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Aliya Hassan ALIYA HASSAN WAS one of Arab Detroit's most effective leaders. As executive director of ACCESS (1972-81), she built bridges between the first Arab immigrants to America, their children, and the new waves of refugees and immigrants that crashed into Detroit in the 1970s. Through her political and religious activism, Aliya shaped, thousands of lives. Her power was based on her moral authority and nurturing spirit. In her later years, Aliya's friends and family called her Hajja, a title honoring her pilgrimage to Mecca. To the generation of activists she inspired, Aliya Hassan was the mother of the Arab American community in Detroit. Aliya Hassan was born in Kadoka, South Dakota, in 1910. Her parents were among the first Lebanese Muslims to arrive in America. Aliya came to Detroit in 1925 to attend the Briggs Boarding School. Blessed with an independent, adventurous spirit, she moved to New York City in the 1950s, where she worked as a private investigator , civil defense director, and political organizer. Aliya was both a feminist and a lifelong advocate of Islam. In the 1960s she struggled to improve relations between orthodox Muslims and the Nation of Islam. Her friendship with Malcolm X grew out of her desire to unite all Muslims in adherence to an inclusive, egalitarian Islam. Aliya helped arrange Malcolm X's pilgrimage to Mecca, during which the Black Muslim leader embraced orthodox Islam. She also traveled several times to the Middle East to discuss the growth of Islam in America with Arab leaders. In 1972 Aliya Hassan returned to Detroit and became active in local politics. She was a guiding force in the development of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS). Aliya helped Yemeni, Palestinian, and Lebanese workers organize to secure basic social services from state and federal governments. Under Aliya's direction, ACCESS provided English classes, food, housing, and translation services to thousands of new immigrants. Twice she helped rebuild ACCESS after it was destroyed by fire. Aliya received dozens of awards and citations for her work, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service in 1981. Despite ailing health, she 317 Politics Fig. 14. Aliya Hassan. Photograph by Millard Berry. continued to advocate for Detroit's Arab and Muslim communities until her death in 1990. Aliya Hassan led an unconventional life, and she was proud of the damage she did to the stereotype of the Arab Muslim woman. She grew up as an Arab homesteader in the American West, sleeping under buffalo robes and Indian blankets; she was an avid cardplayer who never lost her taste for gambling; she believed in nonviolence and studied the martial arts; she was married and divorced several times; she prayed inArabic and journeyed to Mecca; she taught others how to wash the bodies of the Muslim dead yet chose, in defiance of custom, to be cremated when she died. For all her radical ways, Hajja Aliya never abandoned the basic values of her Arab American upbringing: faith in God, identification with the dispossessed, respect for tradition, and a willingness to fight for change. Today, her legacy survives in the work of ACCESS and in the vibrant growth of the Arab community she loved. In the following poem, Saladin Ahmed tries to make sense of the heroic figure he knew only as a doting great-grandmother. As he remembers the Hajja, blending his private recollections with her public persona, he re-creates the spell she cast over Arab Detroit. 318 ...

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