From the local shops, doctors' offices and restaurants, men and women are making their way to Masjid al-Muminin, one of numerous storefront mosques in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

Either they are symbols of diversity, breaking the Ramadan fast with smiling politicians, or zealots, hurrying into their storefront mosques.

At 5:25 A.M., he rushes through an unmarked door and enters a nondescript storefront mosque for prayers.

The Al Rahman Islamic Center is a storefront mosque in Mississauga, Canada, a city of 734,000 west of Toronto, Canada.

Secular Cairenes endorsed it as a possible means toward greater government control over all of the tiny storefront mosques that have often proved a font of violent, extremist Islam.

Preaching his incendiary brand of revolutionary Islam at storefront mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City, the rotund, diabetic cleric quickly captured the attention of law-enforcement authorities.

That case was followed by the indictment of Ali al-Timimi, a charismatic leader known for his fiery sermons at a storefront mosque in Falls Church.

Mayor Koch yesterday urged his ad-ministration to find a way to return a storefront mosque to a group of Muslims who lost the property last year in a tangled dispute with the city.

He began to speak in small storefront mosques and Islamic centers.

Osama Abdel Meguid, an 18-year-old, once spent his afternoons listening to militant leaders call for the overthrow of the Government in small storefront mosques.