Just returning to a snow covered DC from four days in the greater Detroit area, where I traveled with our partner Mithat Bereket, leading host for Turkey’s public television station TRT, to film a documentary on Islam in America. Michigan has one of America’s largest, and one of the world’s most diverse, Muslim populations. Ranging from Arab American to African American, Sunni to Shia, recent immigrant to third generation, you’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim community not represented in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. We barely scratched the surface of the Bangladeshi, Yemeni, or South Asian communities. But I did manage to get a close look at two vastly different Muslim communities.
On Saturday we spent most of our day with Imam Abdullah El Amin and his congregation at the Muslim Center of Detroit. After leaving our hotel in suburban Dearborn, and navigating the tangled web of freeways in the heart of Ford country, we arrive at an unassuming white brick building in a dilapidated neighborhood of urban Detroit. 
Many of the surrounding houses are windowless and boarded up, and the ‘main streets’ in the area are a wasteland of “Coney Island’ fast food establishments, car dealerships, businesses and restaurants which look as though they’ve been out of business for years. We walk into the masjid, which serves the largest congregation of African American Muslims in the area, and are greeted warmly by several members of the congregation eager to share their mosque with a Turkish television audience. The Muslim Center, which was originally a bank before being incorporated as a mosque in 1985, seems more of a community center than a mosque. While they gather for prayer five times a day, their Saturday is also brimming with community service activity.
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Ilana Weinberg America, Detroit, Islam, Muslims, Religion
This month, as Vietnam assumes the Presidency of the UN Security Council in New York, the AP reports continuing conflicts back home between Vietnamese police and followers of the superstar Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) took the opportunity to highlight what they see as Vietnam’s continued human-rights abuses, particularly in the realm of religious freedom.
The commission writes that:
…religious freedom conditions have not improved since Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and have deteriorated for some religious groups and the human rights lawyers who try to protect them…
As America Abroad explored in The First Freedom, Vietnam has become something of a Rochard test for how you view the struggle to advance International Religious Freedom. Many point to the end of violent forced renunciations of faith and the release of religious activists from Vietnamese prisons as evidence of monumental progress. Yet there are those, including the folks at USCIRF, who argue that despite these first steps, the Communist government of Vietnam still has many miles to go.
The Commission has called for the Obama Administration to turn up the heat by placing Hanoi back on the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) – that’s among the strongest sticks available to the US government in the decade-old International Religious Freedom legislation. But that move seems unlikely, since Vietnam essentially worked their way off the CPC list three years ago. And the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom champions the case of Vietnam as a prime example of the effectiveness of IRF diplomacy.
To see an interactive map of USCIRF Countries of Concern, go here.
Matt Ozug Religion, Vietnam
This past June, President Obama delivered his address to the Muslim World from Cairo. It was no accident that it emphasized the principle of religious freedom. From Obama’s speech:
The richness of religious diversity must be upheld – whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. And fault lines must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq. Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it.
In recent years, the Middle East has seen growing sectarian conflict, and a rising tide of extremists promoting a bloody and intolerant form of Islam. This issue of religious liberty extends far beyond the Muslim world. Religious persecution is on the rise around the globe, from Russia and India to swaths of sub-Saharan Africa.
But why is religious freedom so important to the US? Tom Farr served as the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom. That office was set up just over a decade ago after Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act—which made the promotion of religious freedom a component of US foreign policy. Listen to an excerpt from America Abroad’s latest program, The First Freedom.
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Javier Barrera International Politics, Religion
Just returning to a snow covered DC from four days in the greater Detroit area, where I traveled with our partner Mithat Bereket, leading host for Turkey’s public television station TRT, to film a documentary on Islam in America. Michigan has one of America’s largest, and one of the world’s most diverse, Muslim populations. Ranging from Arab American to African American, Sunni to Shia, recent immigrant to third generation, you’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim community not represented in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. We barely scratched the surface of the Bangladeshi, Yemeni, or South Asian communities. But I did manage to get a close look at two vastly different Muslim communities.