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.