Wearing comfortably baggy blue jeans, college freshman Sara Ahmed paces around her Batavia house, chatting on a cordless phone with a friend. In the white-carpeted living room, Sara’s mother, Mazher Ahmed, is kneeling on a small prayer rug, facing Mecca. Head covered by colorful silk scarves, she is quietly reciting the third of her required five daily prayers to Allah.
The savory smells of Indian home cooking are wafting from the Ahmed kitchen, where the family cat, Haji, is busy crunching lunch from his food bowl. With his long white hair, Haji is named for Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, who dress in white during their obligatory visit to Islam’s holy city.
In ways quintessential and inconsequential in the Batavia home of Hamid and Mazher Ahmed, longtime leaders in the west suburban Muslim community, suburbia intersects Islam. Throughout the area, Islam is American, and Muslims are the next-door neighbors.
In towns in DuPage County and the Fox Valley, mosque meets mall. In businesses that line the busy east-west corporate corridors, high-tech engineers and healthcare workers pause during their workday for prayers. Now, during the month of Ramadan (Dec. 20-Jan. 18), Muslims may be more visible in workplaces as they fast during daylight hours to commemorate the time when the prophet Mohammed received the Koran, the holy book of their faith.
The area’s Muslim community is coming of age. Only a few studies have been done and estimates vary, but the number of Muslims in metropolitan Chicago is thought to range from 300,000 to 350,000. The total includes a small group, roughly 10 percent, who consider themselves members of the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan.
The city’s western suburbs are home to around 18 percent of the metropolitan Muslim community. A generation of immigrant parents, largely ethnic Indian and Pakistani, settled in the suburbs and became American citizens. They are now raising children who are distinctly, and distinctive, young Americans, down to their laughter, backpacks, fashionably flared jeans and Internet proclivities. These children are at home, literally, in the suburbs, commuting to nearby colleges and universities while living with their parents, as culture and religion prescribe.
“I would really have no hesitation in calling the United States — or even Woodridge, for that matter — my home,” says Kashif Siddiqui, 27, a graduate student at Benedictine University who speaks four languages and lived in three countries as well as on the East Coast before moving to Woodridge last year. Siddiqui, who is studying for a second master’s degree, is the president of the Muslim Student Association at Benedictine University, which claims 50 members.
Benedictine, a Catholic institution in Lisle, is ironically one stronghold of Muslim students in higher education. Siddiqui says the religious motivations of the school and the organization constitute a “common bond and link. There tends to be commitment to faith.”
At a weekly meeting of the student association inside the university’s Krasa Center for student activities, students are deepening their commitment to their faith by studying the Islamic concepts of heaven and hell. Most of the students were born in this country and graduated from suburban high schools. Like many other area Muslims, these students are familiar with stereotyping prevalent on the cultural airwaves, and their response is uniform and tolerant. They say the image of Islam as warlike, and its perceived association with terrorism, is unfair and uninformed and about as true as linkage between Oklahoma City terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh and Christianity.
“It is hard to paint 1.2 billion (Muslims) with the same brush,” says Siddiqui.
Muslim women are familiar with the perception of themselves as oppressed, perhaps visibly symbolized in American eyes by the head scarf, or hijab, of Muslim women. They respond that hijab is a choice with advantages in American culture, where women are routinely viewed as sex objects. Moreover, Islam accorded women property ownership and inheritance rights long before Western cultures did so.
“It’s great for women,” says Mahwesh Javed, 17, of Naperville, a freshman at Benedictine.
Some of the unveiled young women at Benedictine say they will eventually wear the head scarf as part of their daily dress. For Deeba Parvez of Carol Stream, the scarf represents a commitment to faith she wants to make with sincerity.
“I’m not ready to do that,” says Parvez, 19.
Hijab is, indeed, a commitment with which American women who convert to Islam may have some difficulty, says Nancy Ali, an American Muslim who leads a support group for American converts that meets each Sunday at the Islamic Foundation in Villa Park.
“It identifies our beliefs,” says Ali, who is now working with 30 to 35 people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, in the group. “A Muslim woman, people know who she is when she wears the hijab.”
Ali, who married a Pakistani man 25 years ago, says her husband was initially concerned that her acceptance of Islam was too rapid. She had spent more than four years as a Roman Catholic nun before her conversion.
“I felt really happy to belong to a religion where I didn’t feel like I was locking myself away from the world,” she says.
The Lombard resident is also happy to regularly run into Muslims in stores throughout her community. She counts 11 Muslim families in her subdivision of 150 homes, Pinebrook.
“The Muslim community has really expanded in Villa Park and Lombard,” she says. “There are tons of us here now, and it’s wonderful and I love it.”
The local population of Muslims was smaller when the Islamic Foundation was established in the western suburbs in 1974. It purchased its current site in Villa Park in 1983 and began operating a school for children there 10 years ago. Enrollment in the Islamic Foundation School has expanded from 45 initially to 330 this year in the K-10 school, which plans to add an 11th grade in 1999 and a 12th grade the following year.
The school’s track record and Muslim population growth have contributed to the enrollment increase, says school director Inamul Haq. “They don’t feel we are experimenting with their kids,” he says with a smile. A staff of 30 includes Muslim and non-Muslim teachers.
“Asalaam Alaikum,” says kindergarten teacher Judith McAlexander, offering the traditional Muslim greeting that means “peace be upon you” to Haq as he enters the classroom. “We’re doing show and tell.”
McAlexander, a Christian, has taught for four years at the school, which offers a standard public school curriculum in addition to religion and Arabic. “They hired us because we’re professionals,” she says.
The Scandinavian heritage of Mary Hemmingsen, an American Muslim teacher, is apparent. She is statuesque and blue-eyed. But she is also wearing a hijab and a flowing Arabian-style gown that almost reaches her ankles.
“This is like my community now,” says Hemmingsen, who married a Pakistani man two years ago and says the two families still haven’t come to terms with the cross-cultural union. “This feels like home now.”
Signs of the flourishing Muslim community are readily visible. The Islamic Foundation recently dedicated its $3.5 million mosque with a visit from Shaikh Saleh Bin Humaid, imam of Mecca’s sacred mosque. The high-ranking religious dignitary had been invited by local Muslim leaders to Elgin, where a mosque and school for Islamic studies operates, and met with city Mayor Kevin Kelly.
Another new mosque, the Fox Valley Muslim Community Center, opened in Aurora in 1995. A Muslim high school, College Preparatory School of America, opened in 1994 in Lombard.
Muslims are establishing a political presence as well. The Oak Brook-based International Strategy and Policy Institute published its first position paper in 1995. ISPI is a Muslim think tank intended to advance the statement of Muslim concerns in American policymaking. This spring it cooperated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Chicago to present a colloquium on pluralism, bringing noted comparative religion scholar Diana L. Eck of Harvard University to speak.
Institute executive director Dr. Javeed Akhter, a pediatric pulmonologist by profession, says the organization will focus on issues important to the building of a civil society, including the protection of American Muslim civil rights in a climate of opinion that too frequently equates the terms “Muslim” and “terrorist.” So he is busy trying to convey a more informed view of Islam and frequently speaks about it in a variety of professional settings.
Still other Muslims feel themselves personal ambassadors to their neighbors. Ashraf Ansari, 17, is serving his fourth year as president of the Muslim Student Association at Fenton High School in Bensenville.
“For me it’s like I’m living in this society to give a better impression of my religion and everything,” says Ansari, explaining why he prefers a public school to a religious one. “If I surround myself with my own people, I won’t be able to tell people about my religion.”
Mazhar Hussaini of Bolingbrook, a nutritionist who also publishes Islamic Sunday school materials, says the behavior of Muslims here will model for their suburban neighbors more accurately what Islam teaches.
“By virtue of reflecting Koranic behavior through our behavior we will win the battle slowly but surely, win in the sense of coexist in a peaceful manner,” says Hussaini, who came from India in 1973 to complete a master’s degree and moved to the Chicago area in 1975.
“In American culture there will be Islamic culture,” he says. “We are American now, whether we like it or not. Our identity as Americans is as strong as our identity as a Muslim.”
