SAO PAULO (Arab News) – Over the past two decades, there has been a visible rise in the number of Muslim converts in Brazil’s large cities.
New mosques have been established in neighborhoods with no history of welcoming Middle Eastern immigrants.
Nobody knows for sure the size of Brazil’s Muslim population. In 2010, when the most recent census was conducted by the government, 35,000 Brazilians declared themselves as Muslim, a very small proportion of the total population of 210 million. Many in the country believe that the number is much higher now.
In 2012, Cesar Kaab Abdul established a mosque in Jardim Cultura Fisica, in the city of Embu das Artes, in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area.
A community organizer for decades, he was part of the first generation of hip hop artists in Brazil in the 1980s, and became known in that sphere as a rapper and cultural activist.
Cesar’s mosque was named after Sumayyah bint Khayyat, a member of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s community.
“I chose a woman’s name to show that the idea that women are oppressed in Islam is only a prejudice,” he told Arab News.
Cesar’s first contact with Islam was through Malcolm X’s autobiography, which commonly circulates among black resistance movements.
“Most rappers had Malcolm X as a reference, but his religiousness usually went unnoticed,” he added.
As an office clerk in Sao Paulo’s financial district, Cesar had a Muslim Arab co-worker and became curious about his breaks to pray during office hours. “He told me he was Muslim, and I remembered Malcolm X’s story,” he recalled.
In 2007, he got in touch with a Muslim preacher in Egypt who instructed him and sent him books about Islam. From that point on, Cesar’s life began to deeply change.
“I used to be very radical on Islam’s cultural and political aspects … but then I began to understand its true nature,” he said.
In 2014 Cesar performed Hajj, which was “a deeply transforming experience.” At that time, he had already ceased to take part in music concerts and to drink alcohol. As well as his mosque, he established a center for the dissemination of Islam.
His mosque became a social center, and during the COVID-19 pandemic it distributed at least 30 tons of food to the neediest in the region.
Jamal Adesoji, a 40-year-old biologist met many African Muslims and started to feel part of a joint identity.
“I studied and discovered that there were malês and even Islamic schools in my city in the 19th century,” he said.
“Islam first arrived in Brazil with the Africans, so it’s part of our identity — a part that was erased over time.”
Adesoji frequents a mosque in the city of Passo Fundo that was created years ago by Muhammad Lucena, a convert from Sao Paulo.
The mosque gathers 1,000 people. About 150 of them are Brazilian converts, while the others are West African and South Asian, mostly workers at halal units in meat and poultry processing plants.
Lucena was a black militant in Sao Paulo whose group began collectively studying Malcolm X’s works at the beginning of the 1990s.
They decided to go to a mosque in the neighborhood to learn more about Islam. Lucena and a friend ended up converting.