Muslim in America: a trip to two of the most Islamic cities in the U.S.

• Author: Dalmia, Shikha
• Position: Dearborn and Hamtramck in Michigan

If Southeast Michigan's claim to fame is that it's the auto capital of America, its claim to notoriety--in certain circles, anyway--is that it's the Arab and Islamic capital too. Around 300,000 Muslims live in the area. Muslims make up less than 2 percent of the nation's population but more than 40 percent of two cities in the Metro Detroit region, Hamtramck and Dearborn.

The former, a 2-square-mile town of less than 30,000 people, triggered a national freak-out last November when it elected a 4-2 Muslim majority to its City Council. The punditocracy's lead Muslim-baiter, Pamela Geller, instandy predicted Shariah, terrorism, and persecution of Jews in Hamtramck's future. A Texas Republican councilman, Micky Garus, earnestly declared that the "end of Western civilization" was nigh.

There was a similar outcry in 2013, when Dearborn elected four Arab Americans, two of them Muslim, to its City Council. The Family Research Council's Jerry Boykin quickly claimed that radical Muslims had made Dearborn off-limits to Detroit police. Dearborn was, in fact, already outside the jurisdiction of Detroit police-not because of Muslim machinations but because Dearborn is not part of Detroit. The accusation prefigured former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's imaginary no-go zones in Europe, especially France, where central authorities have allegedly lost political control to local Muslims who allegedly shoo away all nonmembers of the faith.

It isn't just fringy sorts like Geller and Boykin who worry about Islamic assimilation. Mainstream center-right scholars such as National Review Institute's Andrew C. McCarthy and, to a lesser extent, center-left ones such as the Brookings Institution's Peter Skerry have similar concerns, albeit typically expressed in more temperate language.

The standard rap against Muslims is that they are fundamentally incapable of embracing liberal democratic values because Shariah--Islamic religious law--rejects the separation of religion and state and imposes regressive sexual norms, especially on women.Therefore, the argument goes, towns like Hamtramck and Dearborn will always be in tension with American values, incubating terrorists in the middle of the United States. In this view, Dearborn will become another Molenbeek, the Belgian city where manyjihadi attacks have been hatched, including the recent ones in Brussels and Paris.

But if you set aside the lens of Molenbeek and look at life as it is actually lived in Hamtramck and Dearborn, an entirely different picture emerges. Molenbeek is the second-poorest borough in Brussels. It has been caught in a downward spiral of poor education, high crime, and nonexistent social mobility. In 2014,27 percent of Molenbeek's working-age population, close to 50 percent of which is Muslim, was unemployed. The opposite cycle is unfolding in Hamtramck and Dearborn even though, remarkably enough, they are ensconced right next to Detroit, the closest thing to Molenbeek's depressive economy in America.

I have lived in Metro Detroit for 27 years, about 20 miles from both of these towns. Since December 2015, I have visited them dozens of times and talked to scores of people--politicians, reporters, shopkeepers, academics, imams. Both are vibrant, diverse, and hopeful communities with populations that, like Muslims across the country, seem fairly happy with life in the United States. (A 2011 Pew poll found that 56 percent of Muslim Americans were satisfied with the way things were going in the country, compared to 23 percent of the general public.) The Muslims of Dearborn and Hamtramck are indeed increasing their participation in political life, but that isn't a plot to turn the towns into little Shariahvilles--it's an effort to assimilate into American life.

Michigan's Muslim communities certainly have their troubles, but they aren't the insidious, subversive forces that Islamophobes imagine. They face the challenges of a community gradually adjusting to American life, generally successfully but with inevitable bumps in the road.Yes, Muslim attitudes on gay rights and censorship of religious speech are out of step with America's prevailing ethos of freedom. But they are no more heterodox than many minority populations before them, and those differences are hardly something a strong liberal polity can't handle.

A Tale of Two Cities

According to Sally Howell, a professor of Arab-American studies at the University of Michigan and the author of several books on Detroit's Arabs, Muslims in Hamtramck and Dearborn are assimilating very nicely. The median income of Detroit's Arab households, about half of whom are Muslim, is $31,700--on par with the region's median income of $32,824. Howell's 2003 Detroit Arab Americans Survey found that 25 percent of the area's Arabs report annual family incomes of $100,000 or more, compared to 16 percent of the general population. Among American-born Arabs (including Iraqi Christian Chaldeans), 94 percent have high school diplomas, 7 percent more than the general public. Identical percentages of both groups have college degrees, and over 31 percent of Arab Americans are self-employed, twice the figure for the general population.

And only 30 percent of Detroit's Arab Muslims go to mosque every month, compared to 66 percent of Arab Christians who attend church that often. Just 18 percent of the area's Muslims were active in their mosques, far less than the 47 percent of Arab Christians who were active in their churches. This is not what an incubator of zealotry looks like.

None of this means that terrorists could never sprout in the Metro Detroit Muslim community, any more than school shooters can't emerge from lily-white neighborhoods. But viewing them as uniquely problematic is unfair both to them and to America's assimilative capacity.

There are important differences between the two towns. Hamtramck's 15,000-strong Muslim population dates back only about two decades, and it consists of everyone from blue-eyed, light-skinned Bosnians to swarthy Bangladeshis. By contrast, Dearborn's community has 100-year-old roots and hails predominantly from the Middle East. Its Muslim population is almost three times bigger than Hamtramck's--more if you count Dearborn Heights, its companion city.

Because the Hamtramck community is newer, it has an air of innocence, as if it hasn't fully comprehended how much post-9/11 hostility there is toward Muslims in America. Its politics are primarily driven by economic security and ties to the old world. Dearborn's community is more settled, savvy, and middle-class, and it is acutely aware of the harsh national Klieg lights pointed at it. Its political participation is a complicated coping dance motivated not just by its economic interests but also the need to cooperate with anti-terrorism efforts without ceding civil or religious rights.

These two towns, 10 miles apart, give us snapshots of two points in the arc of Muslim assimilation in America.

Hamtramck

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