A donation of food from a Frankfort mosque and a Tinley church's outreach of compassion after 9/11 created the SouthWest Interfaith Team that strives to build bridges between religious communities.
- VOLUNTEERS IN THE NEWS
- Joe Vince
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Friday, September 9, 2011
The SouthWest Interfaith Team is a nonprofit group in the south suburbs of Chicago that was born through an act of giving. Rev. Jim Young, then of the Tinley Park United Methodist Church, met with Khalid Mozaffar and Tariq Khan, of Frankfort's American Islamic Association, in November 2002 after the AIA donated to the church a large collection from a food drive. Young, who’d worked at Ground Zero, said he was looking to do something more with Christian-Muslim relations and this meeting with Mozaffar and Khan planted the seeds for that. Around the same time, the Rev. Terrence Baeder of Zion Lutheran Church in Tinley Park reached out to the AIA in a show of support after hearing about threats against area Muslims in the wake of 9/11. This …
41.521383
-87.833286
American Islamic Association
8860 W Saint Francis Rd, Frankfort, IL
/articles/area-interfaith-group-born-out-of-tragedy-and-charity
324137
/locations/5310017
Muslim leaders recall differing community reaction to the approval and building of two Southland mosques in Frankfort and Orland Park post 9/11.
- THE NEIGHBORHOOD FILES
- Jesse Marx
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Thursday, September 8, 2011
The year was 1978. Bob Marley convinced warring Jamaican factions to shake hands. China lifted a ban on the works of Shakespeare. Pete Rose logged his 3,000th major league hit. And in the sparsely populated town of Frankfort a small group of Sunni Muslims founded a Sunday school to preserve their cultural heritage and religious doctrine that would later become known as the American Islamic Association. After four years of renting local classrooms and offices, enough money was raised to purchase property from a Frankfort crop duster at 8860 W. Saint Francis Rd. The farmhouse would eventually become the school. The airplane hangar would become the prayer hall. “It was nothing but pure farm land,” AIA co-founder and vice chairman Tariq Khan …
41.58912
-87.87179
The Orland Park Prayer Center
16530 104th Ave, Orland Park, IL
/articles/building-a-mosque-after-911-a-tale-of-two-cities
282370
/locations/5296788
41.521383
-87.833286
8860 W Saint Francis Rd, Frankfort, IL
/articles/building-a-mosque-after-911-a-tale-of-two-cities
/locations/5296789
Qasim Choudry
8:12 am on Friday, September 9, 2011
great topic more ›