PHOTO BY RACHAEL LEVY (C)
ISLAM IN AMERICA
Nahela Morales marches with other Latino Muslim women at a Hispanic pride parade in Union City, N.J. on October 5., 2013.
Another Growing Component of the Muslim Fabric Latino Muslims are bringing another experience to the Muslim American community BY RACHAEL LEVY
W
hen Yusuf Alamo became Muslim five years ago, people looked at him strangely. When he married a Muslim woman in 2011, his father’s side of the family didn’t attend the wedding. Alamo, 34, a Puerto Rican who was raised Mennonite in the New York City borough of Bronx, says he feels more accepted five years after his conversion to Islam. “Now, all these guys over here, when they see me, they’re not even Muslim, they say ‘salaam aleikum,’” Alamo said. While Hispanics in New York began converting to Islam in the 1970s — often in connection with the larger African American Islamic movement — conversion rates have been rising in recent years in the Bronx and the greater New York area, community members say. At Musa Mosque in Belmont, N.Y., where Alamo converted and later married, there were no Latino Muslims 15 years ago, said Virgil Asanov, a mosque employee. Now there are at least six out of about 200 regular attendees, Asanov said. 26
Converts cited different reasons for why they were drawn to Islam. Some converts never felt at home in Catholicism. Others say the increased focus on Islam after Sept. 11 prompted them to look into the religion for the first time. Still others convert through marriage, experts say. An influx of Muslim West Africans to the Bronx also increased Latinos’ contact with Islam, said Medina Sadiq, a Puerto Rican who converted to Islam 40 years ago and who is the executive director of the Southern Boulevard Business Improvement District in the Bronx. “Although the Bronx is predominantly Latino, there is a big influx of West Africans
and a big influence on the Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, and they are converting,” Sadiq said. “In the Bronx, it’s a tremendous change,” she added. About half of Bronx residents are Latino, according to the U.S. Census. The Bronx’s sub-Saharan African population grew from 51,609 in 2005 to about 63,510 in 2012, according to the American Community Survey. From 2000 to 2010, the number of Muslims in the Bronx tripled, from about 12,000 to more than 38,000 adherents, or about 3 percent of the Bronx population, according to the Religious Congregations & Membership Study. No conclusive data on Latino Muslims exists, said Harold Morales, a religious studies professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who specializes in Latino Muslim groups. “It’s completely unknown because the difficult part of this is, how do you define Latino?” Morales said. “If they have a grandmother or grandfather who is Latino, does that make them Latino? And if that’s the case, we don’t have that kind of demographic work.” “Each group has a different conception of what Latino means and what it means to be Muslim,” he added. Varying estimates put the number of Latino Muslims in the U.S. somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000, Morales said, though he believes that figure is on the lower end of that scale. There were about 52 million Latinos in the U.S. in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “Even if you find numbers, I’d take any
ISLAMIC HORIZONS JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014