Standing shoulder to shoulder inside a community center in Morton Grove, Muslim men and boys bowed their heads in prayer. Behind them, women and girls prayed along, some with faces covered, some just their heads.
At the same moment, Muslims around Chicago and the world faced Mecca and prayed to Allah. They repeated the pattern of standing, kneeling, bending their foreheads to the ground, uttering prayers.
It was Ramadan — the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, in which Muslims fast and devote themselves to prayer, giving to the less fortunate and nourishing relationships. At the end of their fast each day, they ate an iftar — breaking their fast.
At this iftar in Morton Grove, Arabic, Urdu and English were spoken by Muslims whose roots traced to India, Pakistan, Jordan and Palestine. Soon, Spanish could also be heard.
Alongside the traditional Pakistani and Indian dishes — daal, butter chicken and endless naan — were Mexican dishes like molé y arroz.
It was a slice of the Muslim world that’s often overlooked — people whose families are from Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Peru.
There are no precise figures on how many Latino Muslims live in the Chicago area, where the population is about 30 percent Latino. But, according to various estimates, the 130 mosques in the city and suburbs are the spiritual home to a small but growing group of converts — Latino Muslims.
According to Aaron Siebert-Llera, an attorney with the Inner-City Muslim Action Network who is the current director of the Latino American Dawah Organization, the black Muslim population has been the predominant Muslim group in Chicago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Siebert-Llera says, the South Asian and Arab Muslim populations grew, separately on the North and Southwest Sides.
As with other immigrant groups, different communities tended to have their own places of worship.
“It’s just based on how Chicago has always been — a very divided city,” he says. “Muslim immigrants kind of followed the same pattern. These communities have all segmented themselves. Latinos are the same way. They stay in the neighborhoods where they’re comfortable.”
Siebert-Llera says Latino Muslims around Chicago tend to be more dispersed than they are in other cities. In Houston, for example, the Centro Islámico mosque opened in 2016 to serve Latino populations.
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