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Finding the Straight Path A Conversation with Mohsen and Lila Amen about Faith, Life, and Family in Dearborn Sally Howell DEARBORN, MICHIGAN, IS home to roughly twenty-five thousand Lebanese Americans. This population forms the nucleus of what is perhaps North America's largest, most highly concentrated ArabMuslim community. As of 1998, there were at least eight mosques in the Dearborn area. These mosques are attended by Shia as well as Sunni Muslims, by third-generation Arab Americans as well as recently arrived immigrants. In this interview, Lila and Mohsen Amen discuss the history of one of the most influential Dearborn mosques: the Islamic Institute of Knowledge, a Shia congregation located on Schaefer Road in the heart of the Lebanese business district. The Islamic Institute was founded by immigrants from the south of Lebanon whose political and religious thought had been shaped by violent upheavals in the Middle East. At the height of the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian revolution of 1979 radicalized a large portion of the Lebanese Shia population. The Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, and the continuing Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, forced many Lebanese to flee the countryside. Those who had relatives in America came to Detroit, ifthey could. This large, newly arrived, and politically brutalized immigrant community built the Islamic Institute in 1984. They continue to establish new mosques and have now begun to build their own private schools as well. Among Arab Americans nationally, Dearborn's workingclass , highly conservative Muslim community has come to stand for Arab Detroit as a whole. Well aware of their reputation among other Arabs in Detroit and beyond, the Amens agreed to speak with me in order to document the social and political thought of the Lebanese Shia community. Rarely are Shia presented in any but the most imagistic and flagrantly politicized terms. In the American (and 241 Religion even the Lebanese) media, Shia wear martyrs' headbands, march in mass demonstrations shouting Allahu Akbar (God is Great), wave the flag of the Iranian revolution, and resist the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon with katushya rockets and kalishnikov rifles. This interview was recorded in hopes of presenting a counterimage. I interviewed Lila and Mohsen Amen for this volume because I wanted to skirt the official, and always somewhat guarded, pronouncements of the mosque's spiritual leaders. I knew that Lila was heavily involved in the Islamic Institute as a volunteer, teacher, and family activist. Mohsen, likewise, is a board member, cofounder, and youth leader. A discussion with them, I thought, would offer a glimpse of the everyday life of the mosque. We spoke together at the Detroit Historical Museum on March 29, 1998 under circumstances that were less than ideal. We were rushed for time and did not have the opportunity to explore in depth many of the topics we discussed. I was delighted, however, to interview the Amens together. Their different perspectives on the individual, family, and community events that have shaped the last twenty years of their lives represent far more than their own points of view. Lila was born in Dearborn into a well-established Lebanese working-class family. Mohsen was born in the south of Lebanon and came to America in 1970. Their marriage is cross-cultural. It brings together two noticeably different, but intimately related ways of thinking. In this respect, the Amen family is a microcosm of Arab Detroit, where immigrants and the Americanborn work, organize, worship, and frequently marry among each other. Their differences of opinion are deep and ever-present, but the Amen case is clearly one in which cultural disagreements have strengthened, rather than weakened, individual notions of Islamic faith and practice. Mohsen and Lila speak in powerful language of their separate conversion experiences. Mohsen's came as a sudden and overwhelming reaffirmation of his rootedness in the Lebanese Shia community . Lila's awakening to Islam was a more gradual reaction to Mohsen's new commitment and an attempt to overcome, with the help of God, a series of personal crises she faced during those years. The Amens discuss the challenge of raising a devout, observant family in contemporary America, a topic that willbe familiar to Americans of almost any religious persuasion. They discuss the movement of their "radical" Muslim community toward mainstream social and political engagement. They describe the mundane and extraordinary activities of the Islamic Institute: ongoing fund-raising efforts, plans to build a religious school, the development of youth programs, the 242 [3.21.231...

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