U.S. LATINOS MELD INTO MUSLIMS

Islam and Illegal Aliens

More than 200,000 converts

by

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

thelastcrusade.org

Islam represents the fastest-growing religion in the United States and Latinos represent one of the fastest-growing minorities. Increasingly, the two trends are coinciding in the form of Hispanic converts to Islam.

In 2004, the Christian Science Monitor placed the number of Muslim Latinos in the U.S. at 15,000.

Five years later, New York University and Newsweek sets this figure at 200,000. Seven percent of the Latinos in America are now Muslims. No other religion has shown such dramatic gains within a short span of time.

This growth is reflected in the appearance of such websites as HispanicMuslim.com and LatinoDawah.org

Dr. Dario Fernandez-Morera, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, says that many Latinos in America now trace their religious and cultural ancestry not to Christian Spain but the al-Andalus Moors, who governed much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492.

In keeping with this development, the Nation of Aztlan, a Hispanic separatist group with ties to Communist dictators Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, has formed a Latino-Islamic Public Affairs Committee to show that there is “no conflict between the Qu’ran and the New Testament” as they relate to Jesus Christ and that the divisions between Latinos and Muslims are “the consequences of the Zionist who reject Jesus as the true Messiah.”

One Chicano ex-convict tried to explain the allure of Islam for Latino inmates, and why Mexican-Americans sympathize with Palestinians: “The old Latin American revolutionaries converted to atheism, but the new faux revolutionary Latino American prisoner can just as easily convert to Islam….There reside in the Latino consciousness at least three historical grudges, three conflicting selves: the Muslim Moor, the Catholic Spanish and the indigenous Indian. For the Mexican inmates, the Palestinians had their homeland stolen and were oppressed in much the same way as Mexicans.”

So many Latinos have thronged to Islam that many mosques, including some in North Jersey, have set up special “Latino Muslim” groups within their congregations. And many now offer simultaneous Spanish translations as part of their religious services.

” When we reached out to non-Muslim organizations,” says Mohammed Al-Hayek, the imam at the Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson inUnion City, New Jersey, “ we weren’t even thinking of Hispanics; we didn’t know much about Hispanics. But they were the ones who responded. That’s when we realized that our outreach focus had to be specifically Hispanics.”

In response to this phenomenon, Imam Al-Hayek brought in the head of a mosque in Ecuador and asked him to go out into the immigrant enclaves of Hudson County and talk about Islam.

“Here was a Latino, someone the people in the Hispanic community could relate to, speaking to them in their own language about Islam,” say Al-Hayek. “It wasn’t Arabs speaking to them, and at the beginning especially, that made a big difference.”

The mosque’s efforts have paid off. Since Al-Hayek began the outreach
program seven years ago, hundreds of Hispanics have attended his mosque and converted to Islam

Mohamed El-Filali, the outreach director for the Islamic Center of Passaic County, holds an “open house” for Hispanics every summer.

“Many of the Latinos who accept Islam are looking for what many people are searching for when they turn to religion in general, which is a way out of one kind of life and a means by which to reach divine acceptance.”

Like many Hispanics at the mosque in Union City, Gaby Gonzalez, a 22 year-old woman from Honduras, came from a family of devout Catholics. “Islam means submission to God, not that you are chosen to go out and bomb a place – that is a specific group that is not practicing Islam the way it was intended,” Gonzalez says. “We don’t drink alcohol, we don’t eat pork, we pray five times a day, and people look at that and call us fanatics.”

Milagros Ali, another member of the Union City mosque, immigrated to the U.S. from her native Peru in 2002.

“I never thought I’d convert,” she says while taking a break from a Quran class. “I went to Catholic school — priests and nuns were all over the place.”

According to Professor Hjamil Martínez-Vázquez of Texas Christian University’s Department of Religion, the conversion of U.S. Latinos to Islam isn’t just a fad.

“It’s going to continue,” said Professor Martínez-Vázquez, who’s currently writing a book about Latino Muslims in the U.S. He explained that, after Sept. 11, there was a surge in converts as Latinos started reading about Islam for the first time. Many thought it answered recurring questions about Catholicism.

Note the PLO flags in background

Uruguayan-born Javier Graviz, 26, of Union City, wears a kufi and sports an unruly brown beard. He converted to Islam while in his late teens, and though he’s never had problems on the street for being Muslim, he knows others who have been called “Bin Laden” while walking down Bergenline Avenue.

Mr. Graviz maintains that his family was perplexed when he first converted but didn’t give him too many problems.

“They were like, ‘What are you getting into?’ My mom thought it was a cult. But I see other Latino families give their kids more trouble about it,” Graviz says. “Now mom is a Muslim, too.”

Imam Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, says Latinos and Muslims find they have a lot in common. “There are so many common denominators between immigrant Muslims and immigrant Hispanics who see the issues common to both of them — immigration issues, as it is a big discussion in the United States, and there are other issues of trying to find a job, keep a job, buy a home — all the same struggles two groups of people happen to be going through creates this bond between them”.