page_title: Islam in Mexico
section_title: Indigenous Mexican Muslims
hierarchical_section_title: Islam in Mexico / Indigenous Mexican Muslims
caption_attribution_description: English: Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, striking a pose, smoking a pipe atop a horse in Chiapas, Mexico
context_page_description: Islam is a minority religion in Mexico. According to the 2010 census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, there were 2,500 individuals that identified Islam as their religion. The majority are Sunnis and a minority are Shiites.
context_section_description: The Spanish Murabitun community, the Comunidad Islámica en España, based in Granada in Spain, and one of its missionaries, Muhammad Nafia (formerly Aureliano Pérez), now emir of the Comunidad Islámica en México, arrived in the state of Chiapas shortly after the Zapatista uprising and established a commune in the city of San Cristóbal. The group, characterized as anti-capitalistic, entered an ideological pact with the socialist Zapatistas group. President Vicente Fox voiced concerns about the influence of the fundamentalism and possible connections to the Zapatistas and the Basque separatist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), but it appeared that converts had no interest in political extremism.  By 2015, many indigenous Mayans and more than 700 Tzotzils have converted to Islam. In San Cristóbal, the Murabitun established a pizzeria, a carpentry workshop and a Quranic school (madrasa) where children learned Arabic and prayed five times a day in the backroom of a residential building, and women in head scarves have become a common sight. Nowadays, most of the Mayan Muslims have left the Murabitun and established ties with the CCIM, now following the orthodox Sunni school of Islam. They built the Al-Kausar Mosque in San Cristobal de las Casas. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Native Mexicans today are non-Muslims.
caption: Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas entered into an alliance with Chiapas Muslims in the 1990s.[5]
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