On a Friday afternoon in southwest Naperville, cars fill a new car park off 248th Avenue and families walk towards a building whose dome was rising from cornfields only a few seasons ago. The story of Pakistanis in Naperville is not one of a crowded ethnic enclave. It is the quieter, more recent story of engineers, doctors and software architects who chose an affluent Chicago suburb for its schools, built mosques between the subdivisions, and turned strip malls along Ogden Avenue into a corridor of halal butchers and biryani.
The Place
Naperville is the oldest city in DuPage County, founded in 1831 by Captain Joseph Naper, who built mills and a trading house where the West Branch of the DuPage River bent through the prairie. For more than a century it stayed a farming town and county seat, the kind of place defined by its grain and its churches.
That changed in the late 1960s. The construction of the East-West and North-South tollways pulled corporate offices and research laboratories out of Chicago, and Naperville’s population grew roughly tenfold by the end of the century. Today it is one of the wealthiest cities in the Midwest, with a median household income above 150,000 dollars and more than seven in ten adults holding a bachelor’s degree, according to city demographic data.
It is into this landscape of cul-de-sacs, top-ranked school districts and technology campuses that South Asian professionals arrived, and Pakistanis among them.
How It Became Pakistani
There was no single ship, no founding street. The Pakistani presence in Naperville accumulated the way professional migration usually does, one job offer and one good school district at a time.
The professional pull, 1970s and 1980s
The first South Asian Muslims to settle in the area came in the 1970s and 1980s, drawn by the corporate and research jobs that the new tollways had brought to the western suburbs. They were doctors, engineers and academics, people for whom Naperville’s reputation for schools mattered more than proximity to any existing community.
In those early years there was no mosque in Naperville at all. Far-sighted Muslim families established the Naperville Islamic School as an affiliate of the Muslim Community Center in Chicago, and prayer meant a long drive towards the city. The community was small enough that it could gather in living rooms and rented halls.
Building a centre, the 1990s
The turning point came in the early 1990s. In 1991 the Islamic Center of Naperville was incorporated as a non-profit under Illinois law, and the community purchased a building on Olesen Drive to anchor itself. For the first time, Naperville’s Muslims, Pakistanis prominent among them, had a permanent place to pray, teach their children and bury their dead.
The centre grew faster than its walls. By 2007 the congregation had outgrown Olesen Drive, and a second facility, Masjid Al-Hilal on Ogden Avenue, was opened to take the overflow during Ramadan and the Eid prayers, when a few hundred families became a few thousand.
Outgrowing the suburb, the 2000s and 2010s
Through the 2000s and 2010s the South Asian population of Naperville climbed steadily. Asians now make up roughly a quarter of the city, the largest single group being Asian Indians, with Pakistanis forming a smaller but established share of the South Asian total. Across Illinois, Pakistanis are the second-largest South Asian group after Indians.
For Pakistani families, the appeal was specific. The schools were among the best in the state. The houses were new and large. And as more relatives, colleagues and college friends followed, the drive to a mosque or a halal grocer shrank from forty minutes to four.
A mosque from the ground up, the 2020s
By the late 2010s even two buildings were not enough, and the Islamic Center proposed a purpose-built complex on a 13.6-acre site on 248th Avenue, between 95th and 103rd Streets, in a residential area on the city’s southwest edge.
The plan met fierce resistance. Neighbours raised concerns about traffic, lighting and the scale of a project that included a mosque, a school, a hall and a gymnasium. The debate drew thousands of written comments to City Hall on both sides. According to coverage of the dispute, the city received more than 2,300 comments opposing the project and close to 9,000 supporting it.
It took fifteen public meetings over nine months before the Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval in October 2021, with the City Council unanimously approving the venture a month later, subject to conditions on traffic, parking, fire safety and noise.
The first phase, a 28,400-square-foot mosque named Masjid An-Noor, “the light”, opened for daily prayers on 15 December 2024 and for Friday congregation five days later. It was the first facility the Islamic Center had built from the ground up rather than adapting an existing structure, with a prayer hall for around 457 worshippers. A larger school building is planned for a later phase, once improvements to 248th Avenue are complete.
The Landmarks
Masjid An-Noor, 3540 248th Avenue. The Islamic Center of Naperville’s first ground-up mosque, opened in December 2024 after a contentious nine-month approval fight. Its 28,400 square feet hold a prayer hall for several hundred and represent the community’s coming of age, a Muslim landmark planted deliberately among the subdivisions of southwest Naperville.
Islamic Center of Naperville (Masjid Al-Hilal), 2844 West Ogden Avenue. Opened in 2007 to absorb the overflow from the original Olesen Drive site, this Ogden Avenue mosque became the everyday centre of religious life for Pakistani and other Muslim families before An-Noor was built. During Ramadan its car park overflows nightly.
The original centre, 450 Olesen Drive. The building the community purchased in the early 1990s, the first permanent home of the Islamic Center of Naperville after years of borrowed halls and the long drive to Chicago. It remains part of the centre’s constellation of sites across the city.
JK Kabab, Naperville. An Indian and Pakistani grill where dishes are made to order, one of the desi restaurants that have turned Naperville’s commercial strips into a destination for biryani, kebabs and karahi. It is the kind of place where a Lahori family and their American-born teenagers can eat the same meal.
Bismillah Market and Restaurant. A combined halal grocer and eatery of the sort that anchors immigrant life: meat slaughtered to Zabiha standards, sacks of basmati and atta, and a counter where you can pick up dinner. Stores like this one and the cluster of desi markets nearby mean a Pakistani household in Naperville rarely needs to drive into the city for groceries.
Naperville Halal Fest, Frontier Sports Complex. An annual festival coordinated by the Illinois Muslim Chamber of Commerce that has drawn crowds estimated in the tens of thousands, with the Pakistani consul general in Chicago among its visitors. It is the most public expression of how large the Muslim, and Pakistani, presence in the western suburbs has become.
Naper Settlement and the Riverwalk, downtown Naperville. The living-history museum at the heart of the city and the landscaped path along the DuPage River are where Pakistani families join the rest of Naperville: pushing prams on a Sunday, watching the summer festivals, claiming the same civic centre that the founders’ descendants do.
Where They Came From
Most of Naperville’s Pakistanis trace their origins to Punjab and Sindh, the two provinces that have sent the largest share of professional migrants to the United States. They came from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and the smaller cities that feed Pakistan’s universities and medical colleges.
This was migration by credential rather than by chain. The first arrivals were selected by American employers and graduate schools for their engineering, medicine and computer science, and once established they sponsored siblings and parents and recommended Naperville to friends back home. The community that resulted skews highly educated and professional, mirroring the city around it.
That origin shapes the present. Pakistani Naperville is less a re-creation of a particular village than a gathering of educated families from across the country’s cities, bound together less by region than by faith, language and the shared project of raising children abroad.
Naperville Today
Today the Pakistani presence in Naperville is visible without being concentrated. There is no single Pakistani street; families are spread across the subdivisions, their children in the same classrooms as everyone else’s. What marks the community is institutional rather than residential: the mosques, the halal grocers, the restaurants and the festivals.
The Pakistani American Association of Naperville and other organisations now hold Eid Milan gatherings and Independence Day celebrations that draw more than a thousand people, events that treat professional success and civic belonging as twin themes. A Pakistan Day festival in the city has, by its organisers’ account, broken its own attendance records year on year.
The tension is not gone. The fight over Masjid An-Noor showed that a Muslim landmark in an affluent, formerly homogeneous suburb can still divide neighbours. But the outcome, a mosque approved and built, also showed which way the city is moving. Naperville now contains, alongside its churches and its Naper Settlement, a growing constellation of minarets and markets that a Pakistani family from Lahore or Karachi can recognise as home.
Families who put down roots here are part of a wider American story shared with the Pakistanis in Plano, Texas and the Pakistanis in Sugar Land, Texas, suburban professionals who built community institutions in once-quiet towns. They share that pattern too with the longer-settled Pakistanis in Edison, New Jersey and the technology-driven Pakistanis in Ashburn, Virginia. Within Illinois, Naperville’s South Asian arc runs parallel to the Chinese in Schaumburg, Illinois and to the older suburban heritage of the Jews in Glencoe, Illinois.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Pakistanis live in Naperville?
The US Census does not break out Pakistanis as a separate category from the broader Asian Indian count, so there is no precise figure. What is verified is that Asians make up roughly a quarter of Naperville’s population, and that across Illinois Pakistanis are the second-largest South Asian group after Indians, which makes the Pakistanis in Naperville a substantial if uncounted community.
Why did Pakistanis settle in Naperville?
Pakistanis in Naperville were drawn by the corporate, research and medical jobs that arrived with the tollways from the late 1960s onward, and by the city’s top-ranked schools. The first families came in the 1970s and 1980s as doctors, engineers and academics, and later relatives and colleagues followed them to the same affluent suburb.
Where do Pakistanis in Naperville worship?
The main institution is the Islamic Center of Naperville, which operates several sites including Masjid Al-Hilal on West Ogden Avenue and the new Masjid An-Noor on 248th Avenue, opened in December 2024. The centre traces its formal founding to 1991, when the community bought a building on Olesen Drive.
When did the new Naperville mosque open?
Masjid An-Noor, the Islamic Center of Naperville’s first purpose-built mosque, opened for daily prayers on 15 December 2024 and for Friday prayers on 20 December 2024. The 28,400-square-foot building on 248th Avenue followed a contentious approval process that ran through fifteen public meetings before the City Council approved it in November 2021.
Where can you find Pakistani food in Naperville?
Naperville has a growing cluster of Pakistani and desi businesses, including the grill JK Kabab and combined grocers and eateries such as Bismillah Market and Restaurant. These halal markets and restaurants mean Pakistani families in Naperville rarely need to drive into Chicago for biryani, kebabs or Zabiha meat.
What festivals does the Pakistani community in Naperville hold?
The Pakistani community takes part in events such as the Naperville Halal Fest, coordinated by the Illinois Muslim Chamber of Commerce, which has drawn crowds estimated in the tens of thousands. The Pakistani American Association of Naperville and related groups also host Eid Milan gatherings and Pakistan Independence Day celebrations attended by more than a thousand people.
If your family’s story passed through Naperville, or any of the places Pakistanis have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Lahore and Karachi to a dome rising over 248th Avenue, to wherever you are now.