Thousands of people descended on Frontier Park in Naperville last Saturday for the town’s inaugural “Halal Fest,” where a variety of Middle Eastern cuisines, music and goods were main attractions.
The fest brought together chefs, artisans and entertainers from various ethnicities.
“The idea was to have a shared program. Usually our community has separate events, but we wanted one umbrella for everybody,” said program director Naila Ali. “It was about coming as one and doing it together as one Muslim community.”
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Shafeek Abubaker, president of the Naperville-based Illinois Muslim Chamber of Commerce, which hosted the event, said the aim of the fest was to give local small businesses an opportunity to showcase their products and services, and “increase their net reach.”
Shahed Kadri, board member of the Islamic Center of Naperville, said the event may have been the largest Muslim gathering ever in Naperville. People came from all over the Chicagoland area. Kadri said he ran into residents from Schaumburg, Carol Stream, Oak Brook, Lisle and Chicago.
He said it’s rare to combine so many kinds of halal cuisine together in one place: from Afghan to Indonesian to Yemeni. Halal is food prepared or meat derived from animals slaughtered in accordance with Islamic dietary law.
“You have a lot of food in one location,” Kadri said. “If you go to a restaurant, you go to a Turkish one and you get Turkish. You go to a Pakistani one, you get Pakistani. Here, there’s a wide variety from different countries. There’s Turkish food. There’s Indian, Pakistani food. There’s Arab food.”
Long lines for food snaked around the park into the early evening.
Meanwhile, there was Middle Eastern storytelling, camel rides, drum shows and halal cotton candy for the attending kids. Merchandisers sold handmade clothing, perfume, art, and hijabs — a head covering worn by Muslim women. Henna artists applied the colorful temporary tattoos.
Musicians played the saz, a Turkish stringed instrument, as well as sacred Islamic music, while Dabke dancers performed the Arab folk dance popular in the Levantine regions of Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. Local and state dignitaries spoke, as did the consul generals from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Pakistan.
Irfan Sarwar, of the Islamic nonprofit organization GainPeace, said he hopes in future years organizers and attendees will encourage even more of their non-Muslim friends and neighbors to attend, so that people of various faiths can better get to know one another and learn how to live cohesively.
According to the organization website, GainPeace has a primary aim to educate the public about Islam and dispel misconceptions about the religion.
“We are an estimated half a million Muslims in Chicagoland. That has grown a lot since I came in the late ’80s,” Sarwar said. “If these half a million people can understand how to talk to people from other faith backgrounds, just imagine how fast we can fill the gap between different faiths and in understanding?”
Giles Bruce is a freelancer.