In the Way of the Prophet

Bismillah Al-Rahman Al-Rahim: on Fridays in America’s Muslim capital of Dearborn, Michigan, the ancient Islamic sentence of invocation wafts over the blighted streets of greater Detroit, drifting out from residents gathering for prayer.

The blighted streets lined with hourly-rental motels that lead from Detroit into the suburb of Dearborn gradually give way to busy avenues dotted with mosques and thriving small businesses. Arabic signs advertise attorneys and physicians, passers-by speak Levantine and Gulf dialects of Arabic, and on the sidewalks women wear the colorful headscarves of hijab.

Dearborn is a microcosm of the Middle East planted in the Midwestern United States. The roughly 40,000 of Dearborn’s 100,000 residents that are Arab American defy the myth many Americans hold of a unified Muslim world, filled with parading masses bearing the likeness of Ayatollah Khomenei. While there are some radical Islamists, Dearborn’s growing Muslim population runs the gamut from international traders to educated professionals to local business owners. Every Arab nationality and religious sect is found here, from Yemeni traditionalism to secular modernity.

Dearborn was founded as the first overnight stop on the stagecoach route linking Detroit to Chicago. Its streets are named for the German Catholics who have since given way to Polish and Italian Americans, whom Arab immigrants and their descendents, in turn, are replacing. Southfield Freeway separates the city’s Western and Eastern worlds, roughly demarcating three neighborhoods: Southend is now mostly populated by Yemenis; East Dearborn is a bustling Lebanese community of Arab restaurants, bakeries, and halal butchers; and West Dearborn’s residential streets remain populated by Italian and Polish ethnics.

The Muslim presence in metropolitan Detroit dates to the last decade of the 19th century, when men from the Lebanese Biqa Valley, working as peddlers and traders, followed a larger number of Lebanese Christian emigrees to the U.S. When Henry Ford began to offer generous five-dollar daily wages for workers at his Highland Park assembly line in 1913, Detroit became the predominant destination for Lebanese immigrants. Immigration accelerated when Lebanon’s economy fell apart in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse at the end of World War I. The restrictive National Origins Act of 1924 reduced Lebanese immigration to a trickle, but over the next twenty years, wives and dependent children, whom the Act still allowed to immigrate, gradually reunited with their husbands and fathers. In 1927, Ford shifted operations to the Rouge River plant in his native Dearborn, and a Muslim neighborhood soon followed.

By the close of World War II, the Dearborn population numbered about 200 families. Most subsequent immigrants–Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi–arrived in Dearborn as political refugees, with only Yemenis coming to Dearborn in this period primarily for economic opportunity (see sidebar). Collectively, the communities in Dearborn represent the second largest concentration of both Arabs and Muslims outside the Middle East, behind only Paris.

East and West in Dearborn Mosques

The evolution of Dearborn mosques reflects the ongoing debate since the late 1960s between conservative and liberal elements of American Muslim society. Conservative movements, including Islamic revivalism, can be traced to Middle Eastern influences such as the Iranian Revolution, which parts of Dearborn embraced when the spiritual guide of Hizbollah, Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, spoke to an enthusiastic audience of Shi’a refugees in neighboring Southfield’s Bonnie Brook Country Club. More religious than political in appeal, Islamic revivalism tries to stem the tide of integration into non-Islamic American society. Liberal movements descend both from the secular pan-Arabic movement pioneered by former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser–Nasserism–and from American influences such as the Civil Rights Movement. Liberals work to construct a distinct Arab American identity and incorporate it into mainstream American life.

Dearborn Mosque–the second mosque ever built in the nation–was gradually raised on Southend’s Dix Road between the 1930s and 1950s. In 1976, it saw the conflict between Americanizing and Arabizing ideologies come to a head when Palestinian-born Hajj Fawzi, leading a group of Yemeni and Palestinian immigrants called the musalee’een, broke into the mosque one Friday when it was closed for prayer and occupied it. Later, they wrested legal control of the mosque, through board elections and litigation, and invited to the imamate a young Yemeni sheikh of the conservative Wahhabist tradition. The new imam banned a women’s group from the mosque when they protested his prohibition of weddings and fundraising events from the mosque’s basement. And he required women who wished to attend the mosque to enter through a side door, don hijab, and keep to certain areas of the mosque.

The sheikh’s tenure was short–he was forced to resign and return to Yemen after molesting a twelve-year old girl–but the Yemeni and conservative takeover of the mosque was complete. With time it has come to reflect the Yemeni Zaydi sect of Sunni Islam and has become known as the Yemeni Zaydi Dearborn Mosque. Only Arabic has been spoken there in the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, the musalee’een began to broadcast the daily calls to prayer over loudspeakers, to the annoyance of some Southend residents. The city of Dearborn attempted to end the broadcasts but was prevented when the courts ruled that the broadcasts constituted the Muslim equivalent of church bells.

More liberal observers of Islam founded their own places of worship. In the 1960s, the most significant of Dearborn’s–and the nation’s–mosques was founded by the highly educated, English-speaking Lebanese Imam Mohamed Chirri. Invited by a group of Dearborn Muslims to serve as the imam of a new place of worship, Chirri began fundraising for a mosque on Joy Road, several blocks across the Detroit border from East Dearborn. Imam Chirri, having befriended one of Nasser’s acquaintances in Lebanon, raised $44,000 from Nasser himself, $7,000 from Jordan, and sizable amounts from the local community.

Imam Chirri’s support for the Americanization of the Islamic community was so pronounced in the 1950s and ‘60s that the imam often appeared in public wearing a business suit and no turban. At the mosque he founded, the Islamic Center for America, or the Jami’, English and Arabic were used equally, and Sunday services for a time became the principal services of the week, drawing whole families as well as men.

The Balance of Left and Right

Imam Chirri sought to construct the Jami’, as an ideologically broad church, and served well as statesman both in responding to pressures from his more conservative constituencies as well as in casting a favorable public image of his religion in America. He was always grateful to Nasser for financial support, defending him publicly when Nasserism had waned as a popular Arab ideology. Initially distancing himself from the Palestinian cause–early on, he counseled Palestinian activists to resign themselves to the reality of Israeli’s statehood and the need for a two-state solution–as his mosque filled with Lebanese refugees, Chirri became publicly opposed to Israel.

In response to the conservative desires of recent immigrants, some changes have taken place–hijab is now common practice, where it had not been before, and the use of the Center for wedding dances and other communal celebrations, common until the 1960s, has ceased. Some Americanized Muslims in Dearborn feel that the arrival of more conservative immigrants has diverted the earlier project of creating an Islamic community that was at once truly Islamic and American.

Imam Chirri died in 1994 and was succeeded by Imam Sayed Hassan Qazwini. Both attained positions of national prominence as the day’s most visible imam during their tenures; Qazwini occasionally serves as an informal consultant to the White House on American Muslim issues. And on a more local level, Qazwini has undertaken projects of unprecedented scale in the community, including a new $15 million complex near the two college campuses on Ford Road and a Muslim American Youth Academy with 170 day students, from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Chirri’s project to balance the left and right of Dearborn’s Muslim populace did not go uncontested. Rejecting the centrism and Americanization of the Islamic Center, several more conservative mosques were founded in Dearborn in the 1980s. Most recently, the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center opened in 1993 as a community center for Iraqi Shi’a refugees. The center lies in a 6,000 square-foot hall on Warren Avenue that had earlier housed a nightclub–Club Gay Haven.

Grown From a Backroom

Places of worship have not been the sole forum for the conversation regarding the role of religion in the lives of Dearborn’s Muslim community. The debate has extended into non-sectarian Arab organizations, and even into municipal government. Secular Arab organizations, such as the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), founded by Donnie Unis in 1967 and presently led by Ishmael Ahmed, have struggled to find a niche for themselves in a diverse community. ACCESS emerged when a group of young, second-generation Arab Americans, influenced by the war in Vietnam and by contact with the Black Panthers, came together to become more politically involved with the local Arab community. Local mosques initially disparaged the organization as an institutional competitor run by radicals and atheists. On two occasions, ACCESS’s first building was victim to arson.

The first years of ACCESS’s history were characterized by great idealism but little institutional development. According to its current vice president, Hassan Jaber, ACCESS’s founders were “more used to discussing political theory than delivering services.” Later, as refugees from southern Lebanon arrived in greater numbers, the group’s leaders commissioned a University of Michigan professor to conduct a study of the immigrant population and found among the city’s Arabs a number of troubling vulnerabilities–possibly the highest infant mortality rate in the nation, an unemployment rate of 30 percent, a population whose majority could not speak English, a 30 percent illiteracy rate in Arabic, and alarming incidences of post-traumatic and other emotional syndromes.

On a volunteer basis, Unis and others tried to correct some of these ills by providing immigrants with English lessons, assistance navigating welfare and social security bureaucracies, and the like. With the hiring of a grant writer and considerable dedication by its leaders, ACCESS grew from the backroom of a Southend store into a building on Salina Street, and now resides in two new buildings on Schaeffer Street devoted to health care and employment counseling. Privatization of social services due to Michigan’s welfare reform process has greatly increased ACCESS’s importance. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, ACCESS met with resistance from the Muslim community; today, according to Lebanese-born Abed Hammoud, a Wayne County assistant prosecutor, “Nobody says ACCESS is doing too much. The question is how to get involved, not should we get involved.”

The community’s constellation of organizations is rounded out by a highly active American Arab Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1992, a newspaper, the Arab American News (or Al-Watan), published since 1984 by Osama Siblani, and Muslim and Arabic-language programming on public-access cable channel 15. Two of the larger village communities have formal institutions: the Bint Jbeil Cultural Center and the older, larger American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine. As Hammoud says, “There’s not one Arab organization that the entire Arab American community embraces.”

Starting with the School Board

In February of 2001, Dearborn Public Schools began accepting proposals from halal food distributors to provide food to its 28 public schools. “The whole point is to give foods they can eat, so they’re nourished and can function in the classroom,” Bob Cipriano, the district’s business manager, told the New York Times. Eight years earlier, Dearborn schools banned pork from their lunches to accommodate Muslim dietary guidelines.

Pressure from the city’s school board, organized groups of parents, and the federal and state governments has resulted in further accommodations to Muslim students in Dearborn’s public schools. Parental advocacy forced the separation of gym classes by gender in one Southend school. And the federal Office of Civil Rights has been responsible for several expansions of bilingual instruction for Arab-speaking students.

As the governmental body to which Muslims and Arabs first won election of municipal positions, Dearborn’s school board has played in important role in both school and community affairs. A recent bond issue led to the emergence on the board of a cohesive, energetic pro-Arab bloc marked by its idealism and tactical skill. A coalition of neighborhood activists defeated bond proposals of $50 million in 1999 and 2000 that would have allocated insufficient funding to heavily overcrowded Arab schools. Two of those activists, Mary Lane and Aimee Blackburn, subsequently won election to the school board, from there devising a $150 million bond to construct three new elementary schools and 26 new high school classrooms in Arab neighborhoods. The remainder of the board acquiesced in the proposal, certain that it, like the others, would fail. With the assistance of Abed Hammoud, this last bond proposal carried with 900 votes. The campaign’s success markedly raised the local political profile of Dearborn’s Arab and Muslim communities, as well as that of the Arab American Political Action Committee founded by Hammoud (himself a former mayoral candidate) and now led by Osama Siblani.

Muslims and the Broader Community

Despite the successes, Arab exclusion from municipal administration and the police force is nearly total, and the city is led by a mayor, Michael Guido, who first won office in 1985 running against “our Arab problem.” He has since moderated his public stand toward the community, but still makes periodic political recourse to anti-Arab sentiment to solidify support among his graying, white ethnic base. According to Hammoud, “What the mayor does is he makes sure that he doesn’t mention anything positive about the Arab American community. He says things like diversity is great, but he never says that the Arab American community is contributing to Dearborn.”

Politically engaged Muslims say that greater Muslim and Arab influence in local governance is a demographic inevitability. They criticize the present mayor for failing to knit together the growing Arab, the declining Italian American, and other white ethnic communities. They have no organizations in common–civic, religious, or otherwise. Consequently, unspoken suspicion combined with outspoken protests of any governmental support tends to be the watchword from white ethnic leaders.

White elected officials, with the exception of the school board officials already noted, boast of their “good ties” to the Arab community while complaining off the record of its growing influence within the city. While Dearborn’s white residents brag about how well their city weathered the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Arabs are quicker to remember the broken storefront windows, the threatening 2 a.m. telephone calls, and insulting highway graffiti. They also remember Abed Hammoud’s sudden setback on September 11, the day of Dearborn’s mayoral primary. Arab Americans feared leaving their homes to go to the polls while whites made an abrupt decision to vote for Dearborn’s Italian American candidate.

Yet Hammoud also worries about the inevitable ramifications that will ensue the election of an Arab mayor. Unprepared for this eventuality and without a groundwork of cross-communal understanding, the white community will flee the city to further removed white enclaves–a new brand of white flight for the 21st century. Ideally white society will grow to incorporate the growing Muslim community in their midst, just as most of Dearborn’s Muslims continue to shift focus from their countries of birth towards a distinctly Arab, but very much American, civil society in their new home–an assimilated political stance directed not towards Lebanon but to Dearborn city hall, Lansing, and Washington.

SIDEBAR: Arab Muslim Immigration to Dearborn since World War II

Palestine

Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a second wave of Muslim immigration began. The Refugee Relief Act allowed Palestinians to immigrate to the United States. Dearborn attracted Sunni Muslims from the villages of Beit Hanina and Bireh, while Christians from Ramallah moved to adjoining western Wayne County. The 1967 war, the Intifada, and regional economic stagnation from 1988 resulted in additional waves of Palestinian immigration to Dearborn. Palestinian immigrants changed Arab Dearborn from a principally Christian and working-class neighborhood to one that was increasingly Muslim and professional.

Lebanon

Beginning in 1975 and continuing until 1991, a period in which one third of Lebanon’s population emigrated, Lebanese Shi’a displaced by their country’s civil war arrived in Dearborn. Particularly large numbers arrived from the Biqa Valley and Tibnin, Bint Jubayl, and Nabiteyeh in the south. These emigrants settled in large numbers both in the Southend area and in East Dearborn, around Warren Street. Christian refugees from this period tended, like the Palestinian Christians, to settle to the west, in Farmington Hills, Westland, and Livonia.

Yemen

Unaccompanied Yemeni males had been migrating to Dearborn since the beginning of Arab immigration, but in the mid-1970s they began to arrive in larger numbers. Less educated and less fluent in English than other Muslim immigrants, they hold unskilled positions in Dearborn and send remittances to their families in Yemen. Rather than bring their families to Dearborn, they themselves return to Yemen–frequently and, with time, permanently. More strictly religious than many of the other groups, the Yemenis shun what they regard as the corruptive influence of American society. They concentrate in Southend with other Yemenis, with the result that the neighborhood now shows the influence of the Yemeni countryside in dress, its absence of women from public spaces, and the centering of male social life around the neighborhood’s coffeehouses. From the mid-1980s on, an increasing proportion–rising from a tenth to a quarter–of Yemenis have immigrated as intact families rather than solitary males.

Iraq

More recently, the southern Shi’a Iraqis came to Dearborn fleeing Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the failed Shi’a rebellion. Coming chiefly from Basra, Al Nasiriyya, and the Al Amarah and Hawr al Hammar marshes by way of the Rafgha refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, nearly ten thousand of them were granted asylum in the United States. Nearly all of them migrated to Dearborn as soon as they were able and there have formed a very tightly knit community located along Dearborn’s northern border with Detroit.