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Arab Detroit's "American" Mosque
- Wayne State University Press
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Arab Detroit's "American" Mosque Nabeel Abraham ONE FRIDAY IN 1976 a group of Muslims gathered on the doorstep of the Dix mosque (officially known as the Moslem Mosque) in the Southend of Dearborn. Finding the door locked, theyforced their way in and proceeded to do what Muslims all over the world do every Friday at midday: perform Jumaa communal prayers. For this group of mostly immigrant, mostly Yemeni and Palestinian worshipers, their dramatic entrance into the mosque symbolized its reclamation by "authentic" Muslims. The "inauthentic" Muslims from whom they reclaimed the mosque were notAmerican converts. Theywere mostly the families of early Lebanese-Syrian immigrants, and their mosque was one of the oldest in America. The nationalist Yemenis among whom I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork at the time were hardly devout. They found the actions of their zealous countrymen, whom they referred to as "al-musa\ee'een" (literally "those who pray") mildly amusing.1 Yet even the avowed atheists among them understood the logic of the musalee een's action. The Lebanese and Palestinian immigrant population residing in the Southend of Dearborn in the late 1970s also readily comprehended the reasoning behind the musalee'een's forced entry into the Dix mosque. Mosques in the Middle East, and elsewhere in the traditional world of Islam, are open on Fridays, their primary function being to serve as a place to hold the Friday communal prayer. That the Dix mosque was not open on Fridays was abnormal, even scandalous, in the eyes oftheimmigrant Muslim community. This fact was obscured in my mind by the rhetoric employed by my Yemeni informants, leftists as well as rightists, who considered the musalee een to be political reactionaries and social neanderthals. With hindsight, it is clear to me that whatever the personal, social, and political attitudes of the musalee'een, the driving impulse behind their action that fateful Friday morning was as cultural as it was religious. 279 Religion The "reclamation" of the Dix mosque that began in 1976 culminated two years later when the musalee'een wrested complete control of the mosque from its more assimilated Lebanese Sunni members following a bitter court battle. With the help of a Yemeni sheikh trained in Saudi Arabia, they instituted a series of seemingly radical measures. Whereas in the past the mosque was open once a week for communal prayers (mostly on Sundays), henceforth it would be open twenty-four-hours a day, seven days a week. The newcomers also did away with the historic division of the mosque " into a prayer area on the main floor and a social area in the basement ; thus they disallowed weddings and other social celebrations that were long the mainstay of the Dix mosque. "Henceforth," the musalee'een's imam declared, "there will be no singing or dancing in this house of worship."2 In another departure from established practice, the new leaders placed restrictions on women entering the mosque. In the past, female members of the congregation were at liberty to enter the mosque as they pleased. After the takeover, they were required to wear head scarves, enter through a special side door, and restrict themselves to designated areas within the building. According to the former imam, Mike Karoub, who was unceremoniously ousted, the musalee'een felt that the women and children were defiling the mosque. Women were believed to be ritually "polluting" the mosque if they entered it while they were menstruating. This "danger" applied even to the parts of the building that had been considered social areas. In the view of the newcomers and their sheikh, the entire building was a "house of worship." Theological rationalizations about "ritual pollution" aside, the musalee'een sought to replicate in Dearborn the public forms of female segregation and subordination they were accustomed to in their countries of origin. To outside observers, the new restrictions comported well with the image of "Islamic revivalism" and "fundamentalist Islam" taking shape in the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran and elsewhere in the latter half of the 1970s. This was especially true of the injunctions applied to the women of the congregation. By the mid1980s those images became the norm in much of Dearborn's Muslim community, the largest concentration of Arabic-speaking Muslims in North America. It is quite commonplace today, for example, to see Muslim women clad in head scarves, long sleeves, and anklelength dresses even on the hottest summer days throughout Arab Detroit. The recent influx of Iraqi Shia refugees...