Islam Gains Hispanic Converts

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By MARCELA ROJAS
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original Publication: October 30, 2005)


http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/p...19/1028/NEWS12

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http://hispanicmuslims.com/

http://www.latinodawah.org/

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It surprises many of their friends and family, but some young US Latinas say Islam offers women more respect.

By Christine Armario | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1227/p11s02-ussc.html


A NEW PATH : Jasmine Pinet is one of a number of US Latinas who have converted to Islam. Ms. Pinet says she feels more comfortable in Muslim garb as she walks the streets of her home in Jersey City, N.J.

UNION CITY, N.J. - Jasmine Pinet sits on the steps outside a mosque here, tucking in strands of her burgundy hair beneath a white head scarf, and explaining why she, a young Latina, feels that she has found greater respect as a woman by converting to Islam.

"They're not gonna say, 'Hey mami, how are you?' " Ms. Pinet says of Muslim men. "Usually they say, 'Hello, sister.' And they don't look at you like a sex object."

While some Latinas her age try to emulate the tight clothes and wiggling hips of stars like Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera, Ms. Pinet and others are adopting a more conservative lifestyle and converting to Islam. At this Union City, N.J., mosque, women account for more than half of the Latino Muslims who attend services here. Nationwide, there are about 40,000 Latino Muslims in the United States, according to the Islamic Society of North America.

Many of the Latina converts say that their belief that women are treated better in Islam was a significant factor in converting. Critics may protest that wearing the veil marks a woman as property, but some Latina converts say they welcome the fact that they are no longer whistled at walking down a street. "People have an innate response that I'm a religious person, and they give [me] more respect," says Jenny Yanez, another Latina Muslim. "You're not judged if you're in fashion or out of fashion."

Other Latina Muslims say they also like the religion's emphasis on fidelity to one's spouse and family.

But for many family members and friends, these conversions come as a surprise - often an unwelcome one. They may know little of Islam other than what they have heard of the Taliban and other extremist groups.

That creates an inaccurate image, insists Leila Ahmed, a professor of women's studies and religion at Harvard University. "It astounds me, the extent to which people think Afghanistan and the Taliban represent women and Islam." What's really going on, she says, is a reshaping of the relationship between women and Islam. "We're in the early stages of a major rethinking of Islam that will open Islam for women. [Muslim scholars] are rereading the core texts of Islam - from the Koran to legal texts - in every possible way."

New views of women and Islam may be more prevalent in countries like the US, where women read the Koran themselves and rely less on patriarchal interpretations.

"I think the women here are asserting more their rights and their privileges," says Zahid Bukhari, director of the American-Muslim Studies Program at George- town University. "

Some Latina Muslims say they harbored stereotypes about Muslim women before deciding to convert, but changed their minds once becoming close friends with a Muslim.

"I always thought, geez, I feel sorry for women who have to wear those veils," says Pinet. Then she met her Muslim boyfriend and began studying the Koran with a group of Muslim women. She says she was impressed with the respect they received.

"A women is respected because she is the mother, she takes care of the children, and she's the one that enforces the rules," Pinet says. "They're the ones who are sacred."

Critics of the decisions of Latinas to convert to Islam say they are adopting a religion just as patriarchical as the Roman Catholic faith that many are leaving behind.

"While it's true the Latino culture tends to be more male-dominated, and there's a tendency toward more machismo, I would venture to say it exists [in Islam] as well," says Edwin Hernandez, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Religion at the University of Notre Dame.

Latinos account for six percent of the 20,000 Muslim conversions in the United States each year, according to a report published by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Anecdotal evidence suggests this number may be rising. But that doesn't mean it's getting any easier for the women who make this choice.

"At first it was anger and then more like sadness," Nylka Vargas says of her parents' reaction when she told them she was converting to Islam and began dressing more conservatively. "They would sometimes feel strange being around me."

Pinet's family has been more accepting, but she too has encountered some resistance in her community. It's as if you've betrayed your own kind," she says.

For some, the cultural differences are the most trying.

"I can't eat pork, I can't wear [form- fitting] clothing, I can't dance in the clubs, I'm not gonna attend church," says Ms. Yanez, who is of Cuban and Spanish descent. "But I keep my language, and there's still things that we do as Latinos that they don't have to change."

Within the Islamic community, Latina Muslims report being warmly received, although language barriers sometimes exist for Latinas who only speak Spanish. There are few Spanish services at mosques and a limited number of Islamic texts in Spanish.

Grassroots organizations specifically for Latino Muslims have been created in recent years. They function in part as an informational resource for new converts and but also as a support group for those who encounter difficulties at home.

Ultimately, Latina Muslims say that time heals the divisions and angst their conversion sometimes causes among friends and family.

"What I had to learn was patience," says Vargas, whose family came to accept her religious beliefs after several years. "Sometimes things are not as we want them."

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I must admit that when i read the Quran where it says Do not follow the disblievers because their aim is to take you back to disbelieve and also because they are jealous I wondered how come?.
I posed the question to the non muslims Including a jewish friend and they all agreed in one way or another that Islam is the religion that bonds people from all over the globe, they all said
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you give charity without showing off
you help without questioning
and you all speak the same language of the Quran
and most of all you are always close to each others and everyone is a brother or sister to you
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. and they all said that they are jealous of that bond despite the different language and different race.
Hamdolilah today in the Mosque I was gobbed smacked seing so many English sisters with full hijab and their children accompagning them. mashallah they looked so pure. you can see peace in their faces .
I know fully understand why islam is peace. since I left Kufr i see nothing but success and happiness, similar thing is being told by the brothers who revert back to Islam all their anger has been washed away, their relationship with their children have improved and they no longer care what happen to them because they fully understand that they are looked after by Allah swt Hamdolilah
Allah is great

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This thread touchd me!
Havnt you noticed converts practice Islam better then us the ones who were born muslims!

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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/loc...,7380692.story

By Tal Abbady
Staff Writer

January 3, 2006


New faith
Marie Hernandez, with 20-month-old daughter Fatimah, grew up Catholic and converted to Islam after reading the Koran's teachings. Some Latinas in South Florida are becoming Muslim because of the religion's emphasis on family and women's roles.


Melissa Matos slips into an easy communion with her newest circle of friends.

At regular meetings, they invoke their families' native towns in Cuba or the Dominican Republic, or recipes for arroz con pollo. English is interspersed with Spanish. And, posing no incongruity to the women, hijabs, or Muslim head scarves, frame their faces.

When she converted to Islam in May, Matos, a Dominican-American raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, expected the passage to be lonely.

"I said to myself, `Great, I'm going to be the only Muslim Latina in the whole world,'" said Matos, 20, a student at Florida International University who recently joined a group of Latina converts to Islam.

Scholars say Matos is part of a growing number of Latin women converting to Islam for its emphasis on family, piety and clearly defined women's roles, values converts say were once integral to Hispanic culture but have waned after years of assimilation.

The women are among 40,000 Hispanic converts to Islam in the United States, according to the Islamic Society of North America. About a decade ago, Latino converts began forming Internet groups such as the Latino American Dawah Organization and the women's group Piedad that trace Hispanics' ties to Islam back to the Spanish Moors.

Grass-roots leaders say the number of converts grew sharply after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, bucking a trend of thought among Americans that links Islam to terrorism.

Sofian Abelaziz, president of the Miami-based American Muslim Association of North America, said one indication of the conversions is the demand for Spanish-language copies of the Koran, which spiked after Sept. 11. In the past two years, the group has filled orders for 5,500 Spanish-language Korans for schools, cultural institutes and prisons around the country, out of 12,000 orders total.

Matos and other converts say the recent media spotlight on Islam was their first exposure to the faith and spurred further learning.

"[Before] I picked up the Koran, my attitude was, `There's something wrong with this religion,'" said Matos, 20, of Miramar. A friend gave her a copy of the Koran. "But then I saw it was filled discussions of grace from God, of the protection of things we talk about as human rights, of a universal brotherhood. ... This is a religion that encourages thinking and contemplation," she said. In May, Matos converted by reciting the shahada, a prayer in which converts attest to their belief in Allah and Mohammed in front of Muslim witnesses. Islam now circumscribes her life. She is studying Arabic, prays five times a day, wears a hijab and follows Islamic dietary laws.

"There is no conflict between my Dominican heritage and Islam. I grew up in a culture where you have a family you love and you take care of one another, and Islam complements those values," Matos said.

Matos' conversion rattled friends and family members who linked Islam with Taliban-style oppression, but scholars say Latina converts are practicing a confessional Islam that offers strong moral guidelines.

"People might ask, `Why would women convert to a religion that is so traditional in its gender roles?' But that's part of the appeal. There's a recovery of dignity," said Manuel Vasquez, religion professor at the University of Florida. "Second-generation Latinas are caught between the morality of their parents and the morality of the larger mainstream society. Islam offers a clear code. Women ... know they are respected, taken care and protected from the negative influences of secular society. It's a kind of empowerment they don't experience in a culture that is constantly sexualizing them, and Latinas are particularly sexualized."

The converts may be fashioning a form of Islam that meets their needs in a country that allows them to do so.

"It's a comment on our society, on the fragmentation of American family life," said Leila Ahmed, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively on gender in Islam. "We have to bear that this is happening in America, where there is freedom of choice. These women are not converting in order to go and live in Saudi Arabia. We also don't know how permanent these conversions are in a country where people convert two or three times in their lives."

Like many converts, Matos calls herself a "revert," a reference to the Muslim belief that everyone is born in a state of submission to Allah. Being Hispanic and following Islam now are inextricable.

"When I meet with [my group] we speak in Spanish," she said. "We'll talk about what it was like back in Cuba or the Dominican Republic. And yet we're all wearing hijabs. It reminds me of the universality of Islam."

Religious leaders say the Latina converts assimilate easily into Islam.

"What they see in Islam is what their parents used to practice: that respect for elders, the care and protection that husbands are obligated to give their wives," said Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, director of the Darul Uloom Islamic Institute in Pembroke Pines. "Many converts tell me, `This is how my parents grew up.'"

When a Hispanic Muslim friend slipped a copy of the Koran into her hands, Marie Hernandez found "a total way of life."

"I started reading about the life of the Prophet Mohammed, and I was convinced that this is the true prophet of God," said Hernandez, 22, of Boca Raton. "This is the message I have to follow."

Islam also was a powerful antidote to a troubled adolescence, during which Hernandez left home for two years.

Conversion meant the end of partying, very little television and waking up at 5 a.m. for her first prayers. It also meant reconciling with her Honduran-born Catholic parents and becoming a Muslim wife. She met her husband, an Egyptian, through a meeting arranged by her imam. They have a 20-month-old toddler, Fatimah, named for the Prophet Mohammed's iconic daughter.

"At first my parents thought it was weird, and they were scared," Hernandez said. "They thought I might get too extreme in my worship. But now we have a beautiful relationship. Part of being a Muslim is to honor your parents, and I started treating my dad the way I should have."

A strong draw for Hernandez was the idea that for Muslims, Islam is the culmination of all religions. In the Koran, Jesus is venerated as a prophet, and entire passages are devoted to the Virgin Mary -- a ubiquitous figure in Latin American culture.

"It's important to know that Jesus and Mary play a role in Islam. Most Latin Americans are Catholic because that's all they know, that's what their predecessors were," said Hernandez, who cooks tamales to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

Converts say they are evidence that Latino identity is in flux.

"One reaction Latinos have with regard to Latinos who come to Islam is, `You're leaving your religion! You're leaving your culture!' But Latino culture is evolving," said Juan Galvan, president of the Texas chapter of the Latino American Dawah Organization.

"It's quite possible that Islam will one day be inseparable from Latino culture just as Christianity is."

Roraima Aisha Kanar, 52, is from a family of Cuban exiles who fled Cuba in 1959 and settled in Miami. Dissatisfied with Catholicism, she converted to Islam 30 years ago.

"My mother was devastated. I couldn't go to the beach and wear a bathing suit. I had to be covered and not wear makeup. I couldn't wear low-cut dresses. I felt like telling her, `Do you mean to tell me that's what's important in life?'" she said. "I think Latinas who convert are looking for a culture that we'd always had and then lost: strictness in the family, respect towards the elderly, moral and spiritual ties and the importance of having God in your life. Our grandparents had values similar to that. As converts we're just coming back to our roots."

After her conversion, she grew apart from her nightclub-hopping friends. She married a Turkish man with whom she has three children.

For Kanar, wearing the hijab, which some see as a sign of subjugation, is liberating.

"I lived through the '70s women's-lib movement," said Kanar, who works in accounting and owns a real estate business. "As a woman you wanted to be accepted as a person with a brain and not just a sexual object that had to be looking pretty to men all the time. I saw covering as something that would give me a lot of self-esteem. It did."

Kanar says she has straddled her Latino heritage and Islam comfortably.

"As soon as you speak to me you forget I'm wearing a hijab. I'm Cuban, and I speak with my hands. I love Celia Cruz. We don't go to Calle Ocho and we don't celebrate Christmas. We eat Spanish food, and though we won't have pork, we can do a nice lamb. What does it mean to be a Cuban, really? I feel Cuban, but I'm a Muslim Cuban."

Tal Abbady can be reached at tabbady@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6624.


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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Sunday, February 26, 2006

By ELIZABETH LLORENTE
STAFF WRITER

http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=...ZWVFRX l5Mg==


Last year, Gaby Gonzalez wore black nail polish and black eye shadow. She had a messy room, standoffs with mom and occasional drinks.

Today, the Honduran-born 20-year-old is known as Sister Gaby.

She proudly wears her jade-green hijab, which forms a nearly perfect frame around her delicate features and large brown eyes. She prays several times a day and does not wear makeup, eat pork or even utter the phrase "happy hour" – that is all haram, she said, or prohibited in Arabic.

"In my past, I focused on myself. I didn't think about other people, about my parents, just myself and my circle of friends," she said. "Now, every day I strive to be better, to do good, to help others. I stopped being selfish and arrogant."

Gonzalez, who majors in anthropology at Montclair State University, is one of thousands of Latinos who have converted to Islam. So many Latinos have thronged to Islam in recent years 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.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, mosque leaders saw the fear and anger mushrooming against Muslims and decided to reach out to non-Muslim organizations and community groups to demystify Islam and to condemn terrorism.

"When we reached out, we weren't even thinking of Hispanics; we didn't know much about Hispanics," said Mohammed Al-Hayek, the imam at the Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson, in Union City. "But they were the ones who responded. That's when we realized that our outreach focus had to be specifically Hispanics."

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. For four months, the Ecuadorean went out into the crowded streets of Union City and the surrounding towns, and encouraged people to ask questions about Islam and Muslims. He also visited homes and spoke to local organizations.

"Here was a Latino, someone the people in the Hispanic community could relate to, speaking to them in their own language about Islam," said Al-Hayek, a thin man with a friendly face and wide smile. "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 five years ago, some 500 Hispanics have visited the mosque, sitting in prayer sessions as guests and attending seminars on Islam. Many converted, usually from Catholicism. Now, Al-Hayek said, of the approximately 1,000 people who regularly worship at the mosque, nearly 200 are Hispanic converts.

Mohamed El-Filali, the outreach director for the Islamic Center of Passaic County, held an "open house" for Hispanics last 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."

Hispanics and Muslims note that their communities have much in common – tight-knit families, reverence for their elders and a tendency to dote on children. They also note that Islam is a core part of the history of Spain, where Muslim Moors ruled for about 800 years. And many Spanish words, they say, come from Arabic.

"They're coming back to their roots," Al-Hayek said.

The sound of Spanish now fills the air at many mosques. On Wednesday night at the mosque in Union City, a group of Hispanic converts spoke Spanish among themselves, with the more veteran ones teaching the newest mosque members how to put on a hijab.

"I don't understand a word they're saying," said Mariam Abbassi, an Oradell business owner, whose eyes darted back and forth as she strained to figure out the conversations. "I'm trying to learn. But it's a pleasure having them here. They're very enthusiastic, very warm; we Muslims feel very strongly about seeing others in our religion as Muslims, not Egyptians or Colombians or Puerto Ricans or Saudis."

Like many Hispanics who embrace Islam, Gonzalez came from a family of devout Catholics. Back in Honduras, her grandmother insisted that Gonzalez strictly adhere to the religion.

"My grandmother whipped me if I didn't go to church, if I didn't read the Bible," she said. "It wasn't something for me that was allowed to develop naturally."

Here, she discovered punk rock music and the punk lifestyle, and for a sheltered Honduran in her teenage years, it was alluring and liberating. "Punk girls wore tight pants, things that showed their figure," she said. "My hair was uncombed."

She was marching to her own beat, but she was still unhappy, she said.

"I was always stressed out, doing things I shouldn't do," Gonzalez said. "I prayed to be led to the right path."

During a college course that looked at different religions, Gonzalez became intrigued by Islam.

"I read more and more about Islam," she said. "I wanted to know what it was that led so many people to submit entirely to this religion. When I read the Quran, I found the truth. It spoke about serving others, putting others first."

Islam made her feel anchored.

But Gonzalez learned that becoming Muslim comes at a price. Some Hispanic converts say they encounter objections from relatives, some of whom have disowned their newly Muslim daughters, sons and grandkids. They find themselves defending their new lifestyles against taunts and warnings by fellow Hispanics about getting recruited into terrorist organizations and losing their freedom to cult-like pressures.

"Most of my family is bigoted against Muslims," said Vincent Gallardo, a student at William Paterson University who converted to Islam two years ago. "A close friend stopped speaking to me," he said. "My mother was very hurt. A Latino co-worker always called out to me: 'Hey Taliban, how's it going?' "

Gonzalez's conversion stunned her friends; some stopped speaking to her. Her parents objected, and she stayed at a friend's home for a while. Even when she found acceptance among some relatives and friends, she said, people disapproved of her veil – a common point of contention, for it is a very tangible, very public expression of devotion to Islam.

Gonzalez's family has come to accept her conversion, she said, and appreciate the positive changes that have occurred in her.

"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 said. "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."

E-mail: llorente@northjersey.com