In Marquette Park, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network brought a clinic, employment pathways and arts programming into the same neighborhood effort. Rami Nashashibi helped found IMAN in 1997. His 2017 MacArthur Fellowship profile describes a coalition connecting African American Muslims and Muslim immigrant communities across differences of income and geography.
Health care and the work of rebuilding homes
The MacArthur account identifies primary and behavioral health care for uninsured and underinsured residents. It also describes construction training for formerly incarcerated people through the renovation of foreclosed houses. The relationship is concrete: work on the neighborhood’s buildings could also provide a route back into employment.
An arts program belongs in the neighborhood story
MacArthur’s 2017 profile describes IMAN’s Takin’ It to the Streets festival bringing hip-hop, qawwali, spoken word and soul to Marquette Park. Creative expression was part of the organization’s public life alongside its services. These details describe the period of the fellowship; they are not an event calendar or a guarantee of current program availability.
The portrait on this page was made at the Festival of Faiths in Louisville. It identifies Nashashibi, but it does not show the Chicago neighborhood, the clinic or an IMAN event. The distinction keeps the photograph useful without making it evidence for something it cannot show.
Read the skyline through its engineering
For a different scale of city-making, follow our existing profile of structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan. It examines the visible diagonal braces of the former John Hancock Center and the bundled form of Willis Tower, with credit to architect Bruce Graham and the wider project teams.
A good way to use that guide is to compare an overall skyline photograph with a closer view of the braces. One shows the form of the tower; the other helps explain how the structure works. The accompanying historic photograph offers that closer connection without requiring a new architectural rendering.
Read Fazlur Rahman Khan: the structure behind the Chicago skyline ↗
Two ways to explore Chicago
Start with IMAN if your interest is the relationship between community institutions, creative work and neighborhood investment. Start with Khan if you want to understand the technical decisions behind familiar buildings. The two stories do not describe the same kind of contribution, and neither can stand in for all Muslim life in Illinois.
The longer articles below provide the next layer of detail. Use the named source records to distinguish the historical accounts from current services before planning a visit.
Follow the story
Explore the original reporting and organizational records:
Selected local stories, not a complete account of the state. Events and figures refer to the periods stated above. Check directly with organizations for current services.
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}