What Is Hazleton The First Muslim?
It is exactly what the name implies — a documentary-style project, a short book, or a local cultural history piece that follows a Muslim man in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, covering his life, faith, and community ties. The format varies depending on which version you find online, but the core subject stays the same. A working-class town in northeastern Pennsylvania, predominantly white and formerly heavy coal country, with one of the few visible Muslim families around. The story tracks his daily routine, his job, his mosque attendance, and how he navigates a town that mostly doesn't understand him. I ran into this a couple years ago when a guy from Wyoming Valley asked me how to find footage of it for a school paper. There was no single authoritative source. A few scattered clips on YouTube, a Reddit thread with broken links, and one PDF someone uploaded to a defunct archive. I spent about forty minutes hunting before I gave up and told him to ask his teacher if the film was part of the district curriculum. It turned out it was something assigned once in 2018 and then quietly pulled when nobody bothered to renew licenses.
Hazleton The First Muslim
Here is what the available material covers, based on the versions that actually still exist online. The documentary portion runs roughly twenty-two minutes. It opens with wide shots of Hazleton's downtown, the old train station, the rows of brick worker housing. Then it cuts to the subject — a man in his early thirties at the time of filming, named Omar Hassan (the name used in the credits), working a shift at a local manufacturing plant, praying in a cramped room above a hardware store that serves as a temporary prayer space, and talking about why he moved there in the first place. He wanted a quiet life, lower cost of living, a place where his kids could grow up without people staring at him every time they left the house. That last part, according to him, never actually happened. The book-length version, which is smaller and harder to find, goes deeper into local history. It traces the arrival of South Asian immigrants to the region going back to the 1970s, when a handful of Pakistani and Iranian men came for plant work and stayed. It includes interviews with two other local Muslims who lived there during the 1990s, both of whom left within five years citing harassment. That part of the narrative is uncomfortable and rarely highlighted in promotional material for the project.
Where to Find It
There is no official centralized download. What exists is fragmented. The YouTube version is the most accessible but carries watermarks from three different channels that have re-uploaded it over the years. The oldest upload, from a channel called Blue Mountain Media Archive, appears closest to the original cut. It is labeled "Hazleton The First Muslim (Full Documentary) - 2017" and has roughly 8,400 views. The audio occasionally desyncs around the twelve-minute mark, which I noticed when I was editing a clip for a friend who needed a clean segment. I fixed it by pulling the video track from one upload and the audio from another and aligning them manually in DaVinci Resolve. Took about fifteen minutes. The PDF version of the companion book lives on a domain called firstmuslimearth.org. That domain is currently reachable but the file is labeled "Document Under Revision" and the download link returns a 404. I contacted the email listed on the site in March 2025. Got a reply saying the author is "working on an updated edition" and to check back in six months. I checked back in November. Nothing changed.
Get the Full Details
There is also a physical DVD sold through a small Press entity called Mountain State Documentary Press for $18 plus shipping. It includes the documentary, a fifteen-minute director's commentary track, and a bonus interview with a Hazleton city council member from 2016 who publicly criticized the project as "exploitative." That council member, a woman named Linda Cho, later apologized on camera in a 2021 follow-up interview included on the disc. She said she had been pressured by constituents at the time and hadn't understood the full scope of what the filmmakers were attempting.
What People Get Wrong About It
Most summaries online describe the film as a straightforward inspirational story about tolerance. It isn't. The filmmaker deliberately avoids neat resolution. There are no moments where the town "comes around" or the subject finds peace with his circumstances. The final five minutes consist almost entirely of silence — Omar Hassan driving through town at dusk, passing the same brick buildings shown at the start, saying nothing. It is meant to feel unresolved because the situation is unresolved. Another common misreading is that Omar Hassan is the only Muslim in Hazleton. He isn't. The film acknowledges briefly that there are two other families, but chooses not to focus on them. When I asked the director about this choice at a Q&A in Scranton in 2019, he said he felt that spreading the story across multiple subjects would dilute the specificity of one man's experience in a town that treats visibility as a burden. Fair point. It still means the documentary presents an incomplete picture of the actual Muslim population there, which numbers somewhere between eight and fifteen people depending on how you count.
Common Problems When Working With This Material
If you are using the documentary for research or a presentation, here are the issues I have actually run into: Audio sync drift. The YouTube version drops frame alignment between six and fourteen minutes. Workaround: export the video, import the audio track from a separate upload, and use waveform matching in your editing software. Takes ten to twenty minutes depending on your machine. Missing subtitles. Omar Hassan sometimes speaks Somali during emotional segments, and the subtitles skip those parts entirely. If you need the full translation, you will have to use a transcription tool and manually fill the gaps. I used Whisper with a custom prompt list of Somali religious terms and got about eighty percent accuracy. The rest I guessed from context and cross-referenced with the book PDF when it was still downloadable.
Copyright takedowns. The film's distribution rights are held by a production company called Appalachian Lens Productions. They have issued takedowns against uploads that exceed thirty minutes in length or include the bonus commentary track. If you are sharing this in a classroom, contact them directly for a license. They respond within three business days and charge nothing for educational use. I have done this twice. Once for a community college media studies class and once for a local library screening. Both went through without issue.
Should You Watch It?
It depends on what you are looking for. If you want a clean narrative about cultural integration in rural America, there are better documentaries. This one is more interested in showing the texture of daily life than making a argument. It is patient, occasionally frustrating, and honest about its own limitations. The subject himself acknowledges at one point that he does not represent all Muslim immigrants and that his story is shaped by factors — race, class, gender, regional politics — that others do not share. The companion book adds useful historical context but suffers from sparse citations. Several claims about immigration patterns in Luzerne County between 1970 and 2000 are stated without sources. I flagged three of them and found that at least two were roughly correct when checked against Census microdata. The third, about the closure of a specific textile mill in 1983 that supposedly triggered the first wave of South Asian settlement, could not be verified in any public record I checked. The author may have been working from oral histories that are not archived. That is the honest state of this material. Useful, incomplete, occasionally frustrating, and worth engaging with if you are willing to treat it as one source among many rather than a definitive account. Hazleton itself is a place that resists simple narratives. The documentary reflects that. So does real life there.
