In Queens, Clearing a Path Between Yoga and Islam

His participation drew instant reproach from the community, he said. “As soon as we finished our event, they said, ‘Imam, what is that, why are you doing that?’ ” he said. “ ‘This is not within our Islam.’ ”       
But Imam Qayyoom said he had come to believe that Islam and yoga could be compatible — if the Sanskrit benedictions are left out, he said, and women’s skin-tight yoga gear is traded for more conservative garments. “Reformed, it will be more popular” among Muslims, he said. “It will not contradict with Islamic religion.” Others are less convinced.        Anwar Hassan, 27, who is from Bangladesh and works in the Queen of Sheba grocery in Jackson Heights, said yoga’s roots were irreconcilable with his faith

“When I came here, I see there is yoga and everything, but we don’t go,” Mr. Hassan said. “A lot of people, they are new to it so they think it’s a gym class, or something. But Hindu people started it, and I think it’s Hindu religion, so I don’t go.”       

When Alex Eingorn prescribed yoga recently to a Bangladeshi woman who came to him with spinal pain at his Better Health Chiropractic clinic in Midtown Manhattan, “she looked at me in horror,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m a Muslim, I can’t practice a different religion.’ ” Mr. Eingorn persuaded her to try it, he said, by saying that in New York, it is considered a secular practice

Mimi Borda, 46, who runs MiMi for Me Yoga, a serene studio in Jackson Heights that is one of the neighborhood’s only yoga centers, has had to make similar allowances. “If there is a little chanting going on, right away this is a turn- off” for some of the Muslims who sign up for her sessions, she said. “Often they won’t come back.”       
In response, Ms. Borda has tailored certain classes, cutting out Sanskrit chants if she thinks it will upset certain students. “Emphasizing the physical, they’re kind of cool with it,” she says. “They feel safe.”       
For Ms. Borda, who has taught yoga to a variety of audiences, including Hasidic women in Brooklyn, it came as a shock, when shortly after opening a previous studio in the area eight years ago she was approached by a Muslim student who voiced concerns with customary chants like “ohm.” She found herself fielding questions like “ ‘Is ‘ohm’ God? Is ‘ohm’ Allah?’ ” she said.       

Ms. Borda adapted her classes for her new clientele, either omitting chanting, or adding both “shalom” and “amen” to the sign-off of namaste.       
“A lot of us in the Western world, we look at it as anything that is going to enhance the way we look aesthetically,” she said. Some Muslim students, she added, were “not looking at the physical aspect, they’re looking at the spiritual aspect.”       
For many immersed in a culture where vinyasa yoga is more readily associated with a New York Sports Club than a Hindu temple, the origin matters little. And for some of the devout living here, the American conception has overridden the beliefs with which they were raised.       
When Mr. Rashid finally took up yoga, he said there were more similarities with his faith than contradictions. In salat, the five-times daily Muslim prayers, which entail a meditationlike centering of focus and several kneeling bows, he felt there were echoes of yogic poses.