01
A second meeting each week
One meeting means six days without a room. A midweek meeting becomes possible as soon as enough members are steady enough to hold one.
Vision & Impact
A room that does not exist yet, in a city that needs one.
What follows is what we can stand behind: checked sources for every external claim, and no invented numbers about ourselves.
The gap
Treatment exists. Community exists. They rarely meet.
A Muslim in Chicago who wants help with addiction can find clinical treatment, and can find a mosque. What is hard to find is a room where both are true at once — where the higher power has a name, where nobody has to translate their faith into someone else's vocabulary, and where nobody has to leave their deen at the door to get well.
Millati Islami has been doing this since 1989 and lists in-person groups across the country — Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC. We could not find one in Illinois. Their national Zoom and telephone meetings are open to anyone here. What does not exist in this state is a room.
Chicago has one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States. It should not be a place where the only Muslim recovery meeting is on a screen.
Where we are
Small, new, and real.
One meeting, every Friday, in a real room at Masjid Al-Muhajireen, with a Zoom link for anyone who cannot be there in person. It is facilitated every week by a physician who has never missed one.
We are not going to tell you how many people come, how many have stayed sober, or how many lives have been changed — because we do not count, and we will not start. A fellowship that keeps an attendance record is not anonymous, and anonymity is the thing that makes anyone walk through the door at all.
What we can tell you is that the room exists, it opens every Friday without fail, and it is the only one of its kind we can find in this state.
Why this framework
We did not pick it because it sounds good.
In 2020, Cochrane reviewed Alcoholics Anonymous and twelve-step facilitation for alcohol use disorder across 27 studies and 10,565 participants. It found high-certainty evidence that manualised twelve-step facilitation increases continuous abstinence more than other established treatments, including cognitive behavioural therapy — and usually at lower cost.
On other measures — how much people drank when they did drink, and the harms that followed — the review found twelve-step programs no better and no worse than the alternatives. The advantage is specifically in staying stopped.
What it does not say
That evidence is for alcohol, and for manualised facilitation delivered clinically. The evidence base for other substances is thinner. It is not evidence for Millati Islami's adaptation, and it is not a claim about our own results — we are new, we measure nothing about you, and we would rather tell you that than imply otherwise. We cite it because it is why we chose this framework.
Looking ahead
What we hope to grow into.
None of this is a plan with a price on it. These are the things our members would like to make possible as the fellowship grows, in roughly the order they would matter to someone walking in.
02
A meeting for women
For many Muslim women a mixed room is the barrier before addiction is even discussed. This waits on a sister among us being ready to facilitate.
03
More members able to facilitate
Today the meeting depends on one person being in the room. Members who have worked the steps learning to carry them is what turns a meeting into something durable.
04
Materials in Arabic and English
The steps, the traditions, and a plain guide to a first meeting — written by members, and free to anyone who wants them.
05
Speaking with imams
The first person a struggling Muslim tells is often an imam. Members visiting masjids to talk plainly about addiction costs nothing but willingness.
06
Learning as we go
Understanding what helps, without ever keeping a record of who came. Anything we learn has to sit inside our anonymity, not beside it.
What will not change
Whatever we grow into.
Whatever we grow into: it stays free, it stays anonymous, it stays run by volunteers, and faith stays the engine of the work rather than a substitute for treatment.
How we sustain ourselves
“Every Millati Islami Jamaat (group) should be self supporting but may accept sadaqa (voluntary charity) without attached obligations or promises to donating parties.”
Muslim Recovery Anonymous is run entirely by volunteers. There is no staff and no salaries. Nobody is paid for facilitating, and nobody ever will be.
There are no fees, no dues, and no collection — not from the people who come to meetings, and not from anyone else. Whatever we manage to do, we do because members give their time to it.
Millati Islami's traditions set the standard a group like ours holds itself to: self-supporting first, and free of obligation to anyone. That is how we intend to remain.
Come and see it.
The strongest thing we can offer you is not a document. It is a Friday evening.
Every Friday · 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central
Masjid Al-Muhajireen