Muslim El Paso: community history, prayer and education

The Islamic Center of El Paso dates its beginnings to a rented downtown house in the 1980s. Its own history places the move to 143 Paragon Lane in 2004. Those two points give a documented outline of the institution’s development without reducing the city’s Muslim history to a founding date; the center’s history supplies a decade for its beginnings, not a precise year. [1]

The Islamic Center of El Paso

The center publishes its address as 143 Paragon Lane, El Paso, Texas 79912, with an office telephone of 915-581-7729 and a contact email at admin@icelpaso.org. Its contact page is a useful starting point for arranging a visit or asking about a particular service. For a congregational prayer, consult the center’s own prayer information and confirm the iqamah — the time the congregation begins — rather than treating a calculated prayer-start time as an appointment. [2] [3]

Education and family programs

Palm Tree Academy appears in the center’s public event record. A notice published on March 9, 2023 advertised a book fair and family night for the following evening. It is a small but specific record of school and family activity at the center, not an upcoming event listing. [4]

Furqaan Academy Online also lists an Islamic Center of El Paso Networked Learning Center at the same Paragon Lane address, with a program covering grades 1 to 12. Its admissions contact is 630-914-5015, extension 700. Parents should ask the program directly about current enrollment, staffing, tuition and how its program relates to other education offerings at the center. Two program names at one address are not two mosques, and they need not describe the same school. [5]

An El Paso oral history

The Muslim Voices collection at Texas Storyscapes holds a September 28, 2022 interview with Suleiman “Sal” M, identified by the repository as an engineer living in El Paso at the time. The interview description follows education, migration and the significance of names, bringing an individual account into view alongside institutional history. The original interview record and transcript remain with that repository. [6]

See the Muslim Voices finding guide for the other interviews in that collection.

Finding the right resource

Use the contact information for a practical visit, the education provider for admissions, and the oral-history record for one person’s retrospective account. This guide brings those resources together; it is not a complete census of El Paso’s Muslim organizations or population.