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There is a lot of information about the origins of Islam in Mexico, but most sources claim it arrived with the Arab slave trade through out the Medieval ages and the 21st Century. And also Lebanese, Saudi Arabian, Yemeni or Syrian immigrants and some other Middle Easterners such as Egyptians, Iranians and Turks. According to the 2010 census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), there were 3,700 Muslims in the country, majority are Sunnites, with Shiite and Ahmadiyya minority.
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Organizations
Today, most Mexican Islamic organizations focus on grassroots missionary activities which are most effective at the community level.
The Centro Cultural Islámico de México (CCIM), a Sunni organization headed by Omar Weston, a British born Mexican convert to Islam, has been active in several big cities in northern and central Mexico. In the state of Morelos, the CCIM built a prayer hall and centre for recreation, learning and conferences, called Dar as Salaam, which also operates Hotel Oasis, a hotel that offers halal holidays for Muslim travellers and accommodation for non-Muslims sympathetic to Islam. This group was the subject of a study carried out by British anthropologist Mark Lindley-Highfield of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Apart from CCIM there is a branch of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order in Mexico City which is often at odds with the traditionalist Muslim community and is headed by two women, Shaykha Fatima Fariha and Shaykha Amina Teslima. There is also a small Salafi organization (the Centro Salafi de México) led by Muhammad Abdullah Ruiz (a former deputy to Weston) and an educational centre managed mainly by Muslims from Egypt and the Middle East, el "Centro Educativo de la Comunidad Musulmana en México" (run by Isa Rojas, a Mexican convert to Islam, who studied Islamic studies in the University of Medina), within the capital city.
In Chiapas
The Spanish Murabitun community, the Comunidad Islámica en España, based in Granada in Spain, had strong ties to the Chiapas community. Chiapas is has some historical Islamic features due to the fact that it was also the first area where the Saudi Arabs arrived during the trade, converting Mayan slaves into Islam. The Spanish missionary 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. But also since then there have been more reports of indigenous Mayans and Tzotzils converting to Islam. President Vicente Fox voiced concerns about the influence of the fundamentalism and possible connections to the Zapatistas and the Basque terrorist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), but it appeared that converts had no interest in political extremism. 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. 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.