At midday on a chilly January Friday, 400-plus people pile into a drafty, plain white building perched between a Mormon Church and a 7-Eleven in Bellevue’s polyglot Lake Hills neighborhood. This used to be a Korean church; now it’s the Islamic Center of Eastside, ICOE or the Bellevue Mosque for short, and this is jumu’ah, the weekly prayer service at the heart of Islamic worship.
The hexadecagonal main hall is packed to the walls with men, some wearing taqiyah prayer caps, some in wool watch caps, many bare-headed. They come from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Sudan, Mali, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, China, Canada, South America — “over 100 countries,” says Khawja Shamsuddin, a retired banker from Bangladesh who’s active in the ICOE community.
