The first night he arrived at his new apartment in Baltimore, earlier this year, Mahtab Hussain—in town for a residency at the Maryland Institute College of Art—noticed the sound of the azan, the traditional Muslim call to prayer. “I stood on the desk and opened the window to hear where it was coming from. That was the only time I heard it from my apartment,” he told me recently. “It felt like a sign.”
Hussain, a portrait photographer who has been documenting how Islam is lived in his native Britainhis temporary hometown so soon. “It cemented the idea that I had to make work in Baltimore,” he says. Immediately, Hussain started to map out the local mosques. Five were a bike ride away, among them Masjid Ul Haqq, first established in 1946 under Elijah Muhammad, at the time the leader of the Nation of Islam. (Its congregation has since shifted to a Sunni practice of Islam.) Hussain visited Ul Haqq the next day.
