Muslim Diversity in Detroit
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.
Once a week the masjid hosts a soup kitchen for the local homeless and working poor, most of whom are non Muslim. Every Saturday these Detroit residents gather to receive lunch and a bag of groceries to take with them. The Muslim Center also collects clothing to donate to those in need. 
Upstairs is a free medical clinic, tending to those in the community (both Muslim and non-Muslim) with no health insurance, providing care and medicine completely free of charge. The doctors, nurses, and other staff come in mostly from the surrounding suburbs and volunteer their time twice a week.
Imam Abdullah El Amin, a commanding presence at nearly 7 feet tall, proudly introduced us to his teachers, volunteers, students, and other congregants that make up this bustling congregation.
Many of the members originally converted through the Nation of Islam, but have since adopted more traditional Islamic beliefs. In his office, surrounded by the Koran and icons of black history such as George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X, Imam El Amin told us of his conversion from Christianity to Islam at the age of 32. He was one of the many Detroit area African Americans who turned to Islam in a time of racial upheaval at the height of the Civil Rights movement, which is very much still a part of their racial narrative. As we were getting ready to leave, they were setting up for a party: the Imam’s wife had just earned her PhD, and the community wanted to celebrate. Over the loudspeakers we could hear the hits from the Motor City’s Motown past, but in between Marvin Gaye and “We are Family” came the Adhan, the call to prayer, which brought the party to a pause as children and grandparents took off their shoes and went to pray.
We returned to the Muslim Center this afternoon to get a few last shots for the documentary, and the mosque was quiet but for two older gentlemen who came to pray. We filmed one of them calling the Adhan, and later found out that he was a former heroin dealer who spent 10 years in prison, during which he converted to Islam and is now a devout member of Imam El Amin’s congregation.
Now fast forward to our day in Dearborn – the home of the Henry Ford Museum and Estate, Ford’s corporate headquarters, and also the largest Arab American population in the U.S. Driving up Warren Ave, one of Dearborn’s main streets, we found what is called ‘Little Arabia’, where you’ll find schwarma, falafel, and hookah shops with Arabic text on every corner. Every grocery carries Lebanese imports, and running them are second and third generation Arab Americans, many of the women wearing hijab.
We spent some time at the Islamic Center of America (now the largest mosque in the US), with Imam Qazwini, the progressive Iraqi Shia leader of this largely upper middle class Arab community. Driving by the impressive mosque, you’d think you were in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, if it weren’t for the expansive freeway and three churches surrounding its property.
The halls are paved with marble and the ceilings adorned with ornate chandeliers. Many members of the active congregation send their children to the Center’s Islamic day school, where the kids were busy running around the gymnasium and displaying their dioramas of different ecosystems.
During our interview, Imam Qazwini repeatedly emphasized the tolerance of the American society and the American government that allows his mosque to thrive, and stressed the complimentary nature of Islam and democracy.
I couldn’t help but notice the discordant nature of the two narratives: it seemed to me that the African American community was drawn to Islam to find freedom from the racist oppression of 20th century American politics, while Imam Qazwini and many of the Arab American immigrants were drawn to America to find freedom from the oppression of their Islamic governments. It felt like we spent the past few days in opposite parts of the world, while in reality we only traveled a 20 mile radius in the heart of industrial America. Any way you look at it, it’s hard to find such starkly contrasting and richly diverse forms of Islam [or any religion for that matter] being practiced right next door to each other, in peace, anywhere else in the world.
Great article Ilana!