One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

PETER: One Friday in 1976, a group of men broke into a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. They didn’t want to vandalize it. All they wanted to do was pray. For the mosque’s members, it was a regular workday. But Friday is a holy day in Islam, and these men, recent immigrants from Yemen and Palestine, were shocked that the mosque was closed. It was the opening salvo in a struggle to control not only the building but how Islam there would be practiced.

BRIAN: The mosque in Dearborn was called the Dix– that’s D-I-X– Mosque, and was one of just a couple in the area. It had been built in the 1930s by Lebanese immigrants who came to work at the local Ford factory. Like many Muslim communities in Michigan, the Dearborn congregation had developed a religious practice, well, that was pretty different from the Islam practiced in other parts of the world. So you can understand why the newcomers were confounded.

Nabeel Abraham grew up attending the Dix Mosque in the 1950s and ’60s, and he’s written about the struggle there. Nabeel, welcome to BackStory.

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Glad to be here.

BRIAN: Now before we get into this struggle that you’ve written about in the Dix Mosque of the 1970s, why don’t you give our listeners a look into what it was like attending the mosque when you were a kid?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Well, it was really an evolving mosque. I didn’t realize that at the time, but we were really like a Protestant church. Nobody wore a headscarf. You know, instead of Friday prayers, which is the thing that Muslims do around the world, we had Sunday prayers. We had Sunday school.

The basement floor, you might say, that was where all the socializing occurred. There were weddings there, and I remember them. And these were Palestinian weddings. These were people from my father’s village.

And there would be a fellow with a sword. That always caught my attention. Here’s this sword, comes out of nowhere, and he’s brandishing it and doing like a Zorba the Greek dance. There would be a lot of sweat, people moving and gyrating and dancing.

BRIAN: But did you have any sense that that was unusual, or you might be violating the religious mores of other worshipers?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Oh, no. No. To us, it completely seemed normal. Because we didn’t have, as a community, we didn’t have any other places. And it was the life, the center of life, for a small group of mostly Lebanese, and some Palestinian and a few other miscellanea Muslims.

The mosque was accommodating itself to life in America. And had been doing so for a while. There was a women’s auxiliary. That seemed to be a little bit more modern or progressive.

BRIAN: And did those women have much of a say in the mosque?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: They did, because they were raising funds, and they were pushing for Arabic language instruction, religious instruction. And they were the ones that I found out later, through my research, were the ones who were saying, hey, we’re losing our young people to out-marriages who are moving away, who aren’t keeping in the community.

BRIAN: But the whole time, as I understand it, even before the new immigrants came in the ’70s, there are these older directors kind of lurking in the background. And they already had a lot of issues with those more progressive women. Is that right?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Yes. Now there were the old men. The old men had a hand in building this mosque and steering it. And they were right-wing, or let’s put it– crusty, OK? But the guys who were coming in from Yemen, the new immigrants, were looking at the whole picture and saying, this is not authentic.

And the old country where we just came from, mosques didn’t look like this. They were open on Fridays. There were a lot of men there praying. And what’s with the women running around without headscarves? What’s with them raising their voices and dictating policy, or attempting to? What’s with these parties going on?

And the old men were looking at these new guys and saying, well, we can use them. We can use them to block the women and put them back in their place.

BRIAN: So this new blood comes in, and it, in some ways, serves the purposes of these old guys.

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Of the old-timers, yes.

BRIAN: How does that work out?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Well, it worked out very badly for them, and they were told that by the women. They said, you think these guys are your allies. They’re going to have your lunch in the future. And they said, well, we’re in charge, and we have the legal documents, et cetera. But they had one– let’s call it weakness. They had elections. [LAUGHS]

BRIAN: So was there ONE key election where the new guys took OVER?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Yes, there was. What happened is they outvoted the old-timers, took over the board, and took possession of the bank account of the mosque. And they started making policy. And they brought an imam, or a sheikh, from Yemen, a real hard, rigid fellow. A puritanical guy.

And the first thing that guy did is told the women that you are not welcome here, doing what you used to do. You’re going to use the side entrance.

BRIAN: Wow.

NABEEL ABRAHAM: We’re going to put up a curtain. There’s going to be gender segregation. And you’re not going to raise your voices in here.

Well, it didn’t take very long for the women to feel that this was not– they weren’t welcome. That’s when they went and started their own group, and the old men followed them, eventually. And they started–

BRIAN: Hold on. Why did those old men follow the women that they had just tried to get rid of?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: They realized that they would have to sit in the back bench, so to speak, or leave. And eventually, they left and joined with the women to form–

BRIAN: How did the women treat them when they arrived with their tail between their legs?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: They humiliated them. They said, we told you so. This is an important point. The women put together this new Islamic center. They put up the money, because their purse, their treasury, remained in their hands. Whereas the men came penniless. They made a Faustian bargain and lost.

BRIAN: What’s the scene today in Dearborn? What is the nature of the Islamic community, if you could make a big generalization?

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Well, there’s enormous diversity, first off, to answer part of that question. What has happened is there’s been this enormous mushrooming of mosques, banquet halls, schools, Arabic parochial schools, Muslim schools, with this enormous influx of more Yemenis, more Iraqis, who weren’t present at that time, more Lebanese.

In the suburbs, you would find, among the Pakistani professional class of Arabs, say, Syrians, Palestinians, you will find less traditionalists. Although– I mean, they may start shouting, no, no, we are traditional, too. And I would say yes.

BRIAN: We love when people write into our website.

LAUGHTER

NABEEL ABRAHAM: Well, there’s enormous diversity. So today, Muslims and Islam are part of the norm. And people who don’t agree with the philosophical line, they can go to another mosque.

BRIAN: And how is different, Nabeel, than the standard story of religion throughout American history, of congregations fighting over differences of practice, and finally, part of the congregation is sent packing? They form their own church, in this case– talking about Protestant in the 19th century. And you know, eventually there’s just this proliferation of churches.

NABEEL ABRAHAM: You really hit the nail on the head. It’s part of that trend. It is the Americanization of Islam in America. They’re following in the same steps, virtually, as the Christian churches– and you could probably add the Judaic institutions.

BRIAN: But Nabeel, I want to thank you for joining us on BackStory.

NABEEL ABRAHAM: My pleasure.

BRIAN: Nabeel Abraham is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn.

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