2015

Greetings From the Chairmen of our Board of Directors and our esteemed partners.

About DREAM A brief history of Dream of Detroit and a look at the people behind it.

A Selection of Articles Readings from some of America’s leading Muslim thinkers and activists.

Table of Contents

Our Generous Supporters The supporters behind 2015’s Dream of Detroit Dinner & Celebration.

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Greetings

Please enjoy these letters from our Board Chairmen and some of our esteemed supporters and partners.

Assalamualaikum,

As the Founder and Chairman of Dream of Detroit, I am humbled and filled with joy today to welcome you all to our first annual DREAM Dinner and Celebration. Thank you so much for coming today and being with us on this joyous occasion as we gather to celebrate the rehabilitation of two more houses on Waverly Street. What was once a joint project of iCAN and Neighborly Needs, DREAM is now an independent organization with its independent board and fully approved 501(c)3 status. It started with a dream in Chicago and an inspiration from the work of IMAN. We added some passion, faith, and action and brought it to Detroit to become a clear goal in sight, which then became the Dream of Detroit.

Since DREAM’s inception in 2012, we have achieved several milestones within a short amount of time. In 2013, we finished our first house that has been supporting a family in need since then. Two more houses have been rehabilitated and the families will be moving into those houses soon. We were also recognized and awarded the Syed Salman Community Award for the DREAM project in 2013. We joined in the citywide Neighborhood Day, got featured in Detroit Free Press, hosted the ISNA service project, re-envisioned the neighborhood with the students from EMU and Lawrence Tech University, and got selected as the Team Service Project by the Public Allies of Detroit. We have high ambitions and hopes for the neighborhood - we will start working on two more homes with one titled “Artist in Residence Home” in the near future.

The DREAM Staff and Board Members are excited and delighted with the progress thus far. However, none of this would have been possible without all your help, prayers, and generosity. May Allah reward all those who helped the volunteer staff and board in achieving such great success in such a short period of time. I have no doubt that Inshallah with your continued support and prayers, we are soon going to realize this dream.

Sincerely, Waseem UllahFounder & Co-Chairman DREAM of Detroit

P.O. Box 38152, Detroit MI 48238 | P: 313.214.2870 | F: 313.451.7211 | E: info@dreamofdetroit.org

AsSalaamuAlaikum,

Several years ago, a small group of brothers and sisters set out to make an impact in our community, building up the street next to the Muslim Center and making ourselves a resource to the neighbors in our area. We called our effort “Neighborly Needs.”

Today, Neighborly Needs continues to be of service to the community but perhaps its greatest contribution has been the co-founding of DREAM with the Indus Community Action Network.

DREAM has helped accelerate the rebuilding of our community and is charting a path toward a sustainable future for our neighborhood on the Westside of Detroit. Getting to the point where we are today hasn’t always been an easy journey, but it’s been worth every single step. The partnership we’ve forged and the progress we’ve made are notable.

I’m excited about what the future holds for DREAM and I’m excited about having you on this journey with us. It’s long past time that Muslims re-established themselves in a major way in the City of Detroit, and I think, with Allah’s grace, that we’re on our way.

Best Regards,Thaddeus ShakoorCo-Chairman, DREAM of Detroit

P.O. Box 38152, Detroit MI 48238 | P: 313.214.2870 | F: 313.451.7211 | E: info@dreamofdetroit.org

May 9, 2015 Dear Friends: I would like to offer greetings to all those attending the Dream of Detroit Dinner and Celebration at the Westin Book Cadillac. Dream of Detroit envisions a city amplified by its downtown business and entertainment districts, but anchored in its sustainable neighborhoods; a city where homeownership, small business development and cooperative economics, local food sourcing, and access to education and the arts are priorities of every neighborhood; and a city where compassion and mercy define the relationships of its residents. As Mayor, I applaud your efforts to build dense, thriving neighborhoods, in the Detroit community and I look forward to seeing the end results of future projects. Again, I welcome you to the Dream of Detroit Dinner and Celebration. Congratulations to everyone involved with making tonight’s event a success. On behalf of the citizens of Detroit, I want to wish you continued success in all your future endeavors. Sincerely, Mike Duggan, Mayor

“The Angel Gabriel continued to advise me to treat neighbors well until I thought he would make them my heirs.”

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

Ashraf Qazi Ciena Healthcare

Dear DREAM Supporter,

Asalaamu alaikum. Welcome!

As Chairman of the Board of Advisors for Dream of Detroit, it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's event.

Over the past year, I've had a front row seat to watch the growth of the DREAM project. In that short time, I've seen the vision of DREAM become clearer and clearer.

Whereas DREAM was previously solely focused on charity and grants, it's now laying the groundwork to leverage investments as well. Whereas DREAM was previously more focused on low-income housing, it's now looking at more holistic community building. And, much to my interest, they're looking to accelerate their economic development planning in the near future.

Tonight is indeed a time to celebrate as we complete two homes, and lay the groundwork for the next stage in the development of DREAM. I consider myself selective when it comes to philanthropy, but so far, DREAM has earned my approval. I hope they, we, have earned yours as well.

I thank you again for joining us, and I look forward to being there with you for the long haul as we make this dream a reality.

Best regards,

Ashraf Qazi Chairman Dream of Detroit Board of Advisors

Elliott Hall Elliott Hall, PLLC

Dear DREAM Supporter,

I’m honored to bring greetings to you on this auspicious occasion. I first learned about Dream of Detroit in 2014, and I was beyond excited to hear about this far-reaching vision.

Today, my sister resides in a home in Detroit that she’s lived in her entire life—nearly 90 years. The whole neighborhood was once a thriving area but, in recent years, our block has been reduced from 50 beautiful homes to just five, as work dried up, the cost of living went up, and neighbors slowly abandoned the place that they called home. I’ve seen first-hand the devastation that’s been wrought in so many Detroit neighborhoods.

That’s why I was excited to see this initiative that’s committed to fixing our neighborhoods—starting with the potentially very valuable neighborhood around the Muslim Center of Detroit.

I’ve had the honor of serving Detroit in a number of ways over the years. From Corporation Counsel of the City of Detroit to Chief Assistant Prosecutor of Wayne County. And though I was forced to leave the area in the late 80s when I became Vice President of Washington Affairs at Ford Motor Company, I’ve always considered myself a life long Detroiter. That’s why I came home to be a partner in the Gateway Center commercial development at 8 Mile and Woodward. And it’s why my law office practices in Detroit.

When I look at Dream of Detroit, I see endless potential. And from the perspective of a commercial developer, I see the budding of an area that will be ripe for investment one day soon. But to realize that potential, I know DREAM will need this community’s support. And I write to you today to express that I’ll be there with you, hand in hand, as we help more and more people to Dream of Detroit.

Sincerest regards, Elliott Hall Elliott Hall, PLLC Attorney and Counselor at Law Dream of Detroit Advisor

Dear Friends,

As Salaamu Alaykum,

For 30 years, the Muslim Center has sought to a beacon of light on the westside of Detroit. Thousands of believers have worshipped in our humble mosque, and it’s often been the birthplace or home of important community service events. We thank Allah for the opportunity to establish such a legacy.

In that time, however, many circumstances have brought plight to our neighborhood. Shrinking job opportunities over many years, and most recently, the housing crisis of the late 2000s, caused many of our neighbors to seek refuge elsewhere. And as a result, house by house, the neighborhood became a victim of blight.

Today, we are proud to be in partnership with Dream of Detroit to tackle that blight—and to rebuild our community holistically. DREAM has quickly become an important effort in our community, and we all pray for its success. Each completed home is an accomplishment. And each family placed in one of those homes, and brought closer to the masjid, is a true a blessing.

We look forward to watching—indeed, helping—DREAM grow in the coming years, inshaAllah. A healthy neighborhood is good for the masjid, it’s good for the believers, and it’s good for our neighbors, to whom we have a responsibility.

May Allah bless the DREAM project!

As Salaamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullah,

Shaykh Momodou Ceesay Resident Imam Muslim Center Detroit

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May 4, 2015

To All Our Friends,

It gives me great pleasure in writing this letter of support for Dream of Detroit. On behalf of the Board of the HUDA Clinic we wholeheartedly support this project which will help bring new life to the City.

This dedicated group of people should be really thanked for the challenging mission they have taken on. The path is hard but the fruits that will be gained will be appreciated for many years.We at the HUDA Clinic understand the hardship of starting a non -profit organization but with a solid vision one can be successful.

The team at DREAM of DETROIT is a group of very dedicated people and need everyone's support to succeed. I encourage everyone to get involved in this honorable project for the success or Communities.

Sincerely,

Zahid Sheikh, MDHUDA Clinic Board Chairman

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! !!Kausar!Hafeez,!MPH!Chief!Executive!Officer!!Board!of!Directors!!Zahid!Sheikh,!MD!Chairman!!Mitchell!Shamsud9Din!!!!!Vice8Chairman!!Catherine!Ziyad,!MSW!!!!Secretary!!Fatimah!Abdullah,!RN!!!Treasurer!!WasimRathur,!MD!Medical!Director!!Syed!Hafeez,!MBA!!JukakuTayeb,!MD!!Usman!Master,!MD!!!!!!W.!Khalid!Mohammed,!JD!!!!!!

About Dream of Detroit

About Dream of Detroit

Dream of Detroit is a Muslim-led initiative that’s combining community organizing with strategic housing and land development to build a healthy community and empower marginalized neighborhoods.

Founded by two allied organizations, Detroit-based Neighborly Needs, Inc. and the suburban-based Indus Community Action Network (iCAN), Dream of Detroit exemplifies the spirit of intra-community cooperation that powers the Michigan Muslim community.

Neighborly Needs was established several years ago to strengthen urban communities by providing charitable assistance as well as developing and implementing self help projects that address urgent community problems and needs. iCAN strives to make a positive change in the lives of Pakistani Americans, Muslims Americans and the community at large in America. In housing development, the two organizations saw a common goal and potential for a significant partnership.

That partnership was birthed in 2012 and Dream of Detroit’s first renovated property, a three-bedroom, two-floor home on Waverly Street was completed in August of 2013. Our second two homes were completed in the spring of 2015, and we are currently preparing to rehabilitate or build properties on three more Waverly lots in phase one of our project. We ultimately anticipate re-developing a major swath of the Dexter-Linwood community, while building each property with the intention of placing our residents on a swift path toward homeownership and thereby building long-term equity in the community, God-willing.

Dream of Detroit envisions a city amplified by its downtown business and entertainment districts, but anchored in its sustainable neighborhoods; a city where homeownership, small business development and cooperative economics, local food sourcing, and access to education and the arts are priorities of every neighborhood; and a city where compassion and mercy define the relationships of its residents.

“Living in the first home of the DREAM project, and within walking

distance of the Muslim Center, has been a gift from Allah for me and my

son. I’ll be honest—after having jumped around from family to family

member and even sometimes living in shelters—just being around

Muslims keeps me in a better state of mind. Having a home where I can

wake up, and not have to worry about basic questions like, “will I be put out tomorrow?” or “where am I

going to eat?” has made a real difference in my life—and the life of

my 12-year-old son.”

Nadirah Abdullah, DREAM’s first resident

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Our Team Project Director

Mark Crain is a digital strategist, community organizer, and online campaigner with experience serving both small non-profit and national advocacy organizations. He co-founded and ran a web development firm for five years, was Communications Coordinator at Chicago's Inner-City Muslim Action Network, and served on the digital team at the Obama 2012 campaign. He's currently a Campaign Director with the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org. After returning to his hometown Detroit in 2013, Mark began his involvement with Dream of Detroit and currently serves in a volunteer capacity as project director. Mark is married to Hazel Gomez and they have two young boys, Musa and Haroon.

Board of Directors

Board of Advisors Ashraf Qazi (Ciena Healthcare) Rami Nashashibi (Inner-City Muslim Action Network) Ahsan Sheikh (Perfect Pizza Pie, Inc./Domino’s Pizza) Carina Jackson (Mariner's Inn) Imam Abdullah El Amin (Muslim Center Detroit) John Sickler (University Islamic Financial) Mikail Stewart Saadiq (Al-Ikhlas Training Academy) Mitchel Shamsuddin (HUDA Clinic) Najah Bazzy (Zaman International) Rashida Tlaib (Former State Representative)

With a special thanks to all of the volunteers who have made the work of DREAM possible so far.

Waseem Ullah, Co-ChairmanRadiologist, Jackson Hospital Owner and CEO, MI Express Care

Thaddeus Shakoor, Co-ChairmanRetired, General Motors

Nauman Imami Opthamologist, Henry Ford Health Systems

Karieem ShckoorDirector, KMS Property Management

Shahied HanifaIT Project Manager, Henry Ford Health Systems

Jawad ArshadER Physician, Oakwood Hospital Owner and COO, MI Express Care

2013 Recipient of the Michigan Muslim Community Council

Syed Salman Community Service Award

2014 ISNA Community Service Event

A Selection of Articles

Hijrah to the Hood: Renewing Malcolm's Call 50 Years Later Dr. Rami Nashashibi

If Malcolm were alive today he would be able to look at the incidents of hate, fear and violence towards Arab and other Muslims in places such as Chicago's Southwest Suburbs since 9/11 and during the last several months and say, "I told you so!"

A week before his assassination, Malcolm X penned a spirited response to a letter from a group of Muslims writing to him from overseas concerned that his ongoing attention to the affairs of black people amounted to lingering Black Nationalist sensibilities incompatible with Orthodox Islam. In his response, written the night his house was firebombed, Malcolm beautifully refuted the argument deploying references to Islamic tradition and challenged the immigrant Muslim tendency to police the beliefs of African American Muslims. In the letter, Malcolm also challenged Muslims migrating to the US for settling in the newly formed white suburbs as opposed to places like Harlem. Malcolm's not so subtle point: Don't lecture me about Islam and issues of race in America, while your people are running into the arms of a white America that has no love for Muslims or their religion.

Today, some American Muslims are grappling with aspects of Malcolm's challenge five decades ago. Over the last several weeks, no less than a dozen incidents of hate crimes have been reported across the country. From the shocking execution of three dynamic young Chapel Hill Muslims, who captured the hearts of so many across the globe, to a Muslim women being cut off and approached by a gun-waving white man yelling racial epithets at a busy intersection in a Southwest Side Chicagoland Suburb.

Many Muslims of immigrant descent are becoming more sensitive to a reality underpinning the pain and anguish animating the movement fueling #Blacklivesmatter. The pain, of course, is not just about one incident of police brutality, but is intensified by the centuries-old project of institutionalized racism that continues today through things like mass-incarceration and police brutality. Similarly, the growing industry generating fear and anxiety about Muslims across the country, coupled with the horrendous images of Islam coming out of groups like ISIS, are creating a dehumanizing affect that will increasingly render Muslims, particularly of Arab and immigrant descent, targets.

Hijra in Arabic means migration and in Muslim history refers to the significant date of migration of Muslims fleeing religious persecution from Mecca to Medinah. My Hijrah to the Hood call is not an unrealistic expectation that immigrant Muslim communities and their children are going to abandon the tremendous infrastructure they have been building for the last four decades to settle in the inner-city. Yet, in reflecting on the Malcolm legacy 50 years after his assassination, my call is to deepen our commitment to repairing, rebuilding and re-igniting hope and mercy in these neighborhoods across the US for three overarching reasons:

1) Our roots are in the 'Hood:

While there is important reason to acknowledge the presence of Muslims during the transatlantic slave trade and Antebellum South, the modern roots of Islam in America began less than a century ago in inner-city communities such as Detroit, Harlem, Chicago and Cleveland. These were the destinations of the great migration North, and these were also the sites where Garveyites and early Indian Muslim immigrants, like the Ahmediyas, mixed and engaged one another around a different vision for the world. It's not a coincidence that nowhere in America are Muslims more comfortably allowed to be themselves then in inner-city neighborhoods. We should champion, organize in and develop these neighborhoods as the living testimony to the legacy of those historic roots.

2) We do a lot of "our" business in the 'Hood:

Over the last three decades many immigrant Muslim families continue to be economically bounded to these spaces. Gas stations, corner stores, food and liquor establishments, fish and chicken restaurants, tax services and an array of other businesses in low-income black communities across the country are still owned and operated by immigrant Muslim families. Bottom line: Irrespective of how you feel about them or how disconnected you are from these businesses, they represent a significant part of the American Muslims community's business infrastructure and we all should be more invested in the neighborhoods these entities subsist off.

3) Our greatest contributions to America are in the 'Hood:

Nowhere was the promise and transformational force of Islam and the American Muslim community more on display than in some of the most dilapidated urban neighborhoods across America. These are places were heroic efforts to organize, sustain, rebuild and heal communities in the face of massive budget cutbacks, disinvestment, middle-class white and black flight, and a range of other factors left neighborhoods reeling. American Muslim efforts over the decades, mostly led by African American Muslim communities have done some phenomenally inspiring work. This is not simply about rebuilding destroyed communities; it's also about rebuilding the fabric of a nation that is still coming terms with deep racial and economic disparities. Bottom line: This commitment is still our greatest contribution to America and, in turn, the greatest contribution to future generations of American Muslims searching for meaning and place in turbulent times.

Again, Hijrah to the Hood is a call to use the reflection on Malcolm's legacy this week, and the life of giants like Imam Warith Deen Muhammed, to collectively elevate a shared commitment to this vision. In the often cited letter Malcolm wrote to Betty Shabazz during his pilgrimage to Mecca, he boldly declared that "the spiritual path of truth" would be "the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to." The vision that animated those words sought to agitate, inspire and uplift our sense of hope in dark times. Now more than ever, this type of migration of our priorities and renewed focus can provide Muslims with a more dynamic and spiritually-rooted response to the challenges and opportunities of the current moment. As we reflect on the larger legacy of one of Muslim America's greatest martyrs (shaheeds), I still believe this is a vision worth living and dying for.

Reprinted from The Huffington Post, February 23, 2015

The Tragedy After 9/11 Haroon Najam

Ten years on from the 9/11/2001 tragedy, I, an immigrant Muslim in America, am supposed to say “everything has changed!” But has it really? Sure, the intense suspicion over our role and place in American society and Islamophobia in its various forms are a new external reality. But there is an internal reality that we are often less inclined to face. What do we, immigrant Muslims, believe our role and place to be in America? What do we understand the historical legacy and contemporary reality of America to be? I will argue below that this reality has not changed, by exploring one of its parts, and that a clearer understanding of this reality can provide us with the agency, options and incentives to effectively alter our external reality.

Race and the struggles to secure equality for all have been central themes in the American story. But opportunity, not struggle, has been the exclusive lens through which we have viewed (our place in) America. As post-1965 immigrants, we arrived when the long Civil Rights struggles were resulting in formal, but not real, equality between whites and Blackamericans. Being unaware of the significance of race and in awe of the freedoms and opportunities here, we were more than happy to buy into this rhetoric of inequality being a thing of the past. There were rewards: We were branded a “model minority” and held up as proof of what a “culture” of hard work (and compliance?) could achieve. But prices too: Able to pursue our interests as immigrants, we struggled to engage our principles as Muslims. This was especially tragic, since our Blackamerican Muslim brothers and sisters were at the core of many of the struggles we didn’t even acknowledge. But we were liked.

Then 9/11/2001 happened. Overnight, this fondness for us turned into fear, suspicion and even dislike of us. Who are these people really and what are they doing here, many wondered aloud and in quiet? Unused to this, we have tried the “law-abiding, tax-paying citizens” reminders, “victimization” narratives, and “constitutional rights” assertions. While these have been mostly ineffective, the important point here is that, once again, all these responses take America as a land where equality and opportunity are available to all without any struggle; one just has to assert or seize them. And here we come to see the real treachery of our limited experience in and of America; it may have crystallized us into a people of opportunity and interests rather than struggle and principles.

Lurking behind our post-9/11 challenges was/is an opportunity for us to try and change that. That would require a fundamental reorientation that we have so far not been willing to commit to. Looking forward, here is the question: Are we still unconvinced that joining the struggles for the betterment of American society, for all, is consistent with our interests and our principles, or is that we are ready but just don’t know how to go about it?

Perhaps an honest effort to answer this question can be the start of the discussion that we all so desperately need to engage in. How we answer it will also have fatal consequences for our other urgent challenge: What will be the basis, if any, for a real, not rhetorical, unity between the Blackamerican and immigrant Muslim communities?

Reprinted from The Chicago Crescent, October 2011 Edition

Sally Howell on ‘Old Islam in Detroit’ (Book Q & A) Excerpts from an interview by Joseph Richard Preville and Julie Poucher

Harbin for ISLAMiCommentary on July 29, 2014

Muslims have a long and rich history in Greater Detroit, Michigan, but it has not been thoroughly documented – until now. Sally Howell brings this history to life in her new book out next month — Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past (Oxford University Press, 2014). In her book she intends to “lay groundwork for a new interpretation of the Muslim American past that makes sense of the tactical amnesias, persistent discontinuities, and narrative breaks that have kept crucial aspects of the history of Islam in America from being remembered and effectively understood.”

Sally Howell is Assistant Professor of History and Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Howell is an editor of Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade (Wayne State University Press, 2011) and Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11 (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2009). She is also a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013), edited by Omid Safi and Juliane Hammer. Sally Howell discusses her new book in the exclusive interview.

What drew Muslim immigrants to Detroit in the early twentieth century?

Detroit was a boom town in the first decades of the 20th century. Muslims were drawn here like everyone else, by the invention of the moving assembly line in Ford’s factories and the myriad opportunities the auto-driven economy created; foremost among them was the promise of a $5 work day. News of the mutual aid societies, anti-colonial political clubs, mosques, and other associations opened in the 1910s and 1920s by local Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Albanians, and Indians brought more Muslims to Detroit, especially religious leaders, missionaries, and those with spouses and children. African Americans from the Deep South also came to Detroit in this period and lived and worked alongside immigrant Muslims. The Nation of Islam was established here in the 1930s, and the Ahmadiyya and Sunni traditions also won Black converts.

What challenges did Detroit Muslims face in the early twentieth century? Are today’s Muslims in Detroit facing similar challenges?

Most Muslims were denied the right to immigrate and naturalize by the racial exclusions laws and immigration quotas put in place in the late 19th and early 20th century. For those who were allowed in, mostly those from the westernmost provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the challenges they faced involved figuring out how to practice Islam in a Christian-majority society. Each generation has needed to establish and sustain mosques, to raise their children as Muslims, to find suitable spouses, to identify and support religious leaders, and to explain Islam and make room for Islamic traditions in a society with deep-seated suspicions about the faith. Most of these goals are easier to accomplish in Detroit today because the region is now home to so many Muslims; to large, well-known Muslim enclaves; and to hundreds of Muslim businesses and institutions. Halal food is ubiquitous in the area; many public schools close for Islamic holidays; and Muslims are key players in the region’s political, economic, and cultural life. This robust visibility has its drawbacks, however, making Detroit’s Muslims vulnerable in the post-9/11 period in ways that would have been unimaginable in the past. In recent years they have faced intense harassment by Islamophobes and Qur’an-burners like Terry Jones, and they have been targeted by several federal agencies.

What role did Detroit Muslims play in shaping “Muslim American identity”?

A huge role. In the first place, the Nation of Islam was established in Detroit, and Detroit was the first American home of the Ahmadiyya movement. Over time, these groups led tens of thousands of African Americans toward more mainstream variants of Islam and introduced the faith and its American practice to millions more. Several of the nation’s first and oldest mosques were built in Detroit by Albanian, Turkish, Arab, and South Asian immigrants. North America’s first pan-Muslim association – the Federation of Islamic Associations of the US and Canada – was virtually led from Detroit in the 1950s-1980s. Together, Detroit’s Muslims developed a comfortable means of practicing Islam in the American Midwest, and they actively promoted this praxis nationwide. When the arrival of new immigrants began in 1965, Detroit’s established Muslim institutions welcomed them, but the newcomers were often deeply disturbed by the American Muslim identities and practices they encountered in Detroit.

In “Competing for Muslims: New Strategies for Urban Renewal in Detroit,” (a chapter you wrote for the book, Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Rethinking the Politics of Enemy and Friend, edited by Andrew Shryock, Indiana University Press, 2010), you wrote about Muslims having turned around one of Detroit’s roughest neighborhoods in the 1980s, making streets safe, revitalizing housing markets, and attracting new business. Are Muslims still sought after in Detroit area neighborhoods for their positive contributions to urban renewal? Could this be a model for other blighted areas in the U.S.?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is eager to attract new immigrants to Detroit and other parts of the state to jumpstart the sort of revitalization and reinvestment I describe in that essay, and this is certainly happening where Muslims already make up a sizable percentage of the population – as in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and certain areas in Detroit, but it is premature to say it is happening in areas that are not already visibly Muslim. In fact, this is the subject of my current research. I’m trying to assess the economic and cultural impact of mosque development in the Detroit area, especially in municipalities that had little Muslim presence until recently. I’m also curious to see if any patterns exist between the civic participation of Muslims and the initial welcome their mosques receive by civic leaders and neighborhood associations. Even in a place like Metro Detroit, with such a long-standing and engaged Muslim presence, new mosques are sometimes met with vehement rejection. In some cases this hostility contributes to very introverted, vulnerable Muslim congregations, while in other cases it encourages just the opposite. Some mosque leaders meet this challenge by working overtime to be good neighbors and to find active partners with whom they can build long-lasting alliances.

Do you agree with Mucahit Bilici that Detroit, Michigan is a “microcosm of Islam in America”? (Finding Mecca in America, 2012)

Yes, absolutely. Bilici sees Muslim identity in Detroit as representative of the larger Muslim American experience, and he believes that Muslims elsewhere will eventually feel as at home in America as many in Detroit do. What Bilici doesn’t see – and he is not a historian, so I don’t fault him for this – is that the (un)comfortably American Islam he writes about is not new in Detroit. It is not new on the national stage either. It is certainly a product of the encounter between new immigrants and an American national context imbued with a complex mix of welcome, promise, and threat, but it is also the product of the encounter between new American Muslims and already established American Muslims who have interacted with each other for over a century, challenging and changing each other as they turn Detroit into a Muslim city. What is truly exciting about Detroit, today and in the past, is how new and sometimes unexpected understandings of Islam’s possibilities in America evolve out of this increasingly shared field of historical experience, community formation, and national belonging.

Reprinted from ISLAMiCommentary, July 2014. Joseph Richard Preville is an American writer living in Nizwa, Oman. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tikkun, The Jerusalem Post, Muscat Daily, Turkey Agenda and Saudi Gazette. He is also a regular contributor to ISLAMiCommentary. Julie Poucher Harbin is Editor of ISLAMiCommentary.

Graveyard DetroitImam Zaid Shakir

Detroit, Michigan is an historic American city. From its humble roots as a French trading post in the early Eighteenth Century, it grew to become one of the largest cities in the United States. It was nearly burned to the ground by fire in 1805, and was scorched by the flames of race riots in 1863, 1943 and 1967. During the Twentieth Century, its fate has waxed and waned with the rise and fall of the American auto industry. However, despite its travails, the city has displayed resiliency and had witnessed a comeback of sorts in recent years with the renewal of its downtown and riverfront areas, at least before the great financial meltdown of 2008.

A graveyard is a place where physically dead bodies are interred. This is its literal meaning. However, the word graveyard also has a figurative meaning. It is a place where worn-out or obsolete equipment or objects are kept. Its meaning can be stretched to include a depository of worn-out ideas. In this latter sense, recent events have conspired to render Detroit a graveyard. The city serves to remind us of many worn out, expired and discredited ideas.

Among them are: the idea that for African Americans the North represented an improvement over the conditions that prevailed in the South; the idea that major American corporations are the engines of economic growth and prosperity for the masses of working people; the idea that an inherent radical “Islamic” threat challenges the hegemony of a militarized American state; and the idea that extremist “Islamist” violence can possibly secure any good for Muslim people and their causes.

The Myth of the “Promised Land”

Many African Americans viewed the North as a mythical “promised land.” The racist terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League and similar groups, which was almost omnipresent in the South, was absent from the large cities of the North. Furthermore, factory work promised relatively high paying jobs, free from the vagaries of the oppressive farms of the South where work, in many instances amounted to legalized slavery. For many black folks, Detroit epitomized the promise of the North. They found plentiful work in the burgeoning factories springing up around the city’s auto industry. As a result, through the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, an expanding black middle class would gradually leave an extensive imprint on the social, cultural and political life of the city.

Detroit’s black middle class would contribute intellectual giants such as Reverend C.L. Franklin to America’s civil rights struggle. Individuals such as the boxer Joe Louis, Franklin’s daughter, Aretha, and the many recording artists of Berry Gordy’s Motown Records became American cultural icons. The prosperity of Detroit’s black middle class, in the 1940s and 1950s, was symbolized by “Paradise Valley” and its scores of black owned establishments such as the elegant Gotham Hotel.

However, the overwhelming majority of black folks migrating to Detroit did not find heaven in the North. They found hell. They were housed in dirty, dilapidated slums as racially segregated as any southern neighborhood. Fluctuating economic cycles and the gradual exodus of manufacturing jobs led to high unemployment rates that would exacerbate tensions between the new arrivals and more established white workers. Tens of thousands would never find meaningful employment, or decent housing.

The harsh economic realities of life in the North were exacerbated by harsh social realities. Crammed into rundown ghettos, cut off from the safety net of their extended southern families, denied access to higher education that was available in the historical black colleges and universities that had been established in the South, –Howard, Morehouse, Fisk, Tuskegee, etc. –many sought refuge in readily available drugs such as heroin or cocaine, and alcohol.

The highways built in the 1950s–the construction of one, Interstate 75, led to the bulldozing of Paradise Valley–facilitated the massive white flight of the 1950s and 1960s from Detroit to now accessible distant suburbs. Another flight, that of the black middle class from the inner-city areas to the abandoned white neighborhoods, rendered Detroit’s inner-city neighborhoods poorer and more dysfunctional.

These developments, culminating in the destructive riots of 1967 (over 2,500 structures were destroyed), rendered Detroit the symbolic graveyard of the “Promised Land” idea that had attracted so many black folks to the North. Its tombstones are the blocks of burned out and ravaged buildings and homes. Many of these areas have been abandoned and they give those parts of inner-city Detroit the look and feel of Berlin or Tokyo after the firebombing of those cities.

The obituary of that dream was twice written, both times in Detroit, in July 1984 and a decade later in August 1994. First, by the death of Reverend C.L. Franklin, who had fallen into a coma after being shot during a robbery of his home five years earlier. Second, when Rosa Parks, whose heroic defiance had ignited the even more heroic African American civil rights struggle, was robbed and beaten in her Detroit home. The dream they represented was no longer deferred. In Detroit, it was dead.

As GM Goes, So Goes the Nation

The Detroit auto industry represented a different type of dream for another set of people: the white middle class. Karl Marx, posited that capitalism, and the bourgeoisie it disproportionately benefitted, would collapse in the face of a massive worker or proletariat revolution brought on by the systematic expansion and impoverishment of the laboring class, and the equally systematic shrinking and enrichment of the owning class.

The emergence of the Detroit auto industry in the early years of the Twentieth Century, catapulted by management and production techniques introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, would lead to levels of proficiency and scales of production that facilitated the popularization of easily affordable automobiles and unimagined profits. During the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, increasingly large shares of those profits would find their way into the pockets of laborers, owing in large part to the unionizing efforts of the AFL-CIO (AFL –American Federation of Labor; CIO –

Congress of Industrial Organizations) and its sometimes estranged sister, the UAW (United Auto Workers).

The unionized auto industry, largely serving a white constituency, would never know the kind of revolutionary upheavals Marx and others had predicted. The white middle class emerging in Detroit not only escaped the collective misery Marx had envisioned for workers, but the automobile and its associated mobility, lifestyle and restructuring of urban and rural space led to the creation of an entirely different and deceptively enticing way of life, suburbia.

It is not coincidental that suburbia, and the deeply fragmented, alienated and racially segregated lifestyle it encouraged would be most startlingly illustrated in the vicinity of Detroit, home of the auto industry that drove white flight nationwide. “Whitetopia,” a mythical land where home ownership, having become the signal designator for attaining the American dream, where the poverty of menacing black folks, and the perceived or real criminality it breeds, was a distant reality left for others to deal with; and where consumerist passions, fueled by the salaries gifted to workers by decades of unionizing, could be freely engaged, first in the strip malls that littered the suburban landscape, and latter in huge self-enclosed mega-malls.

Unfortunately, labor’s victory would prove ephemeral. The auto industry, colluding with big oil, would pay little heed to fuel efficiency. When global economic conditions led to exponential increases in fuel prices, American gas guzzlers could not compete with far more fuel efficient and increasingly better-made foreign cars, especially Japanese ones. The rising strength of the Japanese and European auto industries and the ever larger slices of both the American and global markets they were able to win from their American rivals led to declining profits, and accelerating numbers of layoffs and plant closures in the States.

During the 1980s and 1990s unions were forced to give back many of the hard-earned benefits they had garnered for workers. Those workers who still had jobs in the auto industry found themselves struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the Detroit-based automakers, seduced by the infusion of bogus wealth into the American financial system during the late 1990s and the first few years of the Twenty-First Century, in the aftermath of the liberal policies of Bill Clinton, policies epitomized by his gutting the Glass-Steagall Act, banked on the continued popularity of energy inefficient, but highly profitable sports utility vehicles (SUVs). However, in the wake of steadily rising fuel prices beginning in 2003 and the financial meltdown of 2008, both the demand for SUVs, and an already hampered American auto industry, collapsed.

That twin collapse, automotive and financial, would severely cripple the “Whitetopia” surrounding Detroit. Thousands of homes fell into foreclosure or were sold at a loss as their owners packed up and ironically headed south. Many of these properties were abandoned to the rapacious banks that encouraged their purchase through levels of manipulation and mendacity that have not been witnessed in this country since the era of the Nineteenth Century robber barons.

With the collapse of the Detroit auto industry, and the refusal of a government that had given trillions of dollars to “bail out” the banking and financial sectors to save it, the idea that big business would be the engine pushing the prosperity of the American, mostly white, middle class has died. Like the African American dream of a promised land, its graveyard is Detroit. One of its tombstones is the rusting factories in and around the city, surrounded by acres of abandoned parking lots that resemble lonely blacktopped deserts. Another is the vacated,

puddle-splattered, unfinished concrete foundations and weed-filled lots of distant suburban developments started at the height of the housing bubble in 2005-2006, now given up for dead.

The Menace of “Islamic” Terrorism

Detroit is also the graveyard of the idea of the menacing Islamic enemy. That there is the threat of a minuscule percentage of alienated, suicidal or just plain angry Muslims engaging in acts of mindless violence that threaten the lives of an even more miniscule percentage of Americans is undeniable. However, the idea that there is a strategically significant Islamic threat possessing any significant resources that can be translated into the kind of power needed to challenge a militarized America or its global financial empire is a baseless fiction.

The killing of Imam Luqman Abdullah, a Muslim activist in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Detroit exposes that fiction. Imam Luqman was allegedly the leader of a group of radical, separatist-minded Muslims whose potential danger warranted the infiltration and surveillance of their mosque, entrapping them in an elaborate scheme involving stolen property and finally the staged ambush and brutal slaughter of the Imam.

The entire operation exposes the fictitious and empty nature of the Islamic threat. While it is true that Imam Luqman was known to engage in fierce anti-American rhetoric, what actual capabilities did he and his followers possess? Their mosque, in one of the poorest sections of Detroit, is in serious disrepair and threatened with foreclosure. The state of the mosque alone demands that

one asks, “How could a group so poor that it could barely afford to operate a small mosque in one of the poorest neighborhoods in America overthrow the United States government or establish a separate state anywhere on American soil?” The answer is obvious except to those whose minds are so poisoned by their narrow, self-serving agenda that they cannot see reality for what it is.

Hence, when Imam Luqman was gunned down by a hail of bullets unleashed by the agents arrayed against him, the real nature of the threat he represents was exposed. Even if he did possess a single firearm, as it is alleged, what threat did he represent in the face of the fully automatic high caliber arsenal in the hands of the bulletproof vested, numerically superior forces arrayed against him? Little or none! Extrapolate from that situation to the global confrontation between America and “radical” Islam and you will understand the true nature of the “Islamic” threat.

With the brutal murder of Imam Luqman, Detroit is once again a symbolic graveyard. In it is buried the idea of the existential Islamic threat. Its tombstones are the tiny mosque Imam Luqman once headed and the cold warehouse in nearby Dearborn where he was gunned down,

handcuffed, and then left to die with less dignity than the shot government dog that was evacuated by helicopter from the scene.

The Glorious “Jihad”

Finally, Detroit is a graveyard for the idea that “Islamic” terrorism can secure any benefit for the Muslim people. That idea fizzled as surely as the bomb allegedly hidden in Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s underwear fizzled over the skies of Detroit–an unexploded, unspectacular, yet unmitigated disaster.

In the aftermath of that event we are left to ask, “What benefit would have accrued to Muslims had that bomb exploded, murdering three hundred unsuspecting, innocent passengers in American airspace on Christmas Day?” None whatsoever! Instead, an exponentially larger number of impoverished, innocent Muslims than those already experiencing American-style justice would have bombs and rockets raining down on their towns, hamlets and villages. An exponentially larger number of innocent Muslims than those already herded into dungeons scattered around the world would be hauled off to be tortured, brutalized and humiliated.

Ordinary Muslims, with no connection to the troubled stranger who operated so ruthlessly in their name with neither their permission nor their counsel would have been left to bear the consequences of his act of unenlightened self-negation. The noble actions of those people resisting the occupation of their lands, the usurpation of their resources, and rankled by the murders and humiliation of their countrymen and women would be callously dismissed as wanton “terrorism.” Furthermore, the patience of even sympathetic Americans, rendered insensitive by the coldblooded action of a clearly disturbed individual, would have been seriously challenged.

There are deeper questions one can ask concerning the nature, targeting, timing and efficacy of the violence of the so-called “Jihad” movement, but we will leave those for another time. For now we will just state that the idea of any benefit accruing to Islam as a result of “Islamic” terror died December 25, 2009 aboard Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253. Its tombstone is in the Detroit-area dungeon Farouk Abdul Mutallab has been thrown into.

Conclusion

So what is the connection between these disparate ideas buried in Graveyard Detroit? African Americans, most of whom are still waiting for the deposit of the funds to cover the bad check Dr. King referred to in one of his speeches, the white middle class whose homes, retirement and pension funds, jobs and sense of security have been stolen by the latter-day robber barons, and Muslims along with others whose lives and lands have been or will soon be laid waste by the American war machine? They must all be made to see that they are being brutalized by the same globalized corporate forces. That being the case, they must find ways to unite if their resistance to those forces is to have any efficacy.

For example, African Americans cannot see Latinos who are “stealing all of the jobs” as the enemy. They must understand that the system that forces campesinos from their land through unjust and inequitable agricultural policies and sends them flowing desperately northward is the same system that structurally marginalizes and criminalizes young African American men and then profits off their incarceration.

Disenfranchised white folks must understand that Islam is neither their enemy nor a threat to their existence any more than the Vietnamese in the 1960s, Latin Americans leftist organizations in the 1980s or tomorrow’s bogeyman, whoever it may be. All of our “enemies du jour” are just desperate people trying to the best of their understanding and ability to preserve their land, culture, and resources against the rapacious appetite of a global empire. The white middle class must understand that it is not the Muslims who have closed down their factories, eliminated their jobs, stolen their retirement funds, devalued their homes, and burdened their children with a mountain of debt by bailing out the banks, insurance underwriters and finance houses.

Furthermore, the white middle class has to stop playing the silly game of political musical chairs, blaming the incumbent party, be it the democrats or the republicans, for the ravages of a morbid system. The problem is not the democrats or the republicans when both parties have sold out to the corporate interests whose army of lobbyists floods Capitol Hill shelling out money to the quislings of both parties who in turn sell out the voters they pretend so hypocritically to serve. The problem is a system that facilitates such a pernicious farce.

The mounting frustrations of the white middle class against the failures and excesses of the political system will not be solved by tea party protests or scapegoating hapless groups such as Muslims or Latino immigrants. Only united and focused nonviolent political action that works to undo the oppressive structures that advance what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as the evil triplets of poverty, racism, and militarism will lead to any lasting change in this country. The white middle class, or its surviving vestiges, must be an integral part of such action.

For their part, Muslims must have the wisdom, insight and sagacity to realize that the current wars being visited upon Muslims are not evidence of an American or Jewish-led crusade against the faithful, any more than the Vietnam War, the first Iraq War or the invasions of Panama or Grenada were crusades–despite the existence of some rhetoric that conveys that impression. They are all geostrategic conflagrations fueled by an outdated Machiavellian logic that ultimately transcends religion.

Muslims must also realize that in some instances poor people in America are brutalized by the police, prison guards, ICE officers and other agents of the state in ways that make many poor neighborhoods in America microcosms of occupied Muslim lands. The validity of this comparison is reinforced by the image of Blackwater mercenaries prowling the streets of New Orleans keeping the “refugees” in check in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Muslims must also understand that there are many American groups and individuals, including Jewish ones, who are working tirelessly to reverse the policies that demonize Muslims and direct bombs and missiles towards their lands. Furthermore, Muslims must see that only by forming bonds of solidarity with those oppressed groups in America and elsewhere will they gain the critical mass needed to begin addressing their grievances and alleviating their suffering.

There is no group, which alone can undo the dangerous policies and politics of a global empire that in many ways threatens the very existence of our planet. Opposing that oppressive force will require a globalized resistance that has the ability, like transnational corporations and their surrogates, to transcend national boundaries. That resistance must have the insight to engage in a deep level of analysis that looks beyond the superficial categories presented by corporate-

sponsored pundits and ideologues to see the underlying causes of our collective problems, the structures that unite the disparate groups that suffer as a result of the policies that facilitate the corporate dominance of the world, and the strategies that will be needed to move forward.

If Graveyard Detroit can teach us anything, it is the degree to which our lives have become intertwined. Whites, African Americans and large numbers of Arabs, many of them Muslims –Lebanese, Iraqis, Yemenis, Syrians and others- live in and around Detroit. Globalizing economic forces have brought them together, and despite the periodic traumas and great stresses that threaten to tear them apart they have been able to form a civic community, which had begun, prior to the 2008 financial meltdown, to come together to begin to rebuild their city. If these communities are able to regroup and then cross the lines that divide them, perhaps their example will inspire a world in desperate need for a new direction, and Graveyard Detroit can become a symbol of rebirth.

Reprinted from New Islamic Directions, 2008

Excerpt from the Introduction toIslam is a Foreign Country

American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority Dr. Zareena Grewal

Unmapping the Muslim World

On a sweltering July afternoon, I absently drove through a neighborhood known as the heart of Arab Detroit. The quiet suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, is famously home to the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company and also home to at least thirty thousand Arab Americans. “The Middle East in the Midwest,” as Dearborn is often dubbed, is a regular stop for journalists and TV crews searching out Muslim man-on-the-street sound bites or exotic b-roll footage—the street signs along Michigan Avenue written in Arabic, halal McNuggets at McDonalds, or burqa-clad women rollerblading. That is why, driving along in the summer of 2007, I barely took notice of the cameramen setting up on the street corner. But then I came upon a swarm of police cars blocking off the street for at least a mile. Anxiously, I craned my neck to see what the gathering onlookers were fixed on. I could hear muffled cries in Arabic and a growing crowd of teenagers waving Iraqi flags further down Warren Avenue. Hoopties with boys piled on the roofs and Arabic radio stations blaring were slowly circling the police lines, Iraqi flags and outstretched arms hanging out the windows. In the distance, drums pounded. A little boy darted between the squad cars waving his Iraqi flag and ignoring the reprimands of the police.

I scanned through the car’s radio stations for news coverage of the war in Iraq. A white police officer directing traffic on Warren Avenue waved me toward a side street. Leaning out of my car window, I asked him, “Did something happen?”

He studied the amorphous mob of Arab teenagers in the distance. “A lot of things are happening right now,” he muttered.

The fear in his eyes made my thoughts race. A few months earlier, I consulted on a major survey on Muslims in the US for the Pew Foundation; the report had just been publicly released and caused a bit of a media stir. Despite the overall rosy findings of the report (reassuringly titled Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream), Fox News and other conservative media focused on the findings high-lighting the political disaffection of Muslim American youth. Anti-Muslim right-wing bloggers and pundits made alarmist arguments in the media about how the report proved that neighborhoods like “Dearbornistan” constituted a “home grown threat.” This is what was on my mind as I turned onto a residential street. Seconds after I rounded the corner, loud gunshots fired. My heart sank as I imagined the headlines, the photographs: Muslim youth, born and bred in America, holding violent demonstrations. I spotted a middle-aged woman with a hot-pink scarf tied over her hair bouncing a toddler in her lap in the shade of her front porch.

“Shoo sar?” I asked from my car window.“Iraq won the Asia Cup!” she yelled back, smiling broadly.Then she lifted her hand in the air and shot an imaginary, celebratory bullet into the sky.

Dearborn may be a quaint “Little Beirut,” but it is also a domestic front in the War on Terror. Locals pride themselves on producing the best Arabic food outside the Middle East and the first

Muslim Miss USA. But Dearborn also has the distinction of being the first American city to get its own office of Homeland Security after September 11th, even before New York. Across the US, Muslim American communities such as Dearborn inspire fear and fascination; they are constantly scrutinized and talked about by researchers, by law enforcement officials, by pundits on the nightly news. For all this attention, Muslim Americans are still rarely heard. Millions of dollars are spent on survey research on the Muslim American population to answer burning questions about their demographics, their political views, the degree of their devotion to Islam, even their happiness.. The goal is always the same: to discern “good” Muslims from “bad” ones, “Little Beirut” from “Dearbornistan”; when surveys find Muslim Americans have strong commitments to Islam and strong attachments to Muslims in other parts of the world, the statistics are routinely treated as ominous, threatening, as if religiosity and a global sense of religious community are an obstacle to the cultivation of attachments to Americans and America. These surveys promise a window onto the Muslim American “street,” but the love of soccer and the emotional and psychological significance of the Iraqi win in Dearborn are, needless to say, impossible to capture in a survey. These surveys are like a picture taken from far away, and the details are often so blurry that a jubilant celebration can look like a riot degenerating into chaos. A more intimate picture might capture the finer textures of some of the most important issues facing Muslims in communities such as Dearborn: what does it mean to be Muslim and American in our global age? What ties Muslim Americans to Muslims around the world? Who speaks for the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? These questions are inextricably linked to questions about the nature of American citizenship as well. What are the cultural criteria of national belonging that allow one to be recognized as American? In Dearborn, everyone understands that citizenship is more than a legal status, that national belonging is fragile and that it can be withheld from those who are deemed foreign and different even if they are technically legal citizens. These days at ethnic events and citywide Islamic holiday parties in Dearborn, recruiters from the US armed forces, the FBI, and the CIA are regular sponsors but not always warmly received ones. Amid the carnival rides and food carts at the Arab International Festival, Arab children receive free balloons and spy swag at the CIA’s air-conditioned “Top Secret Lounge” and scale the US Army’s rock-climbing wall as stories of wrongful arrests and the scents of grilled kabobs swirl through the crowds below.

The gap between legal citizenship and social citizenship belies the idea that the nation is a natural entity, merely a territorially bound political unit; rather, the United States is a place both physical and also imagined, one that is produced and perpetually reproduced by a community of citizens who collectively imagine that they share a deep, horizontal kinship. On the nightly news, the weather report presents our national borders as natural features of geography, crossed by cold fronts and warm fronts. These simplified maps are one of innumerable representations that

naturalize the moral geography of the nation, treating cultural difference like a feature of the terrain. The imagined community of the nation is often apprehended in geographic terms. When we talk about the US as the “City on the Hill,” the “Leader of the Free World,” or the “Nation of Immigrants,” we construct the nation as an exceptional community in the world, but these national mythologies also conjure an imagined geography of an exceptional, value-laden place. Moral geographies are constituted by a set of ethical and political assertions about a piece of land that produce a shared, conceptual map among that land’s inhabitants. The ethical and political assertions that accompany a moral geography are so taken for granted, so integral to the identity of the place, that they are “facts” of life, silent, unspoken. As Donald Pease notes, “a nation is not only a piece of land but a narration about the people’s relation to the land.” The collectively imagined affiliations among American citizens—and the corresponding imagined separation from people outside the nation’s borders (as well as outsiders within), the perpetually appealing notion of “us” versus “them,” of “We the people” in contrast to the “Others”— sustain the imagined community of the nation, the idea that the nation is a container of a singular, all-encompassing culture, a national way of life bound by the water’s edge.

Like the nation, the Orient is also a moral geography of an exotic but inferior culture that is treated as though it were merely a place. The late cultural critic Edward Said argues in his classic book Orientalism that centuries of Western production of artistic and scholarly representations of the Oriental (Muslim) Other as weak, decadent, depraved, irrational, and fanatical operate as a form of backhanded self-flattery, confirming through contrast that the West is civilized, dynamic, and superior. The central point of Said’s Orientalism is to challenge the authority and political neutrality of this body of self-referential knowledge about the (Muslim) Other, this powerful discourse that operates independently of and in political service against the actual lands and peoples it claims to represent.

Americans have inherited this centuries-old discourse. When Americans refer to the “Muslim World,” they reproduce, amend, and complicate Colonial Europe’s moral geography of the Orient. Often Americans mistakenly use the terms “the Muslim World” and “the Middle East” interchangeably; both terms refer to far more sweeping groupings of peoples and lands than those defined by the specific and narrow American political and cultural interests in these geographies over time. Historically, American popular attitudes and US foreign policies toward the Middle East have been neither uniformly hostile nor consistent: as “the Holy Land,” it has been a site of religious significance since the country’s founding; as a source of oil, it has been an economic linchpin since the Second World War; as a proxy, bloody, Cold War battleground against the USSR, the region became a site of national, geopolitical interest; as a source of terrorist threats in the late twentieth century and even more dramatically in the twenty-first, the region became a site of national security interest. In addition, American minorities, particularly African Americans, have contested the dominant American discourse about the Muslim World, developing their own alternative investments in Islamic peoples and places as inspirations of racial justice; their transnational attachments to Muslims abroad who are not Americans destabilizes the idea of a “people” at the heart of citizenship.4 In contrast to European colonialists’ sustained preoccupation with the Orient, historically, American interests in the “Muslim World,” those of whites or racial minorities, are characterized by spurts of cultural and political attention and material investment “followed by virtual silence,” cycles of discovery and forgetting, reimagining and remapping. Today the “Muslim World” figures as a place and an idea that is strategically important to the US despite being, in the eyes of most Americans, regressive, dangerous, and distant, both geographically and culturally.

Of course, cultures, peoples, ideas, and beliefs do not actually map themselves onto the terrain of the earth in this simple way. There is, in other words, no place we can call the “Muslim World.” If the “Muslim World” is the modern equivalent of Islamdom (lands ruled by Muslims), it would refer only to Muslim-majority countries; countries with significant minorities of Muslims, such as China, will be left out. If the “Muslim World” is a euphemism for the Middle East (sometimes including Afghanistan and Pakistan), it fails to account for the indigenous populations of Christians and Jews and other religious minorities throughout the region as well as the fact that .6 billion Muslims live outside the Middle East. Ultimately, the term “Muslim World” implies both that Muslims live in a world of their own and that Islam is an eastern religion and there is a foreign place—a distant, contiguous part of the world—where Islam properly belongs. Where does that leave the American Muslims who are the focus of this book? Do places like Dearborn make the United States part of the “Muslim World”?

Islam Is a Foreign Country unmaps the moral geography of the “Muslim World” as a place and a people outside American geographic and cultural borders by mapping an alternative, transnational Muslim world imagined by American Muslims that includes them and the US. To mark the dominance of the moral geography of the “Muslim World” as a foreign place and a source of foreigners in the West, I capitalize both words; when referring to Muslims’ aspirational moral geography, the “Muslim world,” I do not. Rather than a foreign region, the Muslim world is a global community of Muslim locals, both majorities and minorities who belong to the places where they live and who, in their totality, exemplify the universality of Islam.

Reprinted from Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority, NYU Press 2013

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