The Hakim Family: A foundational stone in Milwaukee’s Muslim community

Second from left, Hadrat Hakim poses with great grandsons Aayan Henry, Aajmal Henry and Nasir Moorman. 

A pair of Milwaukee matriarchs 

Before we go back to the beginning, we will highlight two women who helped lay the foundation for Milwaukee’s Muslim community with their behind-the-scenes servant leadership: Sr. Hadrat and her sister-in-law, Lathita Ahmad.

Sr. Hadrat Hakim-the rock

“My mom is the rock of the whole community, the foundation,” Kalim said. Many of Milwaukee’s Muslims in the early days were students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette and other universities, he explained. They came from Turkey, Egypt, Somalia, Jordan and Palestine. 

“And whose house did they come to? Who do they remember? My mom,” he exclaimed.

“We had one Eid when the whole community came to my mom’s house to eat and celebrate the festival. In fact, several times she invited the whole community to her house,” Karima said. “We prayed in and outside her house,” on Milwaukee’s Northside, near North Avenue. “The neighbors had never seen anything like it.”

Over the years, Sr. Hadrat did a lot of cooking and baking for community events and fundraisers, they agreed. She and her husband Jalil Hakim helped repair and clean the old school building that became what is the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and mosque at 13th Street and Layton Avenue. 

Their children also pitched in. In the early days of the ISM, “we were always there, doing whatever needed to be done,” said Karima, recalling her early teen years. Her mother, Sr. Hadrat, led her family and the community by example, she said.

Dedicated to meeting her Islamic obligations, at 70, Sr. Hadrat went on the Haj, the required Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. In 2000, she went with a pilgrimage travel group with people mostly from Chicago.

Auntie Lathita-a servant leader

“Auntie Lathita is the epitome of a servant leader,” Sr. Lathita’s great niece and Sr. Hadrat’s granddaughter Hadiyyah Clark told WMJ. (Sr. Lathita is Jalil Abdul Hakim’s sister.)

One day, decades ago, Sr. Lathita noticed the white donation box for clothes at the Dawah Center overflowing and spilling onto the floor. Yet, clothes kept coming in. She decided something needed to be done. 

She asked the brothers at the masjid what would be done with the clothes and they responded they would take them to Goodwill or somewhere to donate, she recalled in an interview last week with WMJ. 

Sr. Lathita decided it would be a better idea to clean the clothes and sell them, with money going to the Dawah Center. She took clothes home and washed them at her own expense, Hadiyyah said. She brought them back to the Dawah Center to sell to people visiting its food pantry. She charged a small fee for those who could afford it but gave items away to those who could not.

When she retired from her job as a nursing assistant, two of her former co-workers, “two good Christian women who were always kind to her,” drove her back and forth between home and the Dawah Center with the clothes, “never asking for a dime,” Sr. Lathita recalled.

Hadrat Hakim, Lathita Ahmad and Karima Hakim stop for a photo after jummah (Friday) prayer at the Milwaukee Islamic Dawah Center.

Sr. Lathita has continued this work into her senior years and her children have stepped up to help, Hadiyyah said.  “She doesn’t think about her legacy. She said, ‘You just do what needs to be done. Giving clothes to people makes you feel good because they need it. It makes them feel good and you as well.’

“She asks Allah to make her children strong in Islam and to be good Muslims,” Hadiyyah added. “She’s showing her children how to do that by being a living example of a true servant leader.”

Now, back to the Hakim story.

Planting roots in Milwaukee

“Our first family members living in Milwaukee would be my parents, Jalil Abdul Hakim and Hadrat Hakim,” Kalim Hakim said. “My father was born in 1923 and my mother in 1928. They were born Muslim and came to Milwaukee as a couple. My father had lived in Texas as a small child and my mother in Mississippi.

“They were ambitious and Milwaukee during the sixties and seventies was very industrial, with a lot of factories and bustling with work. There seemed to be a good work ethic here. That and the opportunities attracted them to Milwaukee to create a better life for themselves.”

“But there were no masajid (mosques) here at all,” Kalim noted. There was the Nation of Islam’s Masjid Sultan Mohammad No. 3 in Milwaukee, but the Hakims followed the path of Sunni Islam.

Jalil Hakim celebrates the wedding of his daughter Karima to Abdallah Clark at the Muslim House in Milwaukee. 

A handful of Muslims

“Mahmoud Atta and his father were some of our first acquaintances with other Muslims,” Sr. Hadrat said. “Mahmoud came here from Palestine as a boy. He and his dad lived with us for a while.” (The late Mahmoud Atta was the father of Islamic Society of Milwaukee executive director Othman Atta, Muslim Women’s Coalition founder Janan Najeeb and Bayan Salous, wife of Franklin alderman Nabil Salous.) 

“When Mahmoud was living with us, we would have jummah prayer in our house,” Sr. Hadrat said. “That was before he went back home and married Intisar. I knew him as a teenager going to school; he graduated from West Division.

“Every Friday, we would put a blanket down on the floor in our living room,” Sr. Hadrat recalled. “We had jummah prayer on our living room floor. Mahmoud was our imam. That was the beginning, about 74 years ago,” Sr. Hadrat said.

“I didn’t know any other Muslims except the Attas and our family,” Karima said about her childhood in the sixties and seventies.

“Back then, we had copies of the Quran but not a lot of translations were available,” said Kalim. “There was not a lot of information about Islam available period. It was very, very rare to find a copy of any hadith.” There was no internet. We would rely on what we could gather from anyone who had studied.”

A brother in the community, “Khalid Walid, also called ‘Chief,’ was a student of a mufti who studied at Al Azhar in Egypt,” he continued. “So, Khalid Walid learned from this shaykh and he started teaching my father and mother. He was considered the most knowledgeable amongst the group.”

Sr. Hadrat added, “Mahamoud Atta was one of the biggest helpers in the group for teaching Islam.”

Growing and building

What started with two or three families praying at the Hakim’s house grew. And as the community grew, so did the need for a masjid (mosque), a school and other Islamic organizations. 

As the hub of Milwaukee’s early Muslim community, the Hakims worked hard with their fellow Muslims to establish them—starting with a storefront for Friday prayers to space in a church near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to the Muslim House, a mansion on 31st and Kilbourn that the community purchased in 1976 as its first masjid. The Hakims and others had worked to raise funds. Legendary basketball star Karim Abdul Jabbar, who played with the Milwaukee Bucks, wrote a check for $500 as a donation. “That was a large donation at the time,” Kalim said.  

The community outgrew the Muslim House and, in the early 1980s, purchased an old school at 13th and Layton, the site of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee-Main. Everyone worked together to make it happen, they said.

“My husband, Jalil Hakim, was one of the real founders of the Muslim House, the Islamic Center and the Dawah Center,” Sr. Hadrat said. 

“He worked really hard for the community during the time of the Muslim House,” Karima added. The Hakims did whatever was needed that they could do, they agreed.

The good old days

In the seventies and early eighties, Milwaukee’s Muslim families spent a lot of time together, the Hakims said. During Ramadan, “we used to go to each other’s houses at night,” Sr. Hadrat said. “Every night we’d break fast at a different family’s house. 

“All the sisters would get together at each other’s homes,” Karima said. “They would come to our house and we would go to theirs.”

“We all knew each other because we were always getting together,” Sr. Hadra added.

“Everybody in the community came,” Karima said. “It wasn’t separated by race or ethnic background. Everybody joined in together.

“We all those students came to our house, we had so many different cultural foods, I didn’t even learn how to make American food,” Karima exclaimed. “I was raised amongst so many different cultures and that was Islam to me.” 

“When we started the Muslim House on Kilbourn, Karima was one of the kids running around everywhere,” Sr. Hadrat recalled. “We had the biggest family, with four sons and two daughters.”

“I was 13 and 14 years old, and we used to go there all the time,” Karima said. “They’d have jummah prayers and martial arts training. A couple of grandmasters would come and train the kids.”

“One of the grandmasters was your brother, Kalim,” Sr. Hadrat noted. 

“Abbas Yassin was the other,” Kalim added.

Once at the ISM, “I’d be in the kitchen where I’d bake and bake,” Sr. Hadrat said. “We always had bake sales. We needed to raise money to get curtains and fix the place up.”

“I remember the kitchen,” said Karima. “We got in there and cleaned it up and tried to make it ours.”

“We worked hard in that building,” Sr. Hadrat agreed. “Cleaning and painting, baking and selling by the dozens.”

In the early days, there were not many Muslim families on the Northside of Milwaukee who weren’t part of the Nation of Islam. Many Muslim immigrant families lived on the Southside near the Islamic Center and some moved to Milwaukee’s Western suburbs. 

There weren’t many Muslim children to play with in the city, but it was not a problem, Karima said. “All my life, I went to public schools. Being a Muslim here, everyone looked at me as different because I wore a hijab all my life, I carried myself differently and I just felt different from other kids.

“But they were just curious,” she recalled. “There were no hostile feelings, no Islamophobia. I played with the neighborhood kids. There was no hatred of Muslims.”

Even reactions during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 were short-lived, she said. “I remember I was out walking down the street with my kids (I got married at 16) and someone telling me to go back home. I was thinking, you don’t realize my mom is half Native American. But that was the only time I heard that type of hatred until after 9/11.

“But I think it’s better now,” she said, “because people began to wonder what this religion is. And more and more people accepted Islam.

“After I moved to Texas, when I visited Milwaukee and stood next to my mom at Friday prayers, or visited the Islamic Center, I was moved by seeing all the Muslims, shoulder to shoulder, from all different backgrounds,” Karima said. “Sometimes I wonder if they know how all this started.”