STARKVILLE — One by one, or two or three at a time, they trickled in, barefoot or in socks, on the plush green carpet, to the main room of the Islamic Center of Mississippi.

Once each found a spot for himself, he stood facing front and put his hands at the center of his chest. A few seconds later, he bowed. Then he sat with his legs folded up under him and brought his head to the floor. Then he brought his head up. Then he stood up. The motions continued for a few minutes, and then he sat down, with crossed legs, and listened.

Friday afternoon prayer had come again, and so about 50 Muslim boys and men were descending upon the mosque on Herbert Street — one of several in Mississippi.

Farag Gaber stood behind a golden lectern at the front of the room giving a sermon in English and Arabic on the significance of Ramadan, the month when Muslims worldwide abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and having sex. This year, the observance will begin Aug. 21 or 22, depending on when the new moon appears.

“It’s like a training month for all of us to continue doing these good things,” Gaber said to the congregation. “To watch our tongues, our hearts at all times — it’s just a training period. The real meaning of fast is to abstain from committing sin.”

After the sermon, the men gathered toward the front of the room and stood shoulder to shoulder in three lines. Then they went through prayers together.

The individuals streamed out of the room and put their shoes back on at about 1:45 p.m. Sunshine awaited them. Many gathered on the front yard of the house adjacent to the mosque, which the mosque owns, and mingled with each other.

For Hachemi Boussouar, a native of Algeria who works at a convenience store in Amory, the Friday afternoon prayer ceremony not only offers a time for prayer — Muslims pray five times a day — but also an opportunity to catch up with fellow congregants and make sure they’re all doing well. If one or another is sick, a visit may be in store, he said.

“It’s not a real friend thing,” he said. “It’s a religious commitment. Friendship will build up later. You know, we have a community. It’s a good thing to be together.”

He said he is thankful they can all gather together at the Starkville mosque, which is the closest one to him. They can do so because of the mosque’s harmony with the city and its residents.

The harmony was hard-won. In 1988, the fifth circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, La., reversed an Aberdeen district court ruling upholding the Starkville Board of Aldermen’s unanimous vote in 1983 to deny a zoning exception that would have let the Muslims continue to use their one-story building on Herbert Street as a mosque.

A resident who represented property owners around the mosque had spoken out against granting the exception because of “congestion, parking and traffic problems” in the area, according to a court document, and soon thereafter the board voted.

The board had granted the exception to several churches in the city in years past, but in the case of the mosque, the aldermen said, parking and noise issues could not be reconciled.

The city suggested the Muslims locate the mosque outside the city and inside Oktibbeha County. But many of the Muslims did not have cars.

In the end, the court ruled the city “did not act in a religiously neutral manner when it rejected an exception for the Islamic center” and used different standards to approve the mosque than it had for other “worship facilities.”

Even though Boussouar is part of the ICM congregation, he said he could understand why the city might have been hesitant to accept his people.

“You can’t blame them,” he said. “They don’t know you. ... They have a right to be careful. ... We have to follow their rules.”

A few years after the court cases, the mayor of Starkville and the president of Mississippi State University at the time came to the mosque, and in later years classes from MSU and Mississippi University for Women have spent time observing gatherings there, said Gaber, a chemistry professor at Lane College in Jackson, Tenn., who drives down to Starkville every Friday to participate in the service and oversee Sunday school. Gaber is originally from Libya, but his family has lived in Starkville for many years, he said.

Today a new mosque stands in the place of the old one, and since the court cases, the number of congregants has risen year after year, said Oda Dakhlalla, the mosque’s imam and a native of the Bethlehem in the West Bank. (Dakhlalla’s wife, Lisa, runs Shaherazad’s, a Middle Eastern restaurant in Starkville’s Cotton District.) He estimated 25 countries are represented in the congregation.

Umut Kaya of Starkville said he finds it interesting to see how different people practice and speak in Arabic.

“Cultures evolve, and traditions evolve, and you’re here, you’re like, ‘Why is he doing this? Why is he doing is this way?’” said Kaya, a native of Turkey who teaches German, Latin and math at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science.

“But in the end, you know, Islam promotes unity,” he said. “... We are evolving in our understanding as well.”