Milwaukee – a Place for Muslims

ISLAM IN AMERICA Milwaukee – a Place for Muslims in the Heart of America

A Muslim community thrives in a midsize, Midwestern city

BY SANDRA WHITEHEAD

Milwaukee group Umrah VIP Girls program at the Islamic Resource Center

When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a new convert to Islam, joined the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969, the MSA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was the city’s only Islamic organization. It held Friday prayers for a dozen people in students’ apartments or rooms on campus.

Almost 50 years later, the legendary basketball star returned to the Midwestern city on the shores of Lake Michigan where he spent his first six years in the faith and led his team to their first national championship in 1971. (The team won its second this July.) Hosted by UWM’s MSA in 2017, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer looked out at a largely Muslim audience and declared, “Muslims can come here and thrive.” Then he marveled, “The Muslim community in Milwaukee has grown and changed. It was nothing like this in the 1970s.”

Today it is a flourishing community of tens of thousands — still growing and maturing but also both self-sufficient and well integrated into the larger society. Years of hard work and strong leadership created multiple mosques, schools, health and social services, businesses and resources that provide a rich environment where Muslims can indeed thrive.

Yet the community’s exceptional growth has brought it face-to-face with its greatest challenge yet — how to be big. GROWING UP DIVERSE AND COHESIVE Arab Muslims arrived in Milwaukee in the 1940s, followed by Muslims from India, Kashmir and Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the

THE WISCONSIN MUSLIM CIVIC ALLIANCE, FOUNDED IN 2019, Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, a UWM digital humanities project. Meanwhile, the Nation of Islam

ENCOURAGES MUSLIMS TO expanded beyond its first two

ENGAGE IN CIVIC LIFE. IT WORKS cities, Detroit and Chicago, and established Muhammad Temple #3

WITH ALLIES ACROSS THE STATE in Milwaukee. Combining tradi-

ON MUTUAL CONCERNS, HOSTS tional Islam with Black nationalist

MEET-AND-GREETS WITH LOCAL teachings, the Nation reintroduced American Blacks to Islam, the faith

CANDIDATES, ORGANIZES GET- many had been forced to give up

OUT-THE-VOTE DRIVES, TAKES during slavery. In the 1960s and POSITIONS ON POLICY ISSUES AND 1970s, many members of the Nation left the movement and adopted ENDORSES CANDIDATES. IT RALLIES mainstream Islam, following lead-

SUPPORT FOR CIVIC INITIATIVES ers like Malcolm X and Warith Deen LIKE FAIR HOUSING AND Mohammed who became Sunni Muslims.

FAIR VOTING LEGISLATION. With three generations of Arabs, two generations of South Asians, a large contingent of African