Anastasio Gomez, a Tzotzil Mayan from Mexico, fondly remembers his pilgrimage to Mecca. He circled around the Kaaba, the highest sanctuary of Muslims, seven times. At Mount Arafat he prayed to Allah and then he, together with 15 other Indians, sacrificed a sheep before boarding the flight back to their Mexican home. "In Islam, race plays no role," the young man says joyously. His enthusiasm is understandable. After all, in his home state of Chiapas, Mexico's poorest, the indigenous...

The Murabitun have been active in Mexico, spreading in the Chiapas region where the Zapatistas are. I've been able to find some interesting sites about their efforts there. A short academic article on them is called Coversions & Conflict: Muslims in Mexico Here is the group's Mexican website The Murabitun are also very active in Spain and have even established a mosque there. So you could also check the group's Spain website (Their mosque happens to be located in Granada and has a...

It's November and too warm to feel like winter. Christmas lights blink and flash along the middle-class Tempe neighborhood. Plastic reindeer prance on brownish-gray rock lawns. At the end of the almost deserted street, intense green lights outline a one-story home. This house seems out of place - like the family that lives inside. There are no plastic Santas in the lawn. No Christmas lights. Instead, a makeshift Happy Ramadan! banner hangs from the front of the house. Below it an old man and...

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico - Outside this city of colonial churches and cobblestone streets built by Maya and Spaniards, Juan Gomez finds shade from a blinding afternoon sun inside his small wooden hut. A beatific smile radiates from the young Tzotzil Maya as he haltingly reads the Koran in Arabic. Gomez, 26, a former Protestant who became a Muslim in 1996, is learning the language as a convert to Islam. He embodies a religious phenomenon in Chiapas, where one-quarter of the 3.9...

When the doorbell rings, Daniel Denton rises from the couch. "Ah, Martin!" he says, opening the door a crack. "Babe, Martin is here," he shouts to his wife, who rushes to get her veil and fits it around her face tightly, so none of her wiry black hair shows. The couple hasn't seen Martin in months. He is Daniel's cousin and has just arrived in Stockton after a day's drive from Rosarito, Mexico. Roxanne approaches the door, smiling reassuringly. "How are you Martin?...

Salwa (née Silvia) Del Carmen has been asked a lot of silly questions since becoming a Muslim at the age of 15, but she insists that there are few contradiction between Latino culture and Islamic beliefs, and those that exist are minor. "No more arroz con salchichón," she jokes. "We change that to fried keilbasa." Contrary to popular belief, less than 10 per cent of the world`s 1.3 billion Muslims are Arabs. The American Muslim Council conservatively estimates...

The United States Census Bureau officially named the nation's 37 million Latinos the country's largest minority population-outnumbering African Americans by 0.3 percent. This demographic shift, coupled with Islam's status as the fastest growing religion in America, has contributed to the significant growth of a newly emerging demographic: Latino Muslims. Lacking an organized network, and with their cultural presence in this country a relatively recent one, Latino Muslims are not as visible as...

The terms Caribbean and South American refer to aggregations of countries, not to specific areas within legally defined boundaries. Thirty-one countries form the Caribbean, which is divided into English, French, Spanish, and Dutch linguistic regions. The majority of the countries are English-speaking. The total Muslim population by country varies from 4 to 15 percent. The largest Muslim populations are in English-speaking countries such as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. There are small...

Every weekday morning, children at an Islamic school in this city sit cross-legged at low desks and rock in time as they recite the Quran in Arabic. The older girls' heads are wrapped in obligatory scarves, and all the children are required to leave their shoes at the door. But this isn't Pakistan, Iran or an Arab state. This Islamic "madrasa" is part of a small but growing community of several hundred Muslim converts in San Cristobal de las Casas, a Mexican tourist community in...

Yolanda Rodriguez considers herself a Muslim first, then Mexican- American, but on her regular walks down 18th Street in Chicago, she does not wear a hijab, the traditional head covering worn by many Muslim women. Well known in the Pilsen community as general manager of Radio Arte, a youth-oriented offshoot of the Mexican Fine Arts Center offering Spanish-language radio experience, Rodriguez, 33, often finds herself negotiating between her public persona and her personal faith. She is...