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Introduction
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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Introduction IN ARAB DETROIT, the imagery of "margin and mainstream" is nowhere more apt, or more complicated, than in its application to religious life. At the most obvious level, Arab Detroit is composed of faiths and sects that are considered alien in America at large. Islam of any sort is marginalized in a country that defines itself, with careless disregard for millions of its own citizens, as Judeo-Christian. Shia Islam, more suspect still, is repeatedly associated with terrorism and violent political movements. Chaldean Catholics and Egyptian Copts, though Christian, often appear no less peculiar, with their ancient liturgical languages and ritual variations, and with their bilingual congregations made up almost entirely of immigrants and their children . Yet one of the great ironies of this seemingly exotic terrain is that Christian churches and Muslim sects that were minorities in the Arab world are majorities in Arab Detroit. Christians, barely5 percent of the Arabic-speaking world, make up at least half of Arab Detroit. Chaldean Catholics, a minority within the Arab Christian minority, are arguably the largest group of Arabic-speaking Christians in Detroit . Shii Muslims, who have sizable Arabic-speaking communities only in south Lebanon, Iraq, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula, make up the majority of Muslims in Detroit. With over forty mosques and churches, Arab Detroit is a religiously inverted version of the Arab world, and this upside-down quality has generated a range of unexpected consequences. Foremost among these consequences is the emergence of religion-based ethnicities where, in the homeland, an overarching Arab identity, with a specific national focus, has typically been the ideal, if not the rule. Sharkey Haddad's memoir shows how completely his personal identity and public career are built on the Chaldean community in Detroit. He freely admits, however, that he grew up in Iraq thinking of himself as an Iraqi and a member of the Arab 199 Religion nation. The fact that he was a Christian did not stand in the way of these identifications. Only in Detroit did he learn about his Chaldean heritage as such; only there did he come to see the advantage in placing a strategic distance between Arab and Chaldean identity. The same themes surface in Richard Jones' essay on Detroit's Coptic Christians. In Egypt, Copts are citizens of an Arab/Muslim state, and their identity (as a minority) must be defined in relation to that state. Clearly, this is not the case in Detroit. As a result, Coptic-American identity can acquire separatist, ethnic, and even national dimensions that would make little sense, and would be altogether dangerous, in Egypt. The same process is discernible among Lebanese Shia, who are now in a position to represent Islam in Detroit not as a minority sect but as the majority of Arab believers. Shiism in Dearborn is remarkable for the extent to which it is local (organized along village and clan lines particular to south Lebanon) and universal (with links to a world community of Shia whose political and spiritual centers are in Iran and Iraq). Islam itself, detached from Lebanon as a place, or Arabism as an ideology, or Iraq as a state, is quickly becoming a total identity for many of Detroit's Muslims. For Arabs, however, this identity has ethnic and political dimensions that link it more to Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen than to, say, Pakistan or the Black Muslim community in Detroit. As religious minorities who were once contained (and even suppressed) within Arab/Sunni/Muslim nation-states become religious majorities in Arab Detroit, they must contend not only with new political freedoms but with intimidating cultural possibilities. Indeed, the distinction between "culture" and "religion" is the battleground on which immigrants fight to define what is Muslim, what is Christian, and what is Arab. This conflict emerges plainly in all the essays that follow. It is especially pronounced, however, in Nabeel Abraham's study of the Dix mosque in Dearborn and Sally Howell's interview with Lila and Mohsen Amen. In both, the relationship between "Old World" and "Americanized" approaches to Islam prompts individual Muslims, and entire mosques, to ponder what in their way of life is based on eternal, divine truths and what is "merely" cultural and therefore open to change. A social scientist would immediately insist that hard dichotomies between religion and culture are false: religion is always cultural, and culture has everyday routines and rituals that are observed as religiously as the Feast of Pentecost or the Fast...