San Francisco’s Tenderloin Is Bringing a New Eid Festival to Its Streets

San Francisco’s Chinatown has its iconic Lunar New Year parade and block party, North Beach boasts the Italian Heritage Parade and who could forget the Mission’s Carnaval celebration?

Now, thanks to local community organizers and the district’s first Muslim American supervisor, the Tenderloin will introduce its own cultural fete: the Eid Night Market Street Fair, slated for April 5.

It will fall approximately a week after the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Muslims’ holy month of fasting.

“The Tenderloin is known for more than just what people see in the news,” San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who lives in and represents the Tenderloin, said in an interview with KQED. “We believe this will showcase that, and in some respect, also be a beacon for the 250,000 Muslims who live in the Bay Area.”

The street fair will feature local restaurants cooking and serving their food “bazaar-style,” as well as other small businesses and vendors. There will be games and activities, a live music performance by local Palestinian American performer MC Abdul, and a collaboration with the Golden State Warriors, whose academy coaches will be present to play with the children.

Mahmood said it was a priority to ensure that the main focus of the festival would be on the kids.

“There are 3,500 children who live in the Tenderloin, and there’s not many activities for them to do,” Mahmood said. “And there’s not many programs that are necessarily geared towards activating this neighborhood for children, or Muslim children in that context.”

Although the Tenderloin’s Muslim community celebrates Eid with a block party every year, Mahmood said that after he was elected in November, its regular organizers approached him to ask for support in elevating the event, transforming it into a large-scale festival with sponsors and community partnerships.

Adnan Alemari, who leads the Tenderloin Muslim Youth group and owns Fanoos Grills in the district, regularly organized the past Eid celebrations. He said this year’s event is significant for many reasons, but mainly two.

“The image that has been painted over the neighborhood made it hard for us, as business owners, to survive,” Alemari said in an interview. “It affected us as residents, mentally, and as a business, financially.”

“We are a diversity in this neighborhood. I mean, you can find anything that you want, you know, from different cultures and at a decent price,” he said.

The other reason, Alemari said, is that as Muslim Americans face a number of biases and discriminatory preconceptions, this event is the perfect opportunity for people who aren’t in the community to see what being Muslim is really about.

“We are people of peace,” he said. “We’re people who care for each other, caring for our neighborhood, and have nothing against anybody else.”

Mahmood echoed Alemari’s thoughts, also adding that amid recent turbulence in conflicts domestic and abroad, many of which directly affect Muslim Americans in the Bay Area, this festival can shine some light and bring positive elements back into focus.

“There’s a lot of things happening at the national level, from threats of a Muslim ban,” Mahmood said. “There’s obviously the crisis unfolding in Gaza, and there’s so many Yemeni and Palestinian residents here.”

“They should be uplifted, and they should be held dear because they contribute so significantly to our communities,” he said. “This is to showcase all of those contributions and to celebrate them.”

Tickets are live now on Eventbrite and are free of charge. More information and tickets can be found here.