a.m. when Ray Elk and his family returned home from Ramadan celebrations on May 5. The children had school in the morning, but there was no way around the late night—not with a 40-minute-long drive home to their home in DeSoto County from the sunset-centered ceremony.
Elk spent upwards of two years working to make sure that one day his family—alongside the 15 other Muslim families in the area—could attend worship without setting aside such a huge portion of their day and using so much gas for the trip. After all, he thought, the city already has a dozen or so churches, so what difference would one mosque make to anyone else?
So he set about creating plans for the mosque—the Abraham House of God—to be built on Church Road in Horn Lake.
Shortly after Elk purchased the land for his dream mosque, one of the adjacent property owners approached him to offer to buy the land from him. Elk turned the offer down.
“He had a friend with him, and he told me, ‘Over our dead bodies will you build a mosque in Horn Lake,” Elk told the Mississippi Free Press.
About two years have gone into the planning of the mosque, so far.”