UPDATED: Treasury Department authorizes release of religious tiles to Manassas Mosque

The U.S. Treasury has authorized the release of religious tiles bound for the Manassas Mosque from Dulles Airport, where they’ve been held since late June.

Leaders from Manassas Mosque and Northern Virginia’s Islamic community said that U.S. Customs and Border Protection was threatening to destroy nearly 750 pounds of tiles featuring Quranic verses simply because they came from Iran, where U.S. sanctions have targeted the government’s nuclear program. But the tiles are just a gift from another mosque in the city of Qom, the faith leaders said, and have nothing to do with the Iranian government.

On Monday, the Treasury Department notified mosque leaders via their attorney that the tiles were authorized for release, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a news release.

Customs and Border Protection agents originally said the mosque can either have the tiles returned to Iran or destroyed.

On Aug. 10, the mosque and its allies took pleas for the tiles to be released public. Imam Abu Nahidian was joined by Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Rafi Uddin Ahmed, president of Prince William County’s Dar Al-Noor mosque and the Muslim Association of Virginia.

“The tiles are religious items; they are not weapons of mass destruction subject to sanctions,” Awad said during a news conference at the mosque, just off Sudley Road outside Manassas.

The religious tiles were meant for a new mosque in the Manassas area. Nahidian said he hopes to break ground next spring on its new facility, about six miles from its current home. He said he has owned the property since 1973 and instead of trying to split it among his nine children and 26 grandchildren, he wanted to donate the land to his community, where it can be used for the mosque and a corresponding Islamic school.

The tiles would be used for the new building’s “mihrab,” a niche that indicates the direction of Mecca, the holy city Muslims face while praying. According to Nahidian, the mosque received a similar shipment from Iran about eight months ago. This time, however, it was stopped by customs agents.

In an email to representatives of the mosque, agents said the shipments should have been cleared beforehand through the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which regulates imports and financial assets coming from nations such as Iran or Cuba under sanction by the United States.

Nahidian said that the tiles have no real financial value, and thus shouldn’t be considered imports in the same way as most assets regulated by the OFAC.

“Before, the same kind of shipment arrived and we received it. The person … was asking, ‘Is it a gift?’ I said ‘Yes, it is. … Frankly, it doesn’t have value. If you put it outside, nobody’s going to buy it.’ Same thing as here,” Nahidian said.

Awad said tiles and other decorative elements for Western mosques are frequently sent from the Muslim world, where expertise in the craft is more common. Prayer rugs, for example, will often be imported from Iran, Turkey or Afghanistan.

Similarly, expertly-made tiles for mosque walls featuring the geometric design favored in the Muslim world are commonly found in Iran. In the U.S., he said, the same level of craftsmanship is harder to find.

“Some of them are made at home here, but it does not really reach the level of perfection that you see,” Awad said, adding that Qom is a sacred place in its own right. According to an article in the Jakarta Post, Qom is one of the holiest cities for Shiites.

“The Muslim communities in the Western world have not developed the homemade skillsets to produce their own perfection of artwork,” Awad said.

The tiles held at Dulles Airport, according to a release from Manassas Mosque, include verses regarding the direction of prayer.