OxBlog

# Posted 2:05 PM by Patrick Belton

LETTER FROM DEARBORN: For the last several days, I've been avoiding my OxBlogging duties off in the burgeoning Arab and Muslim capital of the United States, the southwestern Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan. I came here to do interviews for a series of articles I've been commissioned to write, which may turn into a book about Dearborn and what it tells us about the future of the Arab and Islamic communities in the U.S. I've been reading this morning some of the media coverage of Dearborn, but all of it is simplistic, too broadly put, and frankly misses the real community, with its subtleties, its invigorating features, its complexities. It's generally the result of reporters jetting from out of town for an evening to collect an interview or two, then returning to write their pieces once they could drop some of the geographic referents, like Warren Street, to pretend they understood the place. But the real Dearborn doesn't appear in any of their pieces.

Quite simply, I fell in love with Dearborn. The largest concentration of Arabs or Muslims in the United States, it's a study in contrasts - in between miles upon miles of depopulated Detroit blocks now filled only with commercialized sex - Dearborn appears, a small thriving colony of Middle Eastern hustle, entrepreneurship, and colour. Where everything around them is bleak, they've created blocks upon blocks of Lebanese restaurants, social service organizations, Arabic newspapers, small businesses, the practices of Lebanese- and British-educated physicians, lawyers, and accountants. Its colour, its bustlingness, its creativity and entrepreneurship are hard to overstate.

While it's a commonplace to describe the Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S. as monolithic, this actually couldn't be farther from the case. Rifts are common and frequent, and continually being patched over or exploited by different would-be leaders seeking a panethnic or more particularist base. The factional difference between Sunni and Shi'a, however, is the smallest - at the Islamic Center of America, the nation's largest mosque, a Qom-trained Shi'a cleric named Imam Sayed Qazwini leads Friday services to a congregation that's principally Lebanese and Sunni; Shi'a cleric Imam Elahi preaaches to a congregation which is also principally Sunni, and so on. The real rifts are ethnic: the Lebanese date from the 1890s, when Henry Ford brought them to the U.S. as occupational migrants, to receive a mildly comfortable $5 a day to build the first Model Ts at Ford's Rouge plant in south Dearborn. They were principally Christian, but Muslims from neighboring villages followed soon after. The real immigration took place in waves; Palestinians after WWII, residents of the Bekaa Valley from 1975, and increasingly from 1982, and Shi'ites from Iraq after the failure of the Shi'a uprising. The social pecking order runs something like this: Lebanese from Beirut and Tripoli are at the top; then Lebanese from the Bekaa Valley; then Palestinians and the comparatively few Jordanians and Egyptians; afterwards, duking it out for last place, are the Iraqi Shi'a refugees, slightly edging out the rural Yemenis who continue to live in the poorest parts of town (which the Lebanese had inhabited on their arrival), and working in the lowest-skill jobs. A separate cleavage, at the level of leaders, runs like this: one group is principally concerned with the local and with securing greater political influence and meeting social needs of the community; in this category would go Ish Ahmed's social service organization ACCESS, former mayoral candidate Abed Hammoud and journalist Osama Siblani's Arab-American PAC, and a cluster of activity on the school board oriented toward building schools in the Arab neighborhoods which previous boards had entirely ignored. (Reflecting typical semitic patterns of social advancment in the US through education, 10 members of the class of 1998 from the Arab Fordson High School are graduating this year from medical school. Also, nearly all charitable monies raisd by the school district in past years have gone to fairly frivolous uses in the wealthiest, white public school, while Fordson and the other Arab schools have received nary a cent). Alongside the locally-oriented groups are the internationally-oriented commercial organizations, such as Ahmed Chebbani's American Arab Chamber of Commerce, which is quite active and creative in sponsoring trade opportunities with Lebanon and the Gulf. These people are attractive; they spin out ideas by the dozens, whether for international trade conferences (Bill Gates, King Abdullah, and King Fahd are all attending one this summer), or ethnic magazines, or business opportunities in Iraq - and they pursue all of them at once, and seemingly quite well. The third category is the mosque activity; they're not as interested in local issues (which they regard as small fish), but as regards politics are principally interested in foreign policy and Palestine (in the last respect unlike the traders, who are content to ignore Palestine until it has a stable government and rule of law propitious for doing business in). More on the last bit later.

Arab exclusion from city hall and the police force is rampant, and shocking. Mayor Guido won office in the 1980's running against "our Arab problem," and subsequently plays the race card in elections while spouting such gems as "if you want to help immigrants, teach them hygiene." He as a matter of unspoken policy does not hire Arabs into either municipal administration or into the police force (this in a city where clearly a quarter, perhaps much more, of the city is much more conversant in Arabic than in English, and where Arabic-speaking police officers would serve a public, not just communal good). He also takes no action to knit together the growing Arab and the declining Italian-American and other white ethnic communities. The inevitability, of course, is that within decades there will be an Arab mayor; and unprepared for this eventuality, the white community may follow Detroit's example with its black minority and flee the city to further removed white enclaves. White elected city officials, with the exception of several school board members with Arab spouses, tend to boast of their "good ties" to the Arab community, while complaining off the record of its growing influence within the city. There are no organizations - civic, religious, or otherwise - that bring together members of the rising and declining communities, with the result that unspoken suspicion and outspoken protests of support are generally from the white ethnic leaders the word of the day. The Arabs, on the other hand, feel marginalized by 9/11 - while whites brag about how well Dearborn weathered the terrorist attacks, the Arabs are quicker to remember the broken storefront windows, the threatening 2:00 a.m. telephone calls, and the highway graffiti insulting to the prophet.

There is a terrorism component to the story, of course, but it is not the only one - although it's sadly the only aspect of this complex story which receives national attention. This is a topic which, in order to deal with as responsibly and carefully as I can, I'll be holding off on for the most part until I address it in print. One interesting dynamic, though, is the incredible extent to which cognitive blinders and distrust of all government counterterror initiatives pervade both white and Arab Dearborn. Islamic charities linked openly to Hezbollah's spiritual leader, Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlullah, operate in the open; yet no one in Dearborn ever mentions the fact. Genuinely Islamophobic local politicians wish to avoid being labelled as such, and avoid the topic; and other quarters have no trust in domestic counterterror efforts, which they believe are all born of a scapegoating urge, and which they describe in the same breath as the awful racism and sickening attacks on Dearborn's Muslims which followed 9/11. The second point is that it is a very, very small number of people, housed quietly in a few mosque-based organizations, who are at all involved in it; the broader community, both Arab and white, is oblivious to its existence. The support in these quarters is for Hamas and Hezbollah, and perhaps to some extent smaller similar organizations like Islamic Jihad, but not to Al-Qa'eda. There is really no affinity of interest between any quarters of the local Islamic community and Al-Qa'eda; the Al-Qa'eda attacks occasioned a precipitous drop in Muslims' acceptance by their neighborhoods and in the fortunes of all of their broader political projects, such as doing away with profiling and securing greater political influence as a community; their interests are inimical.

The support for these groups, however, is a part of a complex larger story, and not the story itself. The broader story is what Dearborn portends for the future of the American Arab and Islamic communities, as the burgeoning capital of both. And I think the broader story is quite good. Compared with blight and poverty on all sides of them, the Arabs of Dearborn have made a thriving and prosperous middle eastern enclave, where they are weaving forth a spectrum of civil society organizations, international trade to enrich their region, and the inevitable desire to secure greater political influence for their community, shared by every other immigrant community in the nation's history. There are dark sides and complexities, shared by the Irish, the Kosovar Albanians, and every other immigrant group which has ever brought its own politics to the U.S. after leaving its own homeland as reluctant refugees, but the processes of reorienting to trade and normal ethnic politics are, I think, strongly advanced and promising. And driving down thirty miles of blighted Michigan Avenue massage parlors and hourly-rental hotels to see this thriving, bustling community, one might be forgiven for imagining the U.S. needs all the Arabs it can get.