Summary
A private Islamic school across the parking lot from Aqsa School in Bridgeview, embracing the Mosque Foundation’s reformist program and a broad, interethnic Islamic identity in the sense of the Umma (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.75).
Details
- Universal offers pre-K through twelfth grade, co-educational with gender segregation after the fifth grade; it averages more than six hundred students per year and its staff comprises nearly fifty full-time teachers; its students are predominantly Arab (Palestinian and Syrian, mostly), with South Asians, Africans, African Americans and a handful of Latinx and whites (PDF p.75).
- It began after a Syrian immigrant physician’s son reportedly saw pornographic images in his public school’s locker room; the father and other professionals in the Mosque Foundation community raised money through the same international networks used for the mosque, began construction in 1988 on land adjacent to the mosque, and opened the school two years later with 140 students and eleven teachers (PDF p.75).
- A founding member of the Council of Islamic Organizations in Chicago and the Council of Islamic Schools in North America, it has become one of the largest Islamic schools in the United States (Riedel 2009, 82–86, as cited) (PDF p.75).