South Side Rescue

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

You wouldn’t know it from its front entrance on W. 63rd Street, with its “No Guns Allowed” sign, or from the fact that you have to be buzzed in, that the Inner-City Muslim Action Network headquarters is one of the most welcoming spaces on the South Side here.

Its neighbors, as well as leaders and activists from other organizations, praise the nonprofit as groundbreaking and effective in the way it brings impoverished members of minority groups together to gain strength in their fight for economic and social justice.

The 25-year-old organization, known as IMAN, has also finally begun to corral a sizable number of grant makers, who point to its twin strengths: performing community-organizing work and running several programs, including a community health clinic, job-training programs for ex-convicts, a campaign to improve the South Side’s corner grocery stores, and arts and justice festivals. The organization now runs a similar program in Atlanta and is seen nationwide as an exemplar of how faith groups can promote justice.

Its many fans credit IMAN’s emergence to its executive director, Rami Nashashibi.

A wiry, fast-moving figure topped by a taqiyah, Nashashibi has earned a reputation as a tireless, open-minded, and creative leader — if a long- underappreciated one. But Nashashibi is now far from overlooked.

He was named a White House Champion of Change in 2016. A year later, his work was rewarded with a MacArthur genius grant of $625,000. And in November, he was awarded the $1 million Opus Prize, given annually by the Opus Prize Foundation and Catholic universities in the United States to recognize leaders around the world who create change in needy areas.

All of that recognition and money have changed its outlook. Long forced to run on a shoestring, with an annual budget that barely scraped $1 million a decade ago, the organization will soon surge past the $10 million mark, largely due to grant makers. Though private and family foundations were slow to come around to him, they are now almost purple in their praise of Nashashibi.

“Rami’s amazing in that he can think about the micro and macro sides of issues at the same time. He’s really a beautiful person,” says Cate Fox, senior program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “He’s one of those rare and passionate people who, when he sits and talks about his work, doesn’t separate it from his life.”

Segregation and Poverty

Now a rising star among social-justice leaders, Nashashibi says he has done little to change his methods from the slower-going early days. Starting while an undergraduate, he has devoted his entire adult life to creating a big-tent activist group with its ethics firmly rooted in Islam. He lives here on the southwest side with his wife and three children — close enough to feel the South Side’s pains.

He credits IMAN’s coalition-building approach and its results with the organization’s success. Nashashibi’s ubiquitous presence has, over time, won it a wide range of backers.

“We’ve been able to get funding from some entities that typically support Israel or who don’t make grants elsewhere in the city or who would usually steer clear of us because we work on police violence campaigns,” he says.

While doing that, IMAN has achieved a similar diversification among its activists. The path to offering solutions to the region’s problems transcends any one "-ism” or type, Nashashibi says. And it needs to be that way on the polyglot and troubled South Side, which regularly experiences waves of crime and soul-numbing cycles of homicides.

The crime rate on Chicago’s South Side has been horrific for decades. Homicides reached their peak citywide in 2016, when 764 people were murdered. About half of the victims were killed on the city’s South and West sides in neighborhoods that included less than 10 percent of the city’s total population. While last year’s homicides totaled around 550, the city’s rate still ranks in the top 25 nationally.

Experts say that Chicago’s status as the nation’s most segregated city, coupled with high levels of concentrated poverty, gives it a distinction as being much more violent than other metro areas its size, including Los Angeles and New York.

Take a drive around Englewood, the neighborhood east of IMAN headquarters, and you’ll see a host of vacant properties, young men languishing on steps and corners on a cold, wet day, and dilapidated and empty storefronts. Even though IMAN is planning a 2019 rollout of its first fresh-food market nearby, the depth of the decay is palpable.

“Philanthropy needs to help us come up with a Marshall Plan for these areas,” Nashashibi says.

Big-Tent Approach

In the meantime, IMAN works to draw culturally disparate neighbors together to rebuild, block by block. Nashashibi is as likely to discuss how IMAN’s community-organization work was influenced by the Jewish-American model developed by Saul Alinsky as he is to point out how IMAN’s coalition-building gained an early foothold in the area thanks to a female African-American Pentecostal minister. Or how the area’s immigrant Catholic Latino leaders have offered support to causes championed by blacks and Muslims.

The decades-long drive to marshal poor people to advocate for new laws that affect policing, mass incarceration, housing inequality, and poverty has borne fruit, he says.

“We have produced a base of engaged community members who are ready to spend five hours on a bus to go to Springfield [the Illinois state capital] so they can have their say about discriminatory and unfair state laws,” Nashashibi says.

IMAN’s work has helped lower crime, train more people who might otherwise get caught up in it, and improve the area’s health, he says.

Keeping Faith at the Front

While creating relationships among very different groups of the South Side’s 400,000 people has offered its own set of challenges, operating as a Muslim organization has sometimes been even harder. Nashashibi points to the stigma that once came along with the faith.

During IMAN’s early years, grant makers worried about ostensible ties to extremist groups overseas or with Louis Farrakhan, none of which existed. The terror attacks of 9/11 cast a pall over Muslim organizations generally. Angry protesters surrounded several mosques in the suburbs here. IMAN, trying to carve out space in an environment that included very few Islamic social-justice groups, suffered, too.

“There was little if any infrastructure among American Muslim groups, almost no representation within foundations, and very little in the way of connections between them and people in our world,” Nashashibi adds.

Though IMAN — pronounced E-man, a word that means “faith” in Arabic — doesn’t preach or organize strictly around its chosen religion, its pro-Muslim approach has scared off many would-be partners over the years.

“We’re one of very few community organizations to come out of the diverse American Muslim experience,” says Nashashibi, 47. “When we started, people would say to us, ‘Why put “Muslim” in your name? All you’ll do is lessen your chances for funding.’ "

The tenets of Islam give the group strong moral shoulders to stand on, he counters: “A lot of what Islam preaches is to take care of the less fortunate, as Muhammad did. Even with our name, we don’t identify ourselves as religious out in the community. We work to get beyond abstractions so we can find solutions that work where people live.”

Though he was raised in a household that didn’t focus on religion, Nashashibi later became an observant Muslim. And he’ll talk about how Islam — through art, culture, music, and street groups — has long been a vital patch in the South Side’s fringy fabric.

IMAN’s “Takin’ It to the Streets” festival, a showcase for artists, craftspeople, musicians, and rappers held in nearby Marquette Park, draws thousands.

Julius Allen/IMAN

Refugee Family

Although Nashashibi comes across as strictly urban and American, his backstory is international.

His mother, Jihad, is from Palestine. “She was born on a dirt road as her family fled the Israeli Army,” Nashashibi says. “Her name means ‘struggle’ in Arabic, which seems wholly appropriate.”

When her refugee family came to the United States, it put down roots in the South Side, becoming one of the first Arab families to settle in communities like Englewood and near Marquette Park, the neighborhoods where IMAN would conduct its work

three decades later. Family members changed their first names — his mother became “Nancy.”

Nashashibi notes the contradiction of those times in the early 1960s. While his mother’s Muslim family worked to assimilate, befriending and working with South Side families who were white and Jewish, many African-Americans were converting to Islam. “She became Nancy during the same era that ‘Cassius’ became ‘Muhammad,’ " he says, referring to boxer Muhammad Ali.

In the 1960s, the growth of Islam in the United States was driven largely by the descendants of slaves, including those who had turned to the religion while behind bars. “Part of our larger story is that we’ve always dealt with people coming back home from the prison system,” Nashashibi says. (Today, around 60 percent of the nearly 2 million Muslims born in the United States are African-American.)

Some came to Islam through their experience on the street, either through relationships with the formerly incarcerated or other converts. Members of black gangs called the Black Stones and Vice Lords were incorporating Muslim teachings into their literature and structure. Some taught immigrant kids from Palestine and elsewhere how to deal drugs.

Still, at its heart, Islam has been seen as a path to justice. “Muslim culture became a vehicle for transformation that no other system could provide,” Nashashibi adds.

Despite his mother’s time in Chicago, Rami is not a native son. Nancy Daoud met Rami’s father, Maher Nashashibi, a Palestinian who served as a diplomat, while on a trip to Jordan. A few years later, Rami was born in Amman.

Nashashibi was raised throughout Europe and the Middle East, and those experiences helped shape him, he recalls. As a 10-year-old crossing the border into Israel, he was strip-searched.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Nashashibi used a soccer scholarship to study international relations at a small college here. Later, he would earn a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.

While visiting sites around the city, he became appalled at the level of racial segregation. A fan of rap and hip-hop, he was also fascinated by the African-American experience, and trips to neighborhoods where the paths of Middle Eastern natives and black Americans crossed became regular.

Nashashibi gravitated toward the narratives of people whose Muslim identity transformed them and their neighborhoods, including some whom were formerly incarcerated. He touted his new group as an oasis that could keep people away from the draw of drugs, gangs, and extremist groups.

Back when IMAN was formed — first as a tiny group of coalitions in 1994 while Nashashibi was a college undergrad and then as a full-fledged organization three years later — he worked to meld his growing Muslim consciousness with community organizing, minus any kind of ethnic or religious litmus test. Part of his goal was to engage the larger Muslim community locally. While the city includes nearly 100 mosques, the upward narrative arc embraced by many Muslim immigrants left others behind.

“A lot of people would send their money back to orphanages in their home countries,” he says. “Part of my goal was to teach them how to give, while offering them an antidote to the apathy that leads people away from Islam.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Growth and Grants

IMAN’s growth accelerated from 2001 to 2004, largely through small donations from community people, including many Muslims — not just those born here but those from Arab and South Asian nations. “We probably doubled or tripled the amount of money we got from the neighborhoods,” Nashashibi says.

Eventually, a small cadre of grant makers took note of the group. Up until 2008, IMAN got by on small donations and fees, as well as some grants from early supporters, including the Jewish Council of Urban Affairs, the Woods Fund, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation.

“Up to that point, I had been blessedly ignorant of foundations,” he says. “It allowed me to focus on building alliances and relationships.”

But as the group’s profile began to shift ever so slightly, it began to rely more on philanthropy. Grants aided the group’s move in 2006 to its current offices, where it opened a health and mental-health clinic that hires professionals who speak patients’ languages.

Grants from Marguerite Casey and others also helped spur the advent of Green ReEntry, IMAN’s job-training program for former inmates, in 2009. A holistic program that combines training from experts in carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, and heating systems with the development of behavioral skills, financial literacy, and advocacy, Green ReEntry has now graduated 100 men who have become certified in a trade.

The program’s first classes helped rebuild vacant buildings in the neighborhoods surrounding IMAN, areas that were hard hit during the Great Recession.

Although the “green” in its title initially referred to the inclusion of solar power in the rehabbed homes, the organization no longer installs solar panels.

“It was unsustainable,” says Nashashibi. “Now, the ‘green’ refers to the earth and spirituality, as well as all those Benjamins people can make once they complete the program.”

Last year, the organization had just converted one of two safe houses within two blocks of its headquarters — places where young men in Green ReEntry seeking sanctuary from the crime of their neighborhoods could seek shelter as they received training.

Hands-On Leadership

Nashashibi does much of his one-on-one work with ex-convicts and young people caught in a cycle of violence, says Liz Dozier, a former high-school principal who in 2016 formed Chicago Beyond, which has raised $35 million to promote the concept of restorative justice in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods. The group also supports IMAN’s clinics and ex-convict programs.

“I had come across Rami after one of my favorite students was murdered,” Dozier says. “I was looking for a place where young men with nothing to do could go to escape the violence. His ability to understand the history of these problems really impressed me.”

She called on Nashashibi again last year when another young man who had done hard time, named Savon, needed to flee his neighborhood after receiving some threats. IMAN put him up in a safe house and offered him training. His commitment to the program was wavering when Dozier asked Nashashibi to intervene.

“Rami had just come back from making speeches to national audiences, and the first thing he did when he returned was to talk to Savon. He essentially told him that it would continue to be hard to step out of his old life but that being certified in a trade would change his vision of the future, as well as help him heal,” Dozier recalls.

When Dozier made it to the safe house later that night, it was close to midnight. Nashashibi engaged her in a lengthy conversation. “I don’t know when Rami sleeps,” she says. “I’ll regularly be talking with him at 11:30 at night, and I know he has to be talking with other people that late, too.”

Despite IMAN’s efforts, several men in the program have been victims of violence, including one who was killed while visiting his son in his former neighborhood.

“We had one guy who was shot who showed up for training the next day. He didn’t want to lose his spot,” says Nashashibi.

Building Power

Most of the group’s trainers are people whose lives mirror those of the students: African-American men who have spent time in prison and gone on to complete the IMAN program.

One of them, Hasan Smith, came to IMAN after spending 27 years in federal prison for murder. The program offered him a chance to change his life when he really needed one, he says.

“When people come out of prison, they want to put their lives together in a hurry — get a car, a house, maybe some other things to impress people. The program kept me grounded, kept me moving forward at a pace that made sense and with a real direction,” says Smith, who went on to open his own carpentry business.

He sees similar reactions from the students he teaches construction skills. “This program does so much for these young men,” Smith says. “A lot of them will tell you they didn’t think anyone ever really cared about them before. The program has a waiting list for a reason.”

Currently, 187 people sit on the Green ReEntry waiting list, both in Chicago and in Atlanta, where the group opened a second office in 2016.

The Opus Prize money will allow IMAN to shorten that list by expanding its job-training programs.

He has plans for the MacArthur genius grant as well. “It’ll allow me to take more personal risks,” he says. A book, planned for publication late this year, will hash out his life and “the trajectory of IMAN,” he says.

Yet the key to the group’s success will continue to be the connections it makes. One of the book chapters Nashashibi has planned is titled “Winning Alone Is Nothing but Delayed Failure,” a saying coined by former South Side organizer-turned-State Senator, Patricia Van Pelt Watkins.

“We need to deeply invest in real alliance building in these kinds of neighborhoods, or we will always lose,” Nashashibi says. “Without them, we’ll never build the power necessary for meaningful and sustainable change.”

Corrections: A previous version of this article said incorrectly that Nashashibi was strip-searched at age 8 (instead of age 10) and that a street festival drew 20,000 people (it drew thousands). Other changes have been made for clarity.