Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit 9781479877218

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Muslim American City

Muslim American City Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit

Alisa Perkins

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2020 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Perkins, Alisa, author. Title: Muslim American city : gender and religion in Metro Detroit / Alisa Perkins. Description: New York : New York University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019039535 | ISBN 9781479828012 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479892013 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479877218 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479814497 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Muslims—Michigan—Detroit—Social conditions—21st century. | Detroit (Mich.)—Social conditions—21st century. | Detroit (Mich.)—Ethnic relations— History—21st century. Classification: LCC F574.D49 M887 2020 | DDC 305.6/970977434—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039535 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Dedicated to my parents, Norman Perkins (1939–2019) and Sonya Perkins, with love, respect, and gratitude

Contents

List of Maps

ix

Introduction: Muslims in Metro Detroit

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1. The Making of a Muslim American City: The Histories of African Americans, Poles, and Muslims in Hamtramck

29

2. Gender, Space, and Muslim American Women

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3. Yemeni Women, Civic Purdah, and Private/Public Divides

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4. Bangladeshi Women and Gender Boundaries

118

5. Prayer Calls and the Right to the City

146

6. LGBTQ Rights, Moral Boundaries, and Municipal Temporality

179

Conclusion: Urban Religion and Secular Constraints

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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List of Maps

Map 1.1. Metro Detroit Map

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Map 1.2. Ethnic Neighborhoods of Hamtramck

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Map 1.3. Muslim Religious Institutions of Hamtramck

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All maps designed by Jason Glatz, Western Michigan University Libraries

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Introduction Muslims in Metro Detroit

During the month-long holiday of Ramadan, observant Muslims refrain from food and drink throughout the daylight hours. Each night at sundown, Muslims break their fast with an iftār meal that brings together family and friends. Across the US, it has become common for Muslims to arrange ceremonial iftārs, inviting non-Muslims to join them in joyful feasts of inclusion. On May 21, 2019, I attended a celebratory dinner at an elegant, Yemeni-owned banquet hall in the city of Hamtramck, Michigan. It was a landmark event: the first time in Hamtramck’s history that municipal officials had arranged a citywide iftār, inviting civic, political, and community leaders from across Wayne County as their guests. By the time I arrived, dozens of people were milling around the banquet hall and finding their seats. The guests were Muslim and non-Muslim, white, African American, Yemeni, and Bangladeshi. Hassan Sheikh, director of the City of Hamtramck’s Community and Economic Development Department, was the first to address the crowd: Being a young man of Muslim American background, being born to immigrant parents, being the first Muslim American department head in this city [ . . . ] it’s extremely important to me that we work towards a goal of unifying our community. This is a city that has such a rich history of accepting others. We have a park dedicated to the Pope. We do Christmas tree lighting every year. And now we are adding a cool event like this. It’s amazing, right?

Sheikh’s words were joyful, yet he alluded to obstacles that had affected the planning of the dinner:

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This year it is not officially a city event. So I took some vacation time, and I helped organize this while I was on vacation. That’s how important this event is for me. I would truly like to thank everybody who was part of the host committee that actively helped get around any obstacles that came to play and who didn’t give any push back when the event was given to them. [ . . . ] I want to thank the leadership, specifically [City Manager] Kathy Angerer and others who helped work on this event. And she, herself, put in a lot of hours when she wasn’t in City Hall advising.

The iftār had not been officially sponsored by the city, meaning that city officials had declined the request to help defray the event costs or to compensate municipal employees for planning the event. In this way, the iftār was unlike the other iconic Hamtramck religious displays that Hassan had mentioned, which had been supported by city dollars—the park housing a large statue of Pope John Paul II and the annual Christmas tree lighting. At my table, guests discussed how some city officials had opposed the idea of sponsoring the iftār on the grounds that support would “cross lines between church and state.” In response, one longtime, non-Muslim Hamtramck resident at my table asked rhetorically: “Who gets to decide where to draw the line?” Just a week after President Trump hosted a White House Ramadan dinner, and in the context of the growing presence and visibility of Muslims in the United States, such questions about the boundaries around pluralism and the inclusion of Muslims were becoming more salient. This book explores how Muslim Americans grapple with the promises and contradictions of pluralism and how they respond to racialization through expressions of religious and cultural identity in public and political life. It focuses on the perspectives of both Muslim and non-Muslims in Hamtramck, a small city situated within the larger metro Detroit region. Extending existing theory on group identity, boundary formation, and space-making, this book examines how the Muslim and non-Muslim residents of this small city mutually reconfigure material and symbolic divides in public debates and everyday exchanges. These reconfigurations demonstrate the book’s main argument: that Muslim experiences in urban America test pluralism as a model of secular inclusion and that co-residents of cities expand the boundaries of belonging together by engaging in social and material exchanges across lines of difference.

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Hamtramck, Michigan, claims the highest concentration of Muslim residents of any American city. Once famous as a center of Polish American life, Hamtramck has undergone a major demographic shift: Muslims now make up at least 40 percent of the city’s total population. Hamtramck Muslims trace their lineages to many regions of the world, including South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central Europe. Other Muslims in Hamtramck identify as African American or black, including those with familial ties to Elijah Muhammad, a Nation of Islam (NOI) leader who lived in Hamtramck in the 1930s. Hamtramck’s Muslims are part of an eclectic mix: today’s Hamtramck residents originate from at least thirty nations across the globe (US Census Bureau 2017). The prominence of Bangladeshi and Yemeni Americans has prompted some Hamtramck residents to dub sections of the city “Banglatown” and “little Sana‘a.” People sometimes refer to Hamtramck as a “Muslim town,” conveying either excitement or resentment, with, for example, jokes that suggest apprehension and curiosity: “They’ll need to rename the city Lambtramck since ham is not halal.” Such jokes play upon fears that Hamtramck’s Muslim populations are pushing out the city’s original and familiar features, replacing them with new ones. Jokes like these can also convey a sense of adventure among both Muslim and non-Muslims who consider themselves part of a unique, citywide experiment with diversity that carries global significance. As Hamtramck’s Muslim populations have grown, debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. This volume illuminates the complex processes by which Yemeni, Bangladeshi, and African American Muslim groups are incorporated into the city, demonstrating how the input of both Muslims and non-Muslims plays a role in determining the particularities of Muslim visibility in a Midwestern American city. The stories of Muslim American experiences in Hamtramck—particularly the interactions between Muslim residents and well-established Polish Catholic, African American Christian, and other non-Muslim residents—illustrate many aspects of city life. This book examines exchanges between Muslim and non-Muslims in many different contexts, and the stories it tells describe interactions taking place at public ceremonies, on the streets, at City Hall, in schools and social service institutions, in interfaith events at mosques, in homes and

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other places where Muslims build community with other Muslims, and in places where Muslim and non-Muslim Hamtramck residents comingle and get to know each other.

OneHamtramck: Let’s Talk On May 22, 2017, the nonprofit group OneHamtramck held the forum “Let’s Talk: Muslims in Hamtramck Politics” to open dialogue between local Muslim political figures and non-Muslim residents. I attended this event at the Yemen Café in the city’s South End neighborhood. While interviewees after the forum described it as successful and some seemed relieved by the absence of Islamophobic rhetoric, the event also revealed some tensions key to understanding Muslim American incorporation in Hamtramck and in the United States.1 I arrived about an hour before the event. Approaching the restaurant from the back, I noticed the words in Arabic “private corner for families” (junāh khāssun lil ‘ā’īlah) on the entrance sign. This phrase signified that the restaurant was friendly to Muslim families who adhere to certain styles of gender separation as part of their religious or cultural practice in which women refrain from mixing with men who are not their close kin. As is often observed in Muslim-majority cities, the Yemen Café owners had blocked off a large back section of the restaurant space from general visibility, and tracked additional sets of curtains around several of the tables in the back, entirely ensconcing them. With this assistance, women who wished to dine without being visible to other patrons or to passers-by could do so. By the time the event began, the curtains shielding the back section had been drawn back, the tables had been arranged into rows, and it was standing room only at the Yemen Café. Although a family that had been behind the curtains left before the candidates arrived, I noticed other strategies of gender organization; for example, of the fourteen aspiring politicians invited to speak, only one was a woman. This was Saiida Miah, a young candidate who identified as a Bangladeshi, Belizean, and Muslim and who was the daughter of incumbent councilman Anam Miah. The fact that Saiida Miah was the only female candidate reflected the predominance of men among Muslim Americans involved in Hamtramck politics.2 Of the fourteen invited, eight Muslim politicians

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attended the event, including sitting council members in midterm, those up for reelection, and new contenders. In opening remarks, OneHamtramck founder Bill Meyer, a white, self-described “nonreligious” person, restated the forum’s purpose: This is an evening to focus on Muslims and politics. Muslim officials are given the floor tonight [ . . . ] addressing what it is like to be a Muslim in American politics. It’s a personal issue. Does it make a difference? If so, how? If not, why do you think that?

Meyer turned the microphone over to moderator Khalid Turaani, a prominent Palestinian Muslim American activist and community leader from a nearby suburb, who had over twenty years of experience in Muslim-minority advocacy. Turaani called the politicians to the microphone one by one. He brought the event’s broad theme—“What is it like to be Muslim in American politics?”—into sharper focus by emphasizing the question: “How does your faith inform your politics?” He asked Saad Almasmari, a Yemeni American councilman running for reelection: “What responsibility do Muslims have to the community in calming things down, in saying, our faith is Islam, but our concerns are the same as everyone else?” Almasmari replied: I did not run because I am Muslim. I was elected by everybody and am working for everybody. So people putting politics in religion, that’s not happening, and it will never happen in my life. If somebody comes asking for help, I will not ask, “What is your religion?” I will ask, “Are you a Hamtramck resident?”

Almasmari focused his response on reassuring the audience that his Muslim identity would not prevent him from being an effective leader. The councilman decided not to address any other aspects of how faith or Muslim identity may or may not inform his politics. Tensions flared as Turaani posed different versions of his question about faith informing politics to each of the Muslim American candidates in turn, and most candidates answered flatly, implicitly critiquing the terms of the question. Bangladeshi American incumbent Anam Miah asserted:

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When you’re running it’s like we never looked at ourselves as a religion, or as a Muslim candidate, or as a candidate that has Islamic understanding or values. I ran for council to make a better Hamtramck, just to make sure that everybody was represented fairly and treated fairly.

Prompting the candidates to address other aspects of his question, Turaani asserted that they are perceived as different by non-Muslims and would need to account for it: “You’re like me, you speak English with an accent,” he reminded one. “You and I are boaters,” he told another. Vividly highlighting questions of race, Turaani told a third participant, “You look like [ . . . ] a Muslim. [ . . . ] You can’t really peel off your skin. So what can you tell them as a Muslim candidate participating in the public square?” The candidate responded: I am a father, an educator, and I am a human being. [ . . . ] I hate being classified as Muslim. [ . . . ] We will stand up against anybody who will try to classify any minority or any group based on their religion. I think you would be irritated if I started calling you [pointing to the audience] my Christian friends, my gay friends, my Jewish friends. So let’s stop doing that.

This candidate put into words what others implied: that they did not wish to answer questions about the details of what Muslim identity meant to them—at least not in this setting. While attendees may have dreaded misunderstandings between Muslims and non-Muslims at this event, the most notable source of tension was between the Muslim American moderator trained in a certain representational strategy and local Muslim Americans who did not wish to identify according to those lines.3 Based on my previous experience with local politics in Hamtramck, I was surprised that most aspiring politicians at the event resisted, or at least expressed ambivalence about, drawing connections between Muslim identity and their political personas. In previous years, I had conducted field work in Hamtramck during several key municipal debates, in which civic actors—some of whom were warming up for runs at local political offices—eagerly foregrounded their identities as Muslim, Catholic, or Protestant as they articulated their moral grounding on a range

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of issues. However, doing so had very different consequences for each group. The way these civic actors drew on religious identity as if it were a political asset echoed a century’s worth of conventions developed by minority religious groups in America: Catholics and Jews who had successfully highlighted certain aspects of their religious identities as part of a process of integration into American civic and political life. Now people wonder if Muslims will do the same. This book examines how Muslim Americans engage with the issue of minority religious belonging in America and confront other dilemmas of inclusion in an Islamophobic climate; it explores how they meet demands for public accounting of what it means to be Muslim at a time when assertions of Muslim identity regularly foment anger and backlash.

Approaching Muslim Incorporation in Hamtramck This book is based on over ten years of ethnographic research about relationships between and among Muslims and non-Muslims in Hamtramck, Michigan. To gather information for this volume, I lived in Hamtramck for 18 months between 2007 and 2009, and frequently visited the city for further research from 2013 to 2019, all the while keeping in touch with Hamtramck study participants via emails, phone calls, and social media. The stories about Hamtramck included in this book are told from multiple perspectives. This approach aids understanding of social processes in highly diverse American cities, and how residents from different backgrounds, faith traditions, and cultures view the benefits and problems of living together with difference. Among the various Muslim groups living in the city, the book centers primarily on Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslims.4 These two groups were most engaged in the kind of public negotiations of religious identity that brought them into individual and collective contact with both nonMuslims and the municipality. Over the course of my research I was drawn into circles of Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslims through their vigorous engagement in City Hall debates, the creation of business and residential enclaves, and mosque- or interfaith-centered activism. By contrast, African American Muslims represent a relatively small group in Hamtramck, with significantly less visibility on the public stage. Yet this group exerts an important influence on city life. I studied

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African American Muslims’ civic engagement mainly by seeking out the leaders and members of several area institutions founded by African American Muslims serving Hamtramck, including a private Islamic school and a social service organization at the Hamtramck-Detroit border, as well as Detroit mosques attended by Hamtramck Muslims. In detailing the histories, similarities, and differences of and between these three groups, I trained my ethnographic lens upon processes of negotiation between and among Muslims and between Muslims and nonMuslims of the city. This work at the material and conceptual boundaries among Muslim groups and between Muslim and non-Muslim groups in Hamtramck pays special attention to processes of spatial negotiation. This study of Muslim-minority groups through how they constitute themselves in spaces marked by the dominant majority reflects innovations of urban theorists such as Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Michel de Certeau (1984). It builds upon the work of scholars such as Kim Knott (2014) and Robert Orsi (1999a) that brings classic urban theory to bear on the study of religious groups in cities. In particular, this work contributes to a field of study advanced by urban ethnographers such as Jeanette Jouili (2015), Mayanthi Fernando (2014), Petra Kuppinger (2015), Ousmane Oumar Kane (2011), Jamillah Karim (2009), and others who have built upon foundational theories on urban religiosity to develop frameworks specific to studying Muslim minorities in cities of liberal secular nations. Throughout this book, the concept “space-making” is used to signify processes of recognizing, representing, and rehearsing identity formation or lifeworlds in spatial, material, or embodied forms, and how these impact and are impacted by the formation or perception of larger publics.5 The analysis emphasizes the production of space in Muslimminority contexts as a dialectical process, accomplished between and among ethnically diverse Muslim and non-Muslim populations living in close proximity in which sensory, material, and embodied cultural expressions profoundly affect social relations (Knott 2000; 2014). This book pays particular attention to relationships among Hamtramck Muslims and Polish Catholics, who were until recently the dominant majority in the city. Hamtramck was founded as a Polish Catholic city in the 1920s, the outset of an intense period of social negotiations for Catholics in the US. The dynamics of this social negotiation are echoed

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in the negotiations of US Muslims in the twenty-first century. The way members of these two groups emphasize or downplay their similarities and differences is an important aspect of this book. I also consider the competing views of the city held by Muslim groups and African American Christian religious and community leaders. I am especially interested in what these relationships and contrasts reveal about processes of group identity formation related to perceptions of shared or parallel forms of racial stigmatization.6 Anxieties over the expression of Muslim-minority identities in North America and Europe are frequently articulated in the idiom of gender—and this was certainly the case in Hamtramck. Even before the colonial era, Muslims have been represented by Europeans as an oppressive, repressed, or oversexualized other, a legacy of exclusion further elaborated upon by North Americans (Massad 2015; Puar 2007; van der Veer 2006). This gendered Orientalism can be seen in French debates over the veil (Bowen 2008; Fernando 2014; Scott 2007). In the United States, the government is less likely to regulate Muslim women’s dress, but similar liberal secularist stereotypes influence interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims both in North America and Europe (AbuLughod 2015; Ahmed 2011; Scott 2011). Accordingly, this book extends theory on the spatialization of religious minority identity in secular societies by studying how the visibility of women and LGBTQ minorities is debated among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims in Hamtramck.7 Three assumptions are foundational to my overarching argument about how Muslims expand the boundaries of American pluralism from its margins: The first assumption is that liberal secularism, and the version of social progressivism it espouses, serves as a hegemonic form of political ideology in Western countries such as the US and parts of Europe (Amir-Moazami 2005; Amir-Moazami and Salvatore 2003; Asad 1993; 2003; Connolly 1999; Volpp 2000). Second, I work with the assumption that this liberal secular framework affects mainstream modes of organizing social life, such as regulating perceptions about which kinds of religions and aspects of religiosity belong in the private versus the public sphere. Third, liberal secularism also has the effect of powerfully conditioning spatial repertoires, or implicit rules governing the way public space is constructed and used (Beaumont and Baker 2011, 2).

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In this book, secularist ideology is defined as a system geared toward regulating religion in public life from a neutral center assumed to be unbiased toward any one form of religion over another. In this view, secularism demands a rational center of authority, based on Enlightenment principles enshrined by the state, which transcends all religions and can govern, order, and regulate public religious life. Some theorists of secularism propose that the transcendent values that define this center—those of justice, equality, freedom—represent core humanist and universalist principles over and above those of any specific religion. Yet recent scholars invested in the critique of secularism have analyzed the way that different versions of secularism brought to bear within North American and European ruling ideologies are in fact heavily biased toward certain styles of Protestantism due to the fact that Enlightenment thinkers developed their ideas in a European Christian milieu (Asad 1993; Connolly 1999; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Klassen and Bender 2010). Arising out of secularism as its “conceptual ground,” pluralism took shape in the United States as the dominant ideology guiding the style and substance of how religious actors should relate to one another in liberal secular societies (Bender and Klassen 2010, 17). Defined as “a commitment to recognize others across perceived or claimed lines of religious difference,” pluralism reinforces many of the same “prescriptive norms of identity and engagement” that are advanced under liberal secularism (Bender and Klassen 2010, 2). Among other directives, pluralist ideology places an impetus on modern religious actors to connect with others across lines of faith in search of commonalities and the possibility of shared social projects. Although upholding goals and orientations that are welcome and laudable, as with any hegemonic project, prescriptive iterations of pluralism suppress styles of religious identity and practice that fall outside its margins. Realizing that current manifestations of pluralism are not “naturally occurring forms” (Bender and Klassen 2010, 2) but rather the product of disciplining from the dominant society that contain their own set of biases helps open the space for critique and imagining alternative expressions of religiosity. Using these assumptions as a starting point, this book analyzes the dynamics through which Muslim Americans as minority social actors negotiate, contest, or otherwise grapple with liberal secular normative

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constructions of public and political space. Sociologists have long noted that the maintenance of religious ties may serve as an important part of the adaptation process for new immigrant groups in the United States.8 Yet some forms of Muslim American public expression may be perceived as counter to normative liberal secular modalities through which religious, civic, and political life are commonly articulated in North American cities. These seemingly anomalous aspects of Muslim practice may be found in the way gender is organized in public space, the ways in which “the public” and “the private” are mapped, and/or the ways in which social and societal obligations or a sense of moral imperative are expressed through public and political realms. The features of the urban context in which Muslim Americans’ negotiations with mainstream norms and forms of public religion take place present an important factor in determining their nature and outcome. Accordingly, this book considers how features of the built environment, institutions, and municipal structures mediate the way diverse residents encounter one another (Conquergood 1992; Horton 1992; Lamphere 1992). Hamtramck is a 2.3-square-mile, highly walkable city, with about twenty-three thousand inhabitants, people from many different origins, linguistic groups, and educational backgrounds. The way people of different races and ethnicities live so closely together aided the study of interactions across racial, class, and religious lines. Hamtramck residents from many different backgrounds eat at the same restaurants, take their children to the same parks, walk the same streets, and live as neighbors who garden in plots separated only by chain-link fences. Studying Hamtramck itself as an object of analysis through a focus on its Muslim populations advances larger urban anthropological goals of moving from studies that treat cities merely as a context for understanding social processes to studies that focus on social processes as the means for developing theory about the city and urban forms in contemporary life (Low 1999).

Muslim: A Social and Religious Identity One goal of this book is to understand the meanings associated with Muslim identity in Hamtramck both for Muslims and non-Muslims. The people in the study’s participant pool thus included individuals

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who identified as Muslim, as well as non-Muslims who were involved with Muslims in the city.9 Hypothetically, the book could have included individuals who were mislabeled as Muslim by others without themselves claiming any familial or personal relationship to Islam, such as Sikhs, Hispanic Americans, and African Americans with Muslim names, although I did not encounter such individuals in my research.10 When I label a group or individual as “Muslim” (or Yemeni Muslim, Polish Catholic, or African American Christian), I refer to the social identity or identities with which the individual identifies. As such, I do not use the label “Muslim” to signify anything about this subset of Hamtramck’s population’s homogeneity or internal consistency in terms of doctrinal aspects of the beliefs and practices of its members. Identities are fluid, shifting, and context dependent (Hall 1990; 1996). In labeling an individual according to an identity such as “Muslim,” I suggest that the person in question identifies with that category at least part of the time, whether as a religious or cultural signifier. This book focuses on the production and meaning of boundaries around collective Muslim social identities as articulated with reference to other Muslim and non-Muslim groups that coexist in the same urban context.11 In this way, I follow the lead of anthropologist Fredrick Barth, especially in his Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference, in which he advocates for a focus on the way boundaries form between groups rather than a study of the “cultural stuff the boundary encloses” in order to more productively understand the evolution of collective identity.12 This approach extends previous treatments of boundary formation dynamics—most notably those applied in the context of strategic identity formation around ethnic and racial groups in cities—expanding the focus to an analysis of how boundaries are formed around secular versus religious social and political actors. As with all metaphors for describing social processes, the boundary metaphor has its limits: for one, it fails to signal how lines of separation between marginal and dominant groups are drawn over uneven terrain. The boundary as a metaphor for social relations shares some of the same pitfalls as the encounter metaphor, as explained by religious studies scholars Pamela E. Klassen and Courtney Bender in the introduction to their edited volume After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement

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(2010): the encounter metaphor “lends itself to a vision of a collision of purities, whether billiard balls or individuals,” and “risks imagining a level playing field in which all religious actors and groups are similarly oriented in relation to secular forms” (15). Klassen and Bender also critique the boundary concept implicit in the encounter metaphor, noting the impossibility of “any lines of difference, religious or otherwise, being equally arrayed, encountered, porous, or bounded for all” (16). As a metaphor for social processes, the social boundary may be best imagined as an organic membrane whose qualities change in response to the changing biological medium in which it finds itself. Such a boundary-as-membrane would become more or less amenable to the penetration of different kinds of particles depending on a wide range of factors, just as social boundaries allow or deny entry to different people at different times, depending on the sociopolitical environment. This is particularly evident in how political debates in Hamtramck over the call to prayer and LGBTQ rights fueled media representations of Muslim and non-Muslim residents as either more or less in step with American pluralism. The decision to categorize individuals and groups by virtue of their religious identity is another inherently problematic aspect of pluralist discourse. Klassen and Bender write, “When prescriptive pluralisms imagine religions as discrete and recognizable traditions with explicit and observable boundaries across which interchange or conflict occurs, they often leave the messy and unpredictable character of religious practice unrecognized” (2010, 12). By grouping individuals according to a religious category as though religion were static and homogenous, internal divisions within the group, for example concerning its doctrines and practices, may go unrecognized. Other possible divisions may include the ways in which members of one group identify with, form alliances with, or participate in religious practices of other religious groups over and above those with whom they share an ascribed identity category. By focusing on internal divisions within doctrine and practice, this book retains the term “Muslim” to group together diverse people but undermines the reductionism often implicated by the unexamined use of this term. I use the term “Muslim” to index a range of social identities, similar to how anthropologist Sertaç Sehlikoglu’s uses “Islamicate” to index the

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practices in her study.13 “Islamicate” refers to a range of orientations, both Islamic and beyond, including those connected with doctrinal and/ or cultural aspects of the religion itself, and ways of life linked with cultures and societies influenced by Islam and/or Muslims. Scholars choose between “Islamic” and “Islamicate” in reference to the practices they describe. But there is no satisfactory term other than “Muslim” to refer to the people who are associated with Muslim religious identity either by heritage or by choice and who are invested in either Islamic (doctrinal) or Islamicate (doctrinal and/or cultural) practices. The terms “cultural Muslim” or “traditional Muslim” have been used by some scholars to indicate people who label themselves and are labeled by others as Muslim by birth, but who may not actively engage with Islam as an external set of doctrinal standards against which they consistently measure their beliefs and practices.14 Additionally, the term “secular Muslim” is used by scholars of divergent perspectives and disciplines. Ethnographer Mayanthi Fernando uses “secular Muslim” for certain Muslims who develop identities in opposition to those whom they view as conservative Muslims, as a way of claiming exemplary citizenship in secular states (Fernando 2009, 380).15 Other studies of Muslims use qualifying terms such as “liberal Muslim” (Fadil 2015), “moderate Muslim” (Bayat 2007), “orthodox Muslim” (Turner 2003, 97), “progressive Muslim” (Safi 2003), “revivalist Muslim” (Kane 2011, 5), or “feminist Muslim” (Hammer 2013; Naber 2012) to characterize orientations to Muslim identity. But these terms carry various and sometimes conflicting meanings across texts. I encountered people in Hamtramck who would fit or claim some of the descriptors listed above, or other such qualifiers. I also encountered Muslims who would identify as African American, Yemeni, or Bangladeshi, and who asserted that their ethnic or racial distinctions held meaning in signifying their style of practice and the meaning of Islam for them personally.16 But all these people still considered themselves at least some of the time—and were considered and treated (at least some of the time)—as “Muslim.” It is in this spirit that I employ the term. In defining an ethnographic object, this book adopts an approach similar to that of Mayanthi Fernando in her study The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (2014). This approach honors what Fernando describes as the need for scholars of

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Muslim minorities to both recognize and resist pressures to create unified representations of the Muslim groups they study as regards a shared religious orientation that can be categorized or detailed qualitatively (27). Accordingly, we will consider voices of Muslim participants talking about what their practices mean to them as expressions of faith, nationality, or culture. But these individual voices do not represent a particular style of religiosity linked with the group “Muslim” as a whole—neither “Muslim French” in Fernando’s case, nor “Hamtramck Muslim” or “American Muslim” in the case of this volume. This book is organized around points of interaction and contestation between urban Muslims and non-Muslims sharing the same spaces.17 The basis of selection to include or exclude any individual relates to their engagement with publicly identified Muslim or Islamicate practices, or if they are involved in educational initiatives, disputes, or contestations over public practices labeled “Muslim.”18 Finally, the great variety among the Muslims in this study—in terms of age, gender, affiliation with particular religious institutions or organizations, nationality, citizenship status, and beyond—enhances the ability to assess the limits of and potential for Muslim belonging, and the various ways it is expressed. Akin to Fernando’s ethnography, this book concerns the understanding of processes of belonging and inclusion as revealed from the perspective of those at the margins of mainstream society in relation with those at the center. This book thus synthesizes the different ways that some Muslims express their religious and cultural identity in the private and public spaces of the city, and the meaning of these spatial expressions to Muslims and non-Muslims. When Muslims take part in building and inhabiting these spaces, such as by having dinner in a restaurant that accommodates gender separation, they do so for a range of reasons and in different relationships to the spaces. Some are tapping into ardent faith. Others inhabit a space of nostalgia or familiarity. And still more experiment with new ways of publicly performing Muslim identity.19

Muslims in Tri-Faith America In an interview after the OneHamtramck forum, the moderator, Khalid Turaani, described feeling frustrated by the way some aspiring Muslim

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politicians had resisted his questions about faith and its role in politics.20 He attributed their reluctance to several factors, including their lack of understanding of how civic duty and civic servitude [is looked at] in the United States. One silo is the civic duty, and the other silo is your faith. And the question is how to connect the two, without making them one. The two are not contradictory. If you can articulate that sentiment, then I think there’s going to be that positive shift in the public square that would be more accepting. I think they would be saying, “That’s great, that your faith informs your civic duty in such a positive way.”

Despite the resistance he encountered, Turaani’s experience at the OneHamtramck event only strengthened his confidence that Muslim Americans must learn to publicly connect their religiosity—or at least some version of it—to their civic engagement to be accepted by the mainstream.21 Turaani’s perspective stemmed from lessons learned over his many years in public advocacy for Muslim minorities on the local, national, and global levels. In fact, his belief about the need for religious minorities to publicly embrace and explain their faith in certain ways reflects the dominant approach to Muslim-minority incorporation.22 Turaani’s position derives from a tradition of advocacy work developed between the 1920s and 1950s by Jewish and Catholic minorities and their Protestant allies. In Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (2011), historian Kevin M. Schultz describes how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish political and religious leaders worked together to confront nativism and cultural monism.23 The monism that tri-faith American activists worked against was best expressed in the metaphor of the great American “melting pot,” with the US as a crucible into which new immigrants are submerged, transformed, and reduced to a supposedly universal humanity. What acts as the heat is the friction generated by the process of interacting with the dominant US society, which is represented in mainstream discourse to be salutary, liberating, and free from “racialized conceptions of culture” (Volpp 2000, 90). In other words, the melting pot promoted universal values rather than cultural specificity. In the city of Highland Park, which borders Hamtramck, Henry Ford famously brought this metaphor to life in pageants for foreign-born em-

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ployees beginning around 1916. For these workers to gain privileges, like higher wages, Ford mandated enrollment in the Ford English school, a free course of study in which employees learned the English language and American values as defined by Ford (Meyer 1981, 123, as cited in Firsht 2012, 2). Upon finishing their studies, new immigrants participated in an elaborate graduation ceremony dressed in garb symbolizing their countries of origin, carrying signs with the countries’ names as they marched up a gangway that led to a representational melting pot at the center of the stage. Climbing into the pot, out of the view of the audience, they would change into a suit and tie or other clothing representing America. Then they emerged on the other side, waving a small American flag, to receive their diploma. The entry into and emergence from the pot symbolized both the death of the old ways and “ritual rebirth” of becoming American (Sollars 1989, 88–92). To counter the cultural monism expressed by Ford and others at the time, some activists, scholars, and public intellectuals began advancing ideas about American pluralism and multiculturalism, the ideal of accepting others who maintained or celebrated their difference from the white, Protestant mainstream (Schultz 2011, 26).24 These ideas were controversial: people argued that if pluralism or multiculturalism were encouraged, new immigrants might retain loyalty to old countries and not defend the United States. Nativists and monists claimed that the new immigrants would neither learn English nor make other adaptations that would allow them to fully function in society. Yet over the course of World War II and the Cold War, different models of pluralism and multiculturalism continued to spread. As Schultz details in Tri-Faith America, from the 1920s to the 1950s Jews and Catholics worked to carve out a place for themselves in politics, business, housing, schooling, and other areas of life through a range of faith-based political and social movements. Proponents of tri-faith America advanced the idea that each of these three faiths stemmed from the same Judeo-Christian ethic that had been the bedrock of American culture and society since its founding.25 In doing so, Catholic and Jewish representatives followed a specific formula to convey a public version of their faith that struck a balance between maintaining their distinctiveness and living in concert with Protestants.26 As the religion assumed by most Americans to be most

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closely linked with secularism and core American values, Protestantism remained the implicit standard by which American religiosity was measured. At the time, Jewish and Catholic identities were considered distinct and even antithetical to Protestant identity. But the tri-faith movement gained acceptance and was co-opted by the mainstream, particularly with the military engagement in World War II. Although the US had been largely anti-Semitic, and did not accept the mostly Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Holocaust in Europe, once the US decided to enter the war against fascism the nation differentiated itself from the Nazis as much as possible, becoming a vocal champion of the Jews and Jewish American inclusion. Catholics started to be embraced during World War II as well. The prevailing message was that while Germany was totalitarian and embraced cultural monism, the US accepted diversity. Part of this public relations campaign was accomplished by showcasing and supporting Catholics and Jews working with Protestants to advance a “tri-faith America.” The idea of tri-faith America was likewise politically expedient during the Cold War. The US, fighting a godless, immoral enemy, emerged by contrast in this representational schema as a nation founded on religion and religious freedom. America used the image of itself as a tri-faith nation to shore up an image of democracy, freedom, and morality. As the first (and still the only) member of a religious minority to successfully run for the presidency, John F. Kennedy deftly wove trifaith American rhetoric into his campaign. The environment for Catholics in 1950s America was akin to what Muslim Americans face in the twenty-first century. Catholics were regularly accused of not being able to separate religion and the state, and many assumed that Catholics’ first loyalty was to the Pope. Rumors circulated that if Kennedy were elected he would build a secret tunnel from the White House to the Vatican. In the 1950s, people also argued that a Catholic in the White House would promote only values in line with his religious beliefs.27 These examples are echoed in post-9/11 arguments that Muslim American politicians harbor an agenda to bring “sharī‘ah law” to the United States. Dialogue from the OneHamtramck forum illustrates how Muslim Americans staunchly defend themselves against suspicion, shadowboxing accusations of anti-Americanism never explicitly articulated at the

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event. Kennedy’s success in using the language of tri-faith America to defend against similar accusations has made a deep impression on the national consciousness, solidified by the successes of other Catholic and Jewish public figures. These popularized gains have cemented a belief among some interfaith actors and public relations experts about the potential of American pluralism to conquer religious bigotry. As suggested by the conflicts at the OneHamtramck event, however, not all Muslim Americans recognize or believe in this promise. In the introduction to After Pluralism (2010), Klassen and Bender describe pluralism as an ideology laden with “both descriptive and prescriptive burdens” (8) through which the “performance and policing of religious difference” takes place (3). By resisting the pluralist frame offered by the OneHamtramck event moderator, who sought to label their political behavior as inherently religious in nature, some Muslim political actors in Hamtramck called into question their belief in the power of such a model to secure their inclusion. Although widely appealing to liberals in the United States and taken for granted as salutary for all, “current forms of religious pluralism are not naturally occurring ones” (2). Rather, pluralisms are historically contingent ideologies that recognize only certain behaviors as properly religious—the first step in filtering and policing diversity.

Citizenship in Urban Space and Time This book analyzes the relationship between Muslim Americans’ expressions of municipal citizenship and their sense of belonging to the nation, or “cultural citizenship.”28 These interrelated forms of municipal and national belonging can challenge hegemonic, post-9/11 discourses that deny Muslim Americans full national membership. As urban theorist Engin Isin demonstrates, individuals’ engagement with the city is a primary means through which they develop a sense of national belonging, or obligations to other citizens. Thus, “the citizen makes himself in the city by learning how to orient himself toward others through everyday experience” (2000, 16). Cities such as Hamtramck, which have experienced recent and major demographic shifts, provide ideal sites for observing how increasingly diverse municipalities develop new styles and structures of civic engage-

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ment. Compared to suburban or rural contexts, cities are characterized by diversity within proximity, and have relatively powerful local governments over which citizens have direct forms of control. Furthermore, local populations are able to assert considerable influence on civic organizations and other instruments of public life. Cities are often marked by intensive levels of race and class stratification, and thus serve as promising sites for the development of social movements geared toward raising awareness about prejudice and inequality, spurring change on both the local and national levels. By expressing religious and cultural identity within interactions in public spaces, institutions, and governing agencies of the city, some Muslim Americans in Hamtramck maintain a sense of autonomy and distinction from dominant societal norms while also fully participating in civic life. In doing so, these Muslim Americans achieve cultural citizenship in the fullest sense: in engaging in social institutions organized by the dominant class, they also successfully perpetuate styles of difference from the mainstream, in some cases achieving positive recognition and acknowledgement of difference (Miller 2001, 2; Ong 2003, xvii). In exploring the boundaries of municipal citizenship for Muslim Americans in Hamtramck from several perspectives, this book analyzes how people consciously understand and articulate “us-them” dynamics experienced in everyday life based on data gathered from interviews, public speeches, and newspaper accounts. But it also explores spatialized, material, and embodied aspects of municipal boundary making. I analyze spatial dimensions by attending to what people do in relation to city spaces—how they inhabit and move through them—as much as what they say about the city (Hall 2003, 51). I am especially interested in the rhythms associated with human movement.29 This book thus emphasizes a view of the city as a contested spatio-temporal regime, how the same shared spaces are viewed and interpreted differently by different people, and how people experience, discuss, and negotiate these differences, with attention to the meanings that people attach to both the placement and timing of actions (Knott 2014, 21). In The Production of Space (1991), urban theorist Henri Lefebvre calls for the study of space itself as an object of social science analysis rather than merely the backdrop for understanding social relations. For Lefebvre, space itself is agentive, changing, and potent, a cultural form pro-

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duced by people that also takes on a life of its own and impinges upon society’s view of the world and itself (11). Further, Lefebvre asserts that it is not possible to study the production of space without also analyzing temporality. By “production” of space Lefebvre means the way that individuals create particular lifeworlds in the conception, perception, usage, and communication about the order and position of people, things, and places around them and the unseen world (1). Relatedly, the production of time refers to the social construction of ideas about the proper sequencing of events or people’s appearances in temporality.30 Lefebvre read space and its production much in the same way that Karl Marx interpreted the commodity (Merrifield 2000). Commodities are fetishized—they take on value in addition to the raw materials used to make them in excess of the cost of their production, and acquire an aura of facticity, belonging, and being in the world in their own right— beyond their actual endurance and spread through space and time. Lefebvre’s term “abstract space” indexes the assumed, normative way that social and material life is organized in space. In echoing the language of Marx’s “abstract labor,” Lefebvre’s “abstract space” encodes the dominant classes’ ideology. Just like a commodity, space serves as a charged accretion that in its assumption of worth solidifies hegemonic world orders and marginalizes expressions of difference. Especially in Rhythmanalysis (2004), Lefebvre emphasizes how the dominant order’s sense of inevitability is expressed via both spatial and temporal regimes. How people and things are placed in space matters as much as the schedule they keep to move through it. Reflecting this dynamic, on the evening of the OneHamtramck event, we recall that the back room of the Yemen Café was first used by a Muslim family as a place where they could maintain their preferred style of gender separation while still participating in public leisure. A bit later, curtains were pulled back, and the same space was used by a mixed group of city residents, some of whom might not have been aware that the restaurant had been facilitating a Muslim style of gender separation right before they arrived. I studied several instances in Hamtramck in which shared spaces were used in a range of ways and oriented in time. Sometimes, like at the Yemen Café the night of the OneHamtramck event, different rhythms existed sequentially and were not perceived as impinging on each other.

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At other times, the ways in which Muslims and non-Muslims used spaces differently became an issue for explicit discussion. At these moments of interchange, whether articulated or intuited, Muslim and nonMuslim residents of Hamtramck co-constructed the spatio-temporal order in dialectic with one another. From multiple positionalities and perspectives, they brought in histories and norms of life rhythms that derive from as many different locations—both physical and metaphorical—as the city residents themselves. All cities are polyrhythmic. Why and how do Hamtramck residents sometimes perceive the “garland of rhythms” that composes their city as eurythmic (harmonious) or arrhythmic (discordant)? How are such perceptions afforded moral weight? How do they drive social action? (Lefebvre 2004, 16, 80). Different groups and subgroups in Hamtramck contribute different rhythms to the organization of city life. These rhythms orient citizens in, for example, the pacing of the life cycles (such as in the construction of adolescence in schools), the proper organizing of the day (as seen in debates over the call to prayer), or the sequencing of social progress (as evident in contestations over the pace of political change in human rights debates).

Muslim and Islamicate Space: Three Methodologies An anthropological study of social relations in Hamtramck requires a method flexible and encompassing enough to capture multiple, overlapping, and shifting strategies that Hamtramck residents use to produce Muslim or Islamicate space. Such an approach would not reduce Muslim and Islamicate spaces to space produced by Muslims alone, nor would it separate such spaces from mainstream city life. The ubiquity of Muslim visibility in almost every corner of the city, and the fact that certain municipal institutions had clear Muslim majorities, makes the challenge of developing a method for the study of Hamtramck both easier and more difficult. There is no shortage of Muslim or Islamicate municipal spaces or processes to study; thus, rather than set apart particular enclaves or institutions as the focus, I consider the city as a whole, and adopt three distinct but overlapping approaches to space-making as it concerns Muslim and Islamicate identities in Hamtramck: a territory-based approach, a practice-based approach, and a phenomenological approach.

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First, I work with a territory-based approach in which Muslim and Islamicate spaces are understood in relation to demographic concentration associated with neighborhoods, institutions, or other features of the built environment. I explore perceptions of how Hamtramck as a whole and certain neighborhoods within it are marked by high concentrations of Muslim residents. I also study the material and symbolic significance of schools and other institutions such as mosques, restaurants, and centers that are understood by study participants to be associated primarily or exclusively with Muslims. With the territory-based approach of this book, I consider the dynamics of identity production within and around areas marked as primarily Muslim (or Yemeni, or Bangladeshi), and how these are linked with Muslim and Islamicate cultural ethics by Muslims and non-Muslims, or to “otherness” by city residents in a range of subject positions who may be attracted or repelled by this perceived alterity, or who meet it with ambivalence.31 The second approach is practice-based, which allows us to analyze how Muslim and Islamicate space is produced through modes of expression associated with such identities. We will consider acts such as praying in the streets, broadcasting the call to prayer, or wearing a face veil, through which Muslims lay claim to spaces as heterogeneous and assert equal cultural claims within society. While the territory-based approach risks imposing the artificial sense that a space can’t be both Muslim and dominant at once, practice-based considerations of space broaden scholarly understandings of how Muslim minorities inhabit urban locales. As described by urban anthropologist Setha Low, a practice-based approach includes attention to “mobile spatial fields” (2017, 101–2). Many ethnographic works analyze how transitory expressions of Muslim identity have become endemic to certain cities. Mobile spatial fields may be produced collectively, such as through the movement of bodies in street parades and festivals marked by signs and symbols both worn and carried as banners or flags.32 Spatial production can take place via cars and taxis, mobile food carts, or the repeated reestablishment of outdoor market areas, dispersed by police due to zoning issues, that spring up again a few blocks away.33 These sites may recur cyclically in time and space: a monthly qur’anic recitation may be held in a rotating series of

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houses, or in areas of restaurants provisionally earmarked for Muslim worship.34 Transient space-making practices can consist of walking through the streets while maintaining strategies of gender separation, or speaking in certain languages that people associate with Muslim identity (Laguerre 2004; Metcalf 1996; Tarlo 2010). They can also include sounds like radio programs associated with Muslims in particular cities or the call to prayer.35 The third, phenomenological approach offers a cogent means of thinking about the spatialization of minority identity to challenge problematic assumptions inherent within “territorial” and “practice-based” models. In the former models, any spaces not visibly marked as Muslim or Islamicate to outsiders are not studied as part of such space. The phenomenological approach allows for the study of how every aspect of public and political life may be spatialized and perceived from perspectives linked to Muslim or Islamicate lifeworlds, leading to new possibilities for how public space is organized and meanings are attributed to political activism, civic engagement, and the formation of collective life. Here, space-making is understood from the view point of Muslim practitioners in heterogeneous locales who experience a sense of Muslim identity by interpreting and “occupying space in a Muslim way” (Henkel 2007) whether or not this has a visual or sensory correlate. The work to advance ideas about the coexistence of multiple lifeworlds in a single locale reflects the phenomenological turn in philosophy—a school of thought that “prioritizes how we see over what we see” because “what we see” is left aside as ultimately unknowable (Whittemore 2014, 301).36 For example, in his ethnographic work on Turkish Muslims living in new housing developments in Istanbul, Danish anthropologist Heiko Henkel (2007) develops a “praxis-theoretical” and “phenomenological” method for understanding how certain Muslims and non-Muslims experience shared spaces differently.37 For Henkel, the notion of “practice” includes the Bourdieusian sense of habitus construction through the enactment and repetition of the lifeworld’s structure (Bourdieu 1997). Henkel finds that Muslims in these new developments experience heterogeneous space as Muslim space through specific “strategies of inhabitation and perception” (2007, 57). Such strategies may include the inculcation of mental habits such as developing the discernment to quickly distinguish the wholesome features of public space from harm-

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ful ones, and cultivating appreciation of the positive features. These strategies allow his interlocutors to both “recognize and transcend” heterogeneity.38

Chapter Overview Chapter 1 begins with a survey of Hamtramck’s history and demographic composition since its founding as a township in 1798. It considers how changes in Hamtramck connect to national-level socioeconomic fluctuations, internal migration, and immigration reform, as well as regional patterns of Muslim incorporation found throughout the metro Detroit area. Beginning with a history of African Americans, who have the most enduring presence in Hamtramck of the groups included in the chapter, it then analyzes the experiences of Polish Americans in Hamtramck, who represented the dominant majority in Hamtramck for many years since its incorporation as a city in 1922. It then outlines the history of Hamtramck’s African American, Yemeni, and Bangladeshi American Muslims. The next three chapters focus on how Muslim women in Hamtramck helped to develop public and semi-public arenas from which to advance their preferences for various kinds of gender separation. Chapter 2 lays out the argument that spaces created by and for women for their own modes of association bring Muslim women into larger circuits of knowing and being known in the city, thereby putting them in a position to interface collectively with the city on their own terms. While chapter 3 focuses on Yemeni Americans and chapter 4 on Bangladeshi Americans, both chapters center on how women and teenage girls use everyday territorial and practice based spatial forms of “civic purdah”—my term for their processes of gender organization—across a variety of different contexts in the city. The chapters focus particularly on their involvement in educational, religious, and charitable activities, which take place in institutions such as public schools, mosques, and informally at the neighborhood level. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on contestations over municipal legislation. In 2004, Hamtramck residents engaged in public debates over the adhān, the Muslim call to prayer traditionally broadcast into the streets five times each day in Muslim-majority nations. Over four months, the city

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council and citizens deliberated the introduction of noise ordinance legislation that would permit and control the sound. I use interviews with residents who engaged in the debates to analyze how they understood the adhān as a novel sound in the city. I develop the concept of the “urban sensorium” in the book’s discussion of how individuals on both sides of the debate described the adhān as rhythm that either facilitated or compromised harmonious relationships between Muslims and nonMuslims. I show how the call-to-prayer debates gave rise to an interfaith alliance in which Hamtramck Muslims and Catholics publicly demonstrated new forms of identification with one another. Finally, I consider how the call to prayer altered social and sensory dimensions of city life, and how the debates changed perceptions of the call to prayer. Four years after the call to prayer debates, Hamtramck became embroiled in another municipal ordinance contestation involving LGBTQ rights. The issue fomented an identity rupture between progressives and conservatives in the city, sundering interfaith relationships that had formed during the call-to-prayer debates as new alliances were being built. Chapter 6 analyzes how a sense of moral urgency from both sides contributed to a temporal sensibility shift that I call “ordinance time,” and a related shift in expectations of rhetorical comportment. In attending to both the pace and tenor of social relations in this tense period, this chapter considers essentialism attached to religious and secular moralities, while addressing how the municipal debate influenced boundary formation processes. The book’s final chapter reviews the volume’s central claim: that social and material expressions of religious identity work synergistically in processes of Muslim American integration, challenging the boundaries around pluralistic inclusion in both verbal and nonverbal ways. In Hamtramck, peoples’ responses to religious and cultural difference arose from both cognitive and sensory modes of evaluation and were influenced by pluralism. Although pluralism promises to support all kind of beliefs and practices, it in fact perpetuates uneven encounters between dominant and marginal groups, since pluralism itself is part of the dominant liberal secular ideology. By engaging in social and material boundary work in which Muslims and non-Muslims expressed moral compatibility or distinction across lines of difference, some residents expanded the boundaries of belonging in the city. These processes reveal

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unique aspects of how religious diversity is experienced, and how the category of religion itself is constructed—and also may be expanded—as a unifying phenomenon in the urban United States today.

Close Encounters In 2003–4, I lived in Morocco while conducting my master’s thesis research. I studied how Moroccan women and men perceived a major reform in the nation’s sharī‘a-based family law, which gave women new rights and freedoms. For most of the trip I lived in the old city of Fes, a walled city and a UNESCO World Heritage site. When I returned to the United States, I experienced that famous reverse-culture shock that visits anthropologists returning from the field. After only one year in Morocco, American ways of doing things suddenly seemed odd and awkward for me, especially in terms of how I was expected to dress and behave as a woman. So how would they seem to people who had spent their entire lives in Morocco or other Muslim-majority nations? I did not romantically believe that by going to Morocco I had somehow tapped into a universal Muslim perspective or experience that was shared by all Muslim Americans. Muslims in America come from many different places across the world, as different from one another as they each are from the United States. Yet I did gain experience living among people who practiced styles of public life and public sensibilities that some Muslim Americans associate particularly with the “Muslim world.”39 I returned to the US in 2004, when the issue of Muslim identity in America had become urgent in the wake of 9/11 and the start of the Second Iraq War, which also influenced my decision to change my field site to the urban United States. Besides my ethnographic training, my own life experiences since childhood made me keenly aware that coming from a certain religious background does not equate with any one style of being religious or identifying with a religion. I was born into an ethnically Jewish family, but my maternal grandparents had converted to Christianity before I was born. My grandfather had become a pastor and founded a church a few towns away from where I lived. My mother embraced Christianity and sometimes invited me to attend church with her, while my father maintained his identity as a Jew. This gave me a

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complicated sense of my religious and cultural identities. I felt that I had no firm footing in either religious identity, but I developed a curiosity about other religions and a desire to understand what it would mean to “really” belong to a faith group. In this book, I share with readers the fruits of my long-term preoccupations and how my experiences in Hamtramck allowed me to explore them. In presenting readers with images of the city from multiple perspectives, I aim to provide information about Muslims in America to foster understanding about styles of civic engagement that relate to the religious, social, and cultural identities held by members of this population. But I also want to give readers new ways of looking at non-Muslim Americans and ways of life that, for readers who grew up in the United States, are likely unfamiliar. When signs of Muslim difference appear in American cities, such as women in burqas, businessmen closing shop in the middle of the day for prayer, or Muslims avoiding places that serve alcohol, they may seem strange, arbitrary, and threatening to freedom. Yet for other people, including Muslim Americans and other religious and racial minorities, urban American “business as usual” seems just as strange, unfamiliar, and biased toward the dominant group. This book shows the ways in which freedom defined by secular and/ or Judeo-Christian-influenced understandings might be seen as unusual or arbitrary by those coming from different religious and cultural traditions. Just as the burqa or abstention from drinking may be perceived as an unwelcome barrier to freedom, when certain traditional “American ways of life” are imposed on new immigrants they may also seem like arbitrary impositions on other kinds of freedoms. The stories in this book demonstrate how Muslims and non-Muslims learn about these different perspectives through their encounters, negotiations, and friendships. Following the time-honored anthropological goal of seeking to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, picture the tightly knit, 2.3-square-mile city of Hamtramck through the eyes of many of its different inhabitants, and shift back and forth with me from one vantage point to another and back again as the book progresses.

1

The Making of a Muslim American City The Histories of African Americans, Poles, and Muslims in Hamtramck

On October 21, 2018, OneHamtramck held the unveiling ceremony for its “Bangladesh: Coming to America” mural. Dozens of city residents and visitors from nearby areas gathered in a grassy lot across the street from the mural to join the celebration. OneHamtramck members served steaming chai, chanā chūr (a spicy chickpea snack), and cotton candy before the program of speeches and musical performances began. The Bangladesh mural spans an entire wall of a charter school building on the border between Hamtramck and Detroit. Stretching fifty-five feet wide by forty-six feet high, it is one of Hamtramck’s largest and most vivid examples of street art. The mural features a young girl dressed in the red and green of Bangladesh’s flag. Her flowing hair is adorned with white waterlilies, the Bangladeshi national flower. Letters from the Bengali script appear cloudlike against the mural’s bright blue sky. Rising from below are the green terraced fields of tea gardens in Sylhet—the region from which most Hamtramck Bangladeshis come. Nusrat Rahman, a young Bangladeshi woman who had served as a OneHamtramck Bangla Mural Project Committee member, was the first to speak, evoking the natural imagery of planting seeds to convey a sense of the organic relationship that her community has with the city: I’m excited and inspired to be here. It’s a truly awe-inspiring moment for all of us here today. For me, having grown up just a few streets down and still living here today, this mural is something that I wish I was able to pass by as a little Bangladeshi American kid. At 22 years old, I am happy to say that it’s not too late. What you see behind me gives a sense of place and pride for me and so many others young and old. [ . . . ] We, as Ban-

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gladeshi Americans, have planted seeds in the ground here in Detroit, across the nation, across the diaspora. We are a beautiful and thriving community.

In her speech, Rahman mentions the importance of the mural to her personally, as giving her a sense of belonging in the city—something that she hints that she could have used more of as a child growing up in the area. Murals, along with street signs, storefronts, and other forms of material culture, reflect the creativity and imagination of city residents, while also conveying messages about the power dynamics animating multiethnic cities like Hamtramck. Our discussion of this Michigan city’s social, economic, and material history situates the rising prominence of Bangladeshi and Yemenis in Hamtramck within a longer account of the city’s development: one that begins with the founding of Hamtramck Township in 1798 and its settlement by French and then German agriculturalists. Here, we trace the history of how a city long known as a Polish enclave has recently become associated just as strongly with Muslim populations. As noted, the city’s public face reflects these changes. In recent years, Hamtramck’s iconic Polish murals have been complemented by street art depicting scenes from Bangladesh and Yemen. Likewise, street signs have also come to honor new populations. In 2008, Bangladesh Avenue joined Lech Walesa Drive near City Hall and Strawberry Festival Boulevard near Saint Florian Church as another one of Hamtramck’s colorfully named streets. Over the course of two centuries, changing patterns of industrialization and immigration have shaped Hamtramck’s economic and social history; in that time, its African American, Polish, and foreign-born Muslim populations have held different positions within the city’s social and economic structures. In our discussion of Hamtramck’s history, we will consider how institutional racism, aimed most directly against African Americans—but also affecting all immigrant groups who were not “white on arrival”—has influenced power structures at municipal, state, and national levels and impacted the development of social relations in Hamtramck. Institutional racism, also known as structural racism, is a term that captures the systematic ways in which the normative functioning of es-

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tablished societal forces serves to perpetuate race-based inequalities. Such forces include laws, policies, cultural representations, and the everyday functioning of bureaucracies like those found within schools and social service agencies that have been developed, historically, in ways that benefit white people while disadvantaging African Americans and other racialized members of society (Carmichael and Hamilton [1967] 1992; Ong 2003). In reviewing Hamtramck’s development since the city’s founding, we will consider how institutional or structural forces such as slavery, segregation, racist immigration policy, and other factors have influenced the economic, political, and social position of various ethnic and racial groups in the city. Despite the impact of institutional as well as individual racism, some African American individuals have been able to gain prominence and build successful establishments in the city. Similarly, early Polish Americans in Hamtramck faced social, political, and economic marginalization as racialized ethnic minorities in an area that was then mainly controlled by Germans; as such, they also experienced racial exclusions, albeit to a much lesser degree than African Americans and nonEuropean migrants. Against the backdrop of racialization and power negotiation of the groups that preceded them, we will consider the history of Yemeni and Bangladeshi American Muslims in Hamtramck.1 Most Yemenis and Bangladeshis did not arrive in the area until the 1960s, after federal racist immigration restrictions were overturned. Like the African Americans and Poles who arrived before them in Hamtramck, despite various forms of marginalization, Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslims have drawn on both religious and ethnic modes of association to build institutions and establish their presence in the city.

From Joseph Campau Avenue to Poland Street The township that became the city of Hamtramck was named after Colonial John Francis Hamtramck (1756–1803), a French-Canadian Revolutionary War hero. In 1776, Colonial Hamtramck was credited for helping secure the handover of Detroit from the British. As one of the four townships composing Wayne County, Hamtramck Township was named after him in 1798 (Maday 1977, 29–32). In 1817, when county

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officials originally set its borders, Hamtramck Township was about sixty square miles, comprising major stretches of coveted land along the Detroit River that were important for agricultural and industrial development. Beginning in 1806, Hamtramck’s riverfront area steadily diminished as the city of Detroit began to annex sizeable tracts of its land (Maday 1977, 47–49).2 By 1893, Detroit had annexed much of Hamtramck Township, including all of its waterfront.3 Hamtramck Township was first inhabited by French agriculturalists (Kowalski 2005, 52; Maday 1977); over the first half of the nineteenth century, German farmers came to dominate. Street names in today’s Hamtramck such as St. Aubin, De Quindre, Conant, and Joseph Campau still reflect the French presence, and the German presence is reflected in street names such as Brombach, Niebel, and Geimer (Kowalski 2005, 15; Maday 1977, 80, 94; Wood 1955). By 1870, a significant number of Poles resided in the city (Kowalski 2005, 19). Beginning around 1907 and accelerating through the 1910s and early 1920s, many more arrived in Hamtramck from Poland, marking the city with street names like Sobieski, Florian, Pulaski, and Poland (Maday 1977; Wood 1955, 98). The arrival of Poles in Hamtramck was part of the mass migration of eastern, southern, and central Europeans to the US that took place mainly between 1886 and 1925 (Roediger 2005, 11). Yet Hamtramck at the turn of the century was by no means entirely composed of those with European ancestry. Early census data provides evidence of the early presence of an African American community: of the 1,559 people living in Hamtramck in 1904, twenty-four are listed as “Negro” (Maday 1977, 95).

Early History of African Americans in Hamtramck and Detroit The first African Americans living in the region that became Hamtramck may have arrived while enslaved to its earliest Anglo settlers in the second part of the eighteenth century.4 While Detroit is often associated with abolitionism (McGraw 2017), slavery existed in many Northern areas, including Detroit, though on a smaller scale than in the plantation South. Early Detroit-area residents participated in the enslavement of both African American and Native American people. Colonial Hamtramck himself was a slave owner, as were others honored

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in Hamtramck, including major landholder and Detroit trustee Joseph Campau (1769–1863), the namesake for Hamtramck’s main street (“Campau, Joseph” n.d.). During the 1790s, small numbers of African Americans fleeing slavery in the South began coming to the area (Finkenbine 2017, 23). In 1793, the Fugitive Slave Act emboldened Southern slave owners to cross state lines in search of these freedom seekers (Finkenbine 2017, 23). Detroit became the site of well-publicized fugitive slave riots, in which free African Americans congregated to protect and aid those fleeing Southern slaveholders (Finkenbine 2017, 23–24). It was an important hub of the Underground Railroad, and its ports were key points of departure for freed blacks and white supporters ferrying slaves to Canada (Finkenbine 2017, 24; Lambert 2007, 31). Though anti-black rioting erupted cyclically in other Northern cities between 1820 and 1850, in this same period, Detroit had a significantly lower rate of similar reported incidents (Finkenbine 2017, 27). Between 1840 and 1860, as Detroit’s African American population grew ten times in size (Finkenbine 2017, 29), some white residents found themselves competing with African Americans for jobs and space (Boyle 2017, 42; Finkenbine 2017, 29). The Civil War destabilized the economy, causing rising inflation and increased conflicts over jobs (Finkenbine 2017, 29). As a result, beginning in 1863, Detroit residents began carrying out similar kinds of anti-black violence, pogroms, and destruction of black property that plagued other Northern cities. These trends of anti-black violence in Detroit persisted after the Civil War, as African Americans across the nation continued to face severe forms of stigmatization, oppression, and violence. During this period, Michigan gained its reputation as a leader in passing legislation to protect African Americans—such as laws limiting certain forms of segregation— that anticipated and surpassed national-level protections (Finkelman 2006). Yet these forms of social justice largely remained de jure rather than de facto. Michigan and Detroit courts were progressive, but area politicians, businesses, and residents were largely reactionary (Finkelman 2006). Despite some promising laws, most institutional and social structures maintained white racial dominance at the national, state, and municipal levels (Finkelman 2006), laying the groundwork for a future of uneven development between African Americans and other communities.

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Between 1870 and 1890, African Americans in Detroit made small advances socially and economically, but the overlapping influx of European immigrants beginning around 1890 stymied these gains. As successive waves of Eastern, Southern, and Central European immigrants arrived in the Detroit area, each in turn were given the lowest-level, most demeaning factory jobs that had been available for African Americans. Eventually, each European group climbed the social ladder to better work—but no such ladders were available to African Americans. African Americans took the low-level jobs back when others refused them and were positioned as strikebreakers during the many incidents of labor unrest (Radzialowski 1982, 202), resulting in even more resentment and anti-black violence. Neither adequate work nor housing nor a safe social climate was available for Detroit-area African Americans during the Great Migration years. But African Americans continued arriving in Detroit at increasing rates because nothing indicated that conditions would be better elsewhere.

German and Polish Tensions In 1901, the leaders of Hamtramck Township moved to incorporate some of their community into a village to help them consolidate control over the area (Maday 1977, 93). At this time, the population was about five hundred, and Germans still controlled most of Hamtramck’s affairs (Maday 1977, 94). Only one of the elected city leaders was Polish, though Poles would soon come to outnumber Germans and gain dominance in the area (Kowalski 2005, 23). Though Germans and Poles in Hamtramck shared similarities as Europeans and, in many cases, as Catholics, there were great tensions between Germans and Poles based on power imbalances, first in Europe and then in the United States (Bukowczyk 2009, 40, 44). German immigration to the US preceded the main wave of Polish immigration. Attracted mainly by “pull factors,” Germans came with relatively more money and status and were thus positioned to expand their holdings in the new land. While the small, early Polish migrations included artisans and members of the middle and upper classes, most Poles who subsequently immigrated were peasants, “pushed” from Poland by economic and political necessity (Bukowczyk 2009), which lead to increased vulnerability in the host society.

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Between 1772 and 1918, different parts of Poland were occupied by Germany, Russia, and Austria. The occupying powers introduced significant hardships, as Poles lost rights, freedoms, land, and status and were threatened with conscription into foreign armies (Bukowczyk 2009; Pula 1995). Local historian Greg Kowalski notes the irony of the way that some groups of Poles, fleeing German-occupied Poland, were drawn to areas with large German populations, likely due to familiarity, since at least Germans were known to Poles in an otherwise completely foreign land (2005, 18–19). Thus, immigrant Poles were doubly marginalized in the US. The dominant US population compared them unfavorably to Western European immigrants, like Germans, who had been there longer, arrived with more resources, and been more accepted by dominant society as culturally and racially compatible with America (Bukowczyk 2009, 21).5 Germans kept their distance from the Poles in Hamtramck, supporting existing hierarchies by maintaining social and physical boundaries (Kowalski 2005, 18–19; Radzialowski 1974, 126–29). Shared Catholic identity may have provided opportunities to mediate such boundaries. In some cases, however, the Germans used religious assembly to sharpen hierarchies. Stories about church building best document this tendency. At first, Poles in the area sought out services at St. Joseph Parish and other German-language parishes in the area (Vinyard 1998, 98). In 1870, when German leaders began raising money to erect a large church for St. Joseph Parish, Polish members offered to donate to the project. The German leaders accepted, but only on certain terms: the Germans would designate certain pews for Polish use, and the Poles would not be permitted to sit among the other parish members (Bukowczyk 2009, 40; Radzialowski 1974, 127). Polish leaders decided instead to establish their own parish with a gothic building that would rival the German parish in size and beauty (Radzialowski 1974, 127). This led to the founding of St. Albertus Parish in 1870, the same year Germans laid the cornerstone to St. Joseph (Godzak 2000, 57). A dedication ceremony to honor the wooden frame structure that first housed St. Albertus Church took place in 1872 (Vinyard 1998, 98), about a mile north of St. Joseph, in an area that was then also in Hamtramck Township but is now, due to shifting borders, in Detroit.

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According to Radzialowski, the establishment of St. Albertus after the German rebuff was the spark that led the Poles to begin unifying as a coherent community in the area where Hamtramck is today (1974, 127). Soon after the founding of St. Albertus, two other Polish parishes, Saint Josephat (1889) and Sweetest Heart of Mary (1892), were established on the same stretch of East Canfield, each less than a mile apart (Godzak 2000, 26).6 In 1907, the Poles established St. Florian, a parish that remains vibrant in the city of Hamtramck today (Kowalski 2005, 20). Three additional Polish parishes were established in Hamtramck or at its border with Detroit between 1917 and 1923.7

Seething with Tensions: Detroit’s Industrial Boom Detroit’s industrial boom began in 1908, when Henry Ford started production of the Model T (Boyle 2017, 41). With the opening of Dodge Main in 1910, Hamtramck also had a major factory, and Hamtramck Village’s Polish population skyrocketed. Between 1910 and 1920, the Polish population climbed from 3,559 to 48,615. Families joined Poles already established in Hamtramck Village. Internal migration further contributed to Hamtramck Village’s population surge, as factory jobs and the area’s distinctly rich communal life convinced Poles to move from other areas, including Detroit, other industrial cities, and rural areas like the anthracite mines in Pennsylvania (Maday 1977; Wood 1955, 99). Historian Kevin Boyle described the atmosphere of 1900–1925 Detroit as “seeth[ing] with tensions” (2017, 41). The city grew quickly; from 1900 to 1930, its population exploded, quintupling to 1.5 million (Boyle 2017, 41). There was great diversity among the new population, which was fueled largely by the influx of African Americans from the Southern US and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and beyond, but which also contained some of the area’s earliest Arab and Muslim populations. The growth of African Americans in the area progressed at an especially high rate, with the population in Detroit increasing by 3,000 percent between 1900 and 1930 (Boyle 2017, 42). That sharp rise sparked increasing hostility from the dominant white majority, who took steps to contain and segregate African Americans in employment, housing, and social life (Boyle 2017, 42–44). In Hamtramck, the proportion of Af-

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rican Americans relative to the white population also rose over several decades, albeit at a more modest rate.8 As detailed later, this atmosphere bred tensions of varying intensity between African Americans and the new immigrants, including Poles in Detroit and Hamtramck (Radzialowski 1974, 134–37; Radzialowski 1982).

The Growth and Decline of the Polish Enclave Even though Poles in Hamtramck and Detroit were successful in establishing their own parishes, most Polish Catholic churches in Detroit and Hamtramck remained under the limiting auspices of the Roman Catholic Diocese/Archdiocese of Detroit, which was controlled by German and Irish authorities. Polish parishes became a primary arena in which Poles worked together to unify and strengthen their community, maintain language and tradition, and resist the “German and Irish hierarchy [that] tried to control and change them” (Radzialowski 1974, 127). Radzialowski describes the “cost of heroic and sometimes brutal sacrifice” that early Polish populations made to support the grand church edifices erected to mark their community’s piety, devotion, work ethic, and unity (1974, 125–27). Even through the worst Depression years, Polish families consistently donated what little they had to support the parish. Their actions were not wholly altruistic: as with other ethnic and racial minorities, the impetus to develop religious institutions was also driven by the desire for “refuge, respectability, and resources” in a society that often harshly denied them (Hirschman 2004, 1228). The parish also became a site for educating children. Many area parishes developed parochial schools. Poles wanted a moral education for their children, and they also believed their children were marginalized and stigmatized in public schools (Radzialowski 1974; Schultz 2011; Vinyard 1998). The early Polish parochial schools in and around Hamtramck offered Polish language and Polish studies, but this curriculum came under attack by the mainly German church hierarchy, which saw the Polish curriculum as an obstacle to assimilation (Radzialowski 1974, 139). By the time Hamtramck Village leaders moved to incorporate as a city in 1922, one-third of Hamtramck’s population was foreign-born Polish immigrants (Zajac 2007, 5). There were also many more Poles among

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the village’s leadership than when the township leaders had moved to incorporate Hamtramck Village in 1901. Hence, in the 1922 elections, Hamtramck residents chose a Polish pharmacist, Peter C. Jezewski, as their mayor. According to Radzialowski and Binkowski, “No Pole had ever attained so high a municipal position” in the United States (Radzialowski and Binkowski 1978, 48; Wood 1955). Jezewski inaugurated an unbroken line of Polish mayors in Hamtramck that continues today. Polish dominance in Hamtramck persisted, even after a series of racist federal immigration restrictions, instated between 1920 and 1924, limited Polish arrivals and those of other non-Western Europeans (Roediger 2005). The number of Poles in Hamtramck continued to increase due to births and migration from Detroit and other US cities. In 1930, foreign-born Poles and their children composed two-thirds of Hamtramck’s population (Zajac 2007, 5). Hamtramck’s total population reached its height in 1930, with about 56,000 residents. After 1930, the city’s population began a decades-long period of decline that continued until 1990, when it bottomed out at 18,137 residents (Zajac 2007, 125). During these years of decline, the proportion of Poles relative to the population as whole remained high, so that, by 1940, Poles composed a staggering 81 percent of Hamtramck’s population (Zajac 2007, 5). After the racial immigration quotas were lifted in the 1960s, new generations of Polish immigrants began arriving in the city, along with other Eastern European groups, including Ukrainians and Albanians (Wood 1955, 20). Polonia historians mark the beginning of the decline of Polish enclaves in Hamtramck and other urban areas across the US as the end of World War II (Bukowczyk 2009, 96; Radzialowski 1974, 141–42). Polish young men returned from war with increased cosmopolitanism, confidence, and resources, such as opportunities to attend college, housing benefits, and other sources of aid from the GI Bill (Bukowczyk 2009, 97). Accordingly, returning Polish veterans settled in the suburbs, away from the insular “Polish ghettos” of their parents. Another factor leading to the decline of Polish life in the area was the infamous destruction of Detroit’s “Poletown” in 1980 to make way for a Cadillac plant (Wylie 1990). According to my interviews with residents who had lived in Hamtramck during that time, Hamtramck Poles had been integrally connected with this vibrant Polish enclave just over the border with Hamtramck on social, economic, and institutional levels, and were deeply impacted by its loss.

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Still, a significant portion of Poles remained in Hamtramck, even during the most intensive years of “white flight” from Detroit.9 While other white ethnic groups left in greater numbers, many Poles held fast to Hamtramck and other parts of Detroit, considering these enclaves their irreplaceable home. Those who did move to suburbs, such as Bloomfield Hills, often remained closely connected to Hamtramck and Polish enclaves in Detroit. They return for annual Hamtramck and Detroit events, such as the Strawberry Festival and other Polish festivals, and Detroit churches continue to host weddings, baptisms, and Holy Communions (Radzialowski 1974, 132, 143–47). Over the course of the 1990s, Polish numerical and cultural dominance of Hamtramck waned significantly. During that decade, the city’s demographics shifted from 84 percent to 61 percent white (Zajac 2007, 125–26), and the number of white residents decreased by about 1,300 at the same time that nearly 6,000 “non-whites” arrived in the city (Zajac 2007, 125–26). The 1990s marked the end of Hamtramck’s long period of decline, and the population rose by about 4,000 persons. Many of Hamtramck’s new arrivals were Bangladeshis, some on their second migration from Queens, New York (Kershaw 2001). They joined a growing population of Yemenis in Hamtramck. During that same period, Eastern Europeans, including Bosnian refugees, Yugoslavians, and Albanians also arrived in Hamtramck (Kowalski 2005, 142). The continuation of these trends has made Hamtramck a city now estimated by community leaders to be composed of more than 40 percent Muslim Americans, mainly Yemenis and Bangladeshis. As of 2015, an estimated 8.8 percent of Hamtramck’s population claim Polish ancestry. Together with Bosnians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and others, these residents compose a significantly larger group of people in Hamtramck claiming Eastern European ancestry. Fourteen percent of Hamtramck residents identify as black or African American.

Segregation and Urban Renewal: African Americans in Hamtramck after World War II Over the course of my interviews with African American and non-black Hamtramck residents, the idea that contemporary and historical race relations in Hamtramck are more harmonious than those in Detroit

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came up repeatedly. Their accounts, as well as those by several historians, also emphasize the fact that some zones and institutions in Hamtramck were integrated earlier and to a greater extent than those in Detroit (Kowalski 2005, 26; Lewandowski 1998b; Zajac 2007, 97). Notably, in 1901, an African American Hamtramck resident named Ordine Tolliver was elected to Hamtramck’s village council (Kowalski 2005, 36), even though African Americans composed only a tiny fraction of the Hamtramck Village population.10 In a similar vein, an African American man named Dr. James Henderson was elected to Hamtramck’s first city council in 1921 (Kowalski 2005, 36). During the Village years, Hamtramck had several African American policemen, and in 1920, an African American man named Walter Thompson was elected as Hamtramck’s constable (Serafino 1983, 84). These facts are especially remarkable considering that Detroit did not elect an African American representative to their municipal council until Attorney William T. Patrick Junior’s election in 1957 (Cuingan 1957; George 1957; McCree 1962). It is equally important to note that aside from another African American city councilman elected in 1922, Hamtramck residents would not elect further African American representatives into their municipal government until the election of Titus Walters in 2013 (Sercombe 2015). In 2006, African American Muslim William Hood was appointed onto council and served for one year. Hamtramck’s reputation for having better black-white relations than Detroit may be attributable to several factors. As co-residents in a city whose 2.3-square-mile span is minuscule compared to Detroit, Hamtramck’s African Americans and white populations have always lived in relatively close proximity.11 This represents a striking contrast with Detroit, a city known for the vast distances imposed between black and white residents (Darden and Thomas 2013; Stone 2017; Sugrue 2017). Nevertheless, there is solid evidence of significant residential segregation patterns in the city over the course of its history, though lines between black and white residents were certainly blurrier in Hamtramck than in Detroit (Wood 1955; Zajac 2007).12 For example, though African American and white residents often lived in different Hamtramck neighborhoods, they shared some of the same institutions, such as schools. Although Michigan passed a law in 1867 giving all residents equal right to attend their district’s schools,

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many schools remained profoundly segregated (Dykes 2017, 24). Yet Hamtramck’s small size and limited number of institutions provided a context for black and white children to attend the same schools (Kowalski 2005, 36). In Detroit, despite many courses of legal action designed to integrate the schools, racial segregation of schools has persisted through the present day (Darden and Thomas 2013; Dykes 2017, 34). In 2017, Detroit had the second-highest rate of school segregation in the United States, while Hamtramck’s schools are well integrated (Chambers and MacDonald 2017). Although Hamtramck’s schools have long been more integrated than those in Detroit, other patterns of racial segregation existed, and still exist, in the city. Over the course of its history, African American residents of Hamtramck were shunted into certain neighborhoods, particularly those at the margins of the city, in what sociologist Arthur Evans Woods described, in 1955, as “a clear pattern of segregation in this Polish community” (22).13 Indeed, in 1950, more than 85 percent of African American Hamtramck residents lived in two of five housing tracts (Wood 1955). Similarly, in 1967, 54 percent of Hamtramck’s population lived in only 23 percent of the city and were concentrated in areas at its outskirts (Zajac 2007, 101). Even so, for the time, segregation patterns in Hamtramck presented a relatively good situation compared to the even more alarming residential segregation patterns in Detroit. Nevertheless, patterns of residential segregation in Hamtramck made African Americans there vulnerable to displacement by urban planning fiat. By the 1960s, the Hamtramck municipality began disproportionately using federal funds earmarked for “clearance and rehabilitation projects” to target and destroy African American enclaves, implementing, in other words, what renowned federal judge Damon Keith described as “Negro removal practices” in his landmark ruling that found the city of Hamtramck guilty of discriminatory urban renewal practices.14 In Detroit, when African American enclaves were destroyed under similar urban renewal plans, the African American population could move to other areas within the same city (Music 2017). However, when African American enclaves were destroyed in Hamtramck, there was nowhere else to go in Hamtramck, both due to the unavailability of low-income housing and to the “strong racial prejudices [that] exist within the defendant City.”15 So they left—many of them crossing the

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border into Detroit. Consequently, the African American share of Hamtramck’s population was reduced significantly, from 14.5 percent in 1960 to 8.5 percent in 1966.16 In the “Conclusions of the Law” section of his ruling, Keith ordered Hamtramck to make restitutions by providing two hundred housing units to urban renewal victims or their families.17 Many of the original uprooted inhabitants had passed away in the years between the destruction of the neighborhood and the offer of new housing. The family members offered new housing were not always interested in moving to Hamtramck. People criticized the restitution plan for situating its houses in marginal places, such as an area divided from the rest of the city by Interstate 75, thereby repeating an old pattern of injury. Additionally, many kinds of delays and disorder plagued the process of construction and granting of houses.18 Led by prominent African American figures such as William Hood, Hamtramck residents banded together over many years to help organize the movement for restitutions.19 As of 2017, the restitution process was still not complete, making Hamtramck the city with the longest-running open urban renewal case in the nation, and it is unclear if it still remains open today. Further problems plague recipients of homes, whose properties are being assessed for taxes at significantly higher rates than when they first moved in, so that residents now face the possibility of losing their homes and being displaced again.20 In November 2018, city officials announced the creation of the Sarah Sims Garrett Memorial Park in Hamtramck, dedicated to the victims of housing discrimination. Garrett was one of the original plaintiffs, whose name was used on the lawsuit (Sercombe 2018a). Today, African Americans make up about 14 percent of Hamtramck’s total population, an approximate return to the level it was at before the major urban renewal displacements (US Census Bureau, 2017). Yet, if the urban renewal had not happened, it is likely that the African American population in Hamtramck would have grown more over the years. Due to Hamtramck’s very small population relative to Detroit’s (among other factors), this urban renewal had a strong and lasting impact on the strength, coherence, size, rootedness, integration, and leadership potential of the city’s African American population—which, according to Judge Keith, was just what city leaders at the time intended.

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The overall pattern in Hamtramck is one of economic, political, and residential marginalization of African Americans, yet in attempting to defend the city’s record on race relations, historians and reporters often emphasize—or, in Zajac’s analysis, perhaps even “overstate”—the exceptions (Zajac 2007, 105). A story often told about Hamtramck is that, during its boom times, when the population density was at a peak, with several families living in separate sections of the same house, some Polish American homeowners took in African American boarders—and, even more notably, some African American homeowners took in Polish American boarders. These stories of integration are exceptions to a rule of hierarchy and inequality, with its patterns best seen through the residential segregation documented by historical census tract records, newspaper archives, oral history accounts, and emphasized in the Keith rulings. Over the years, African Americans have indeed succeeded in establishing some institutions, businesses, and positions of political power in Hamtramck, yet the obstacles they faced in pursuit of those gains should not be underestimated. The Life Histories of Hamtramck website includes oral history accounts from five African Americans that offer a balanced perspective on the opportunities and constraints faced by African Americans in the city.21 The Experiencing Discrimination, Overcoming Oppression subsection contains excerpts from interviews with Reverend Darla Swint, long-term neighborhood and community activist Vera Burk, and Hamtramck’s first African American chief of police, Solomon McCormick; these accounts detail different aspects of race relations in Hamtramck. Some African Americans interviewed for the website also emphasize the strength and number of African American churches in the city, and the website provides a list of historically black Hamtramck churches.22 Other African Americans in Hamtramck have risen to prominence in city affairs. For example, African American have taken on strong leadership roles in the school board, such as Titus Walters, who served as vice president of the Hamtramck school board for several years before being elected to the city council in 2013 (Sercombe 2015). Mike Nelson, pastor of the St. Peter AME in Hamtramck, was active in national-level NAACP leadership for many years before he took a role in Hamtramck’s NAACP governance in 2008. In 2007, then-president of the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission Bill Meyer organized an African Ameri-

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can Recognition Dinner for prominent African Americans in the city. In 2013, the city honorarily named a street after Reverend Joseph Jordan (1937–2014), who was pastor of Corinthians Baptist Church in Hamtramck for over forty years and an activist in the struggle against housing discrimination (Thompson n.d.).23

African American Muslims in Hamtramck and Detroit Beginning with the Great Migration, Northern cities such as Detroit and Chicago became sites for the development of new religious movements among African Americans, some of which were linked, symbolically or otherwise, to Islam.24 Most scholars report that the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) was founded in 1913, although historian Edward E. Curtis points to the lack of certain evidence for this (2002, 47). It was founded in Newark, New Jersey, by Noble Drew Ali, a religious leader with an obscure racial background who identified with African Americans. The MSTA influenced African Americans across the urban North, and in 1929, the organization established a temple in Detroit (Clegg 2014, 20). In the early 1930s, another racially ambiguous leader, W. D. Fard, began preaching about a new religion called the Lost Found Nation of Islam; he spoke mainly to African Americans in Detroit’s Paradise Valley. By 1931, Elijah Muhammad (then Elijah Poole), a Hamtramck resident for a few years, became one of that movement’s leaders; the organization soon became known as the Nation of Islam. In 1931 or 1932, Elijah Poole established a home at 3059 Yemans Street, in the center of Hamtramck, with his wife, Clara Muhammad, another significant NOI leader. Elijah and Clara’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad (born Wallace D.), who would also become a prominent Muslim American leader, was born in Hamtramck in 1933 (Burton 2008; Clegg 2014; Sahib 1995, 67–69). The first NOI temple was established in Detroit in the early 1930s, moving to several different locations across the city. In the 1920s and 1930s, some African American Muslims in the urban North also became affiliated with the Indian-led Ahmadiyya movement, which had established a branch in Detroit by the 1920s (Clegg 2014, 18). These new religions combined elements of Islam, Christianity, and other traditions and incorporated cultural symbols linked with the Middle East and North Africa to create powerful associations that fulfilled

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spiritual and psychological needs for African Americans. They also borrowed from the Masonic Temples’ esoteric symbology, which similarly drew on associations with Arab and Muslim worlds. Scholars have put forth considerable theory to account for the birth of these movements, the reasons for their distance from more globally recognized forms of Islam, and the factors that led to their appeal. In determining the primary factors shaping the emergence, character, and meaning of different forms of urban African American Islam during the Great Migration years, existing scholarship tends to emphasize the scarcity of resources available to African Americans at the time, as well as the racial prejudices faced by this community.25 In the context of racism, destitution, and oppression coming from many sides, leaders of new Muslim African American religions proposed to call the children and grandchildren of enslaved Africans back to the beliefs, traditions, and cultures of their ancestors. Resignifying the meaning of African American identity, African Americans affiliated with the MSTA reconceived of themselves as Moorish rather than black and thus tied racially to great civilizations of both Asia and Africa (Turner 2003). The NOI also resignified blackness, as the black man was understood to be the original man, also tied to a large swath of non-white races in the world. Historian Richard Brent Turner proposes that the racial philosophy movements provided a powerful form of “ethnic therapy” for African Americans, by deconstructing or reversing the eugenic philosophies of the dominant white power structure (Turner 2003, 157). Given their shared status as racial and religious minorities, the question of the relationship between foreign-born and African American Muslims has been taken up by a range of scholars. Recently, historians and ethnographers have begun to emphasize histories of intercooperation between African American and foreign-born Muslims in the urban North during the Great Migration years (Dannin 2002; Howell 2014). These accounts also focus on documenting the practice of Sunni Islam as a unifying force between African Americans and other Muslims, whereas previous scholarship tended to focus more on the MSTA, NOI, and Ahmadiyya movements as fomenting rifts between African Americans and other Muslims. To my knowledge, there have never been any primarily African American mosques in Hamtramck itself, whether NOI, MSA, Sunni, or otherwise. When I lived in Hamtramck from 2007 to 2009, I was informed that,

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with some exceptions, African American Muslims residing in Hamtramck mainly attend services at one of the African American mosques in Detroit, such as the Muslim Center on Davison Freeway, located about three miles from Hamtramck’s eastern border, or Masjid Wali Muhammad, located about a mile and a half south and east. Rather than gaining prominence in Hamtramck mosques, local African Americans took on leadership roles in two Muslim organizations at the border between Hamtramck and Detroit: Al-Ikhlas Training Academy (ATA), an Islamic parochial school, and the social service center called Muslim Family Services (MFS). These institutions are located directly across the street from one another on McDougall Street in Detroit, in an area known as “metropolitan Hamtramck” due to its geographical, economic, and cultural contiguity with Hamtramck.26 Although these institutions have had high levels of African American leadership, historically and today, they each primarily serve Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslims in the area. Through these institutions, African American Muslims invest in Muslim community building in metropolitan Hamtramck and exert an influence on the city’s social relations. Al-Ikhlas Training Academy is one of a growing number of Islamic private schools throughout the nation. Although it currently has a Sunni Muslim orientation, its history, like that of many African American Muslim institutions, is rooted in the Nation of Islam’s University of Islam schools. W. D. Fard established the University of Islam in Detroit in 1932 as an elementary and secondary school dedicated to providing academic and religious education for local African Americans. According to Rashid and Muhammad, “the first school was located in the home of Elijah Muhammad and his wife Clara. Clara Muhammad was the school’s first teacher” (1992, 178). According to accounts cited earlier, Elijah and Clara lived in Hamtramck in 1932. Thus, the first University of Islam school was situated in Hamtramck. In the late 1970s, Elijah Muhammad’s son Wallace D. Muhammad renamed the network’s schools as Clara Muhammad Schools and revolutionized their mission (Rashid and Muhammad 1992, 182). One longtime ATA administrator whom I interviewed traced ATA’s history to a Clara Muhammad school that operated out of the Linwood Street building that today houses Masjid Wali Muhammad and once housed the Nation of Islam Temple No. 1. The school was renamed Al-Ikhlas Training Academy in 1991. Over the years since its founding, ATA has

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moved several times. Today’s Al-Ikhlas is housed in al-Falah Masjid, just over the city’s northern border. Previously, it was housed in buildings owned by the Yemeni-majority Mu‘ath bin Jabel mosque. Some African American Muslim teachers at Al-Ikhlas Training Academy regularly attend services in the Bangladeshi-majority Al-Falah mosque, part of the same complex of buildings that houses their school. According to my interviews with employees and families affiliated with Al-Ikhlas, Yemeni and Bangladeshi families living in the immediate area comprise the majority of the population served by the school, but it also serves African American Muslims who travel from different areas of Detroit. A majority of the school’s administration, teachers, and staff are African American Detroit residents. ATA is also a notable example of African Americans taking the lead in providing services and religious education to foreign-born Muslims.27 Located directly across the street from Al-Ikhlas and Masjid Al-Falah, Muslim Family Services of Detroit is a division of the national charitable organization ICNA Relief (Islamic Circle of North America). African and African American Muslims are well represented among Muslim Family Services leadership. For example, Sheikh Ali Suleiman Ali, a prominent Ghanaian Islamic scholar, has served as executive director of MFS for many years. He also serves as the senior imam and director for the Muslim Community of the Western Suburbs of Detroit. Tahira Hassanein Khalid, a prominent African American Muslim community leader and social worker, serves at MFS’s Head Counselor. The Steering Committee for Muslim Family Services contains other prominent members of Detroit’s African and African American Muslim community, such as Abdullah El-Amin, emeritus imam of the Muslim Center. The presence of these Detroit-based African and African American Muslim community leaders at Muslim Family Services and Al-Ikhlas Training Academy creates important links within the multiracial and multiethnic communities of Hamtramck and Detroit.

Muslims from the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe The histories of Yemeni Americans and Bangladeshi Americans in Hamtramck begin more recently than those of their African American and Eastern European counterparts. Although Yemenis and people from

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the geographical area that is now Bangladesh28 have been present in the Detroit metro area since the turn of the century, it was not until the 1950s that the first individuals from these areas began setting down in Hamtramck and not until the mid-1970s that they began establishing religious institutions in the city. From the 1890s until the early 1920s, significant numbers of immigrants from Muslim-minority countries across the globe began to immigrate to US cities, including Detroit and Dearborn (Howell 2014, 32).29 Some of this Muslim immigration can be traced to disruptions of the Ottoman Empire, leading to the migration of Muslims and Christians from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and Greater Syria (the area that today comprises Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) (GhaneaBassiri 2010, 144). In those years, Muslims and Christians also came from Middle Eastern areas such as Palestine and Yemen, North African areas such as Egypt, and South Asian countries such as India, which then comprised today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh (GhaneaBassiri 2010). By the beginning of the twentieth century, foreign-born Muslims from many nations had developed small but significant enclave communities in Detroit and other US cities offering factory work (GhaneaBassiri 2010, 137–50; Howell 2014, 31–32), though gaps in the historical record make it difficult to grasp their size.30 Due to restrictions in both their countries of origin and reception, Muslims during this period often changed their names to hide their religious identity (GhaneaBassiri 2010, 152). Census takers often made mistakes when entering data about points of origin, since the regions from which these non-European migrants came were little understood in the US (GhaneaBassiri 2010, 138– 39; Howell 2014, 34). The Muslim American immigrants arriving in the first wave were overwhelmingly men who believed that they would return to their families as soon as political conflicts in their home countries had subsided and they had saved enough money in the US to ensure their families’ survival in the country of origin (Howell 2014, 34). As it was for the Poles discussed earlier, for most Muslim immigrants, push factors weighed more heavily than pull factors. For example, those coming from regions associated with, or directly under, Ottoman Empire rule, fled great political and economic destabilization and the threat of military conscription (Kayyali 2006, 30–31; Takim 2009, 12; Walbridge 1997, 34).

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The number of Muslim immigrants in this first wave was relatively small, and they frequently arrived alongside non-Muslims from similar places of origin and language groups. In some cases, emphasizing national or linguistic identity afforded them greater opportunities for networking and building communities. For that reason, and because of the prevalence of stigmatization, the earliest Muslims in Northern cities like Detroit tended to form organizations to meet their needs that were ethnicity (rather than religion) based, such as benevolent associations and coffee houses (GhaneaBassiri 2010, 18; Howell 2014, 34–37). Sometimes organizations founded on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, or nationalism grew to encompass mosque space and religious functions (Howell 2014, 32). The first mosques in the US sprang up in the 1920s. The mosque in Highland Park was among the first of these.31 The Moslem Mosque of Highland Park was a block away from the Ford factory, which had opened in 1910 and employed many Muslims from Greater Syria and elsewhere. The pattern of building mosques near factories with a significant Muslim workforce endured in the Detroit metro area and paralleled the way that Polish Catholic communities developed their churches around the factories that employed them. The passage of successive racist immigration laws in 1921 and 1924 led to an almost complete ban on the entry and/or naturalization of people from regions of the world considered Asiatic, African, or Ottoman (Kayyali 2006, 24). The result was a large-scale reduction in immigrants to the US from Muslim-majority parts of the world. By the 1950s, as quotas began to be lifted, Muslims started to arrive in Detroit and other areas across the United States in greater numbers. More arrived in the 1960s, after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act. Significant populations came from the Middle East and South Asia, including Yemen and the area that is now Bangladesh. The demographics changed, as it became more likely for whole families to come, with the intention of settling in the US for longer stretches of time. Communities began building mosques in greater numbers. There were not many foreign-born Muslims in Hamtramck until after 1960, when some Yemenis moved from Dearborn to Hamtramck to work in Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant (Abraham 1983, 115). Sometime in the early to mid-1970s, Yemenis established a multiuse gathering place

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on Joseph Campau Avenue in the South End of Hamtramck known as al-Jam‘īat al-Yamanīah (the Yemeni Association) that was used for prayer, schooling, and other community needs, but it closed after several years due to financial constraints. In 1976, Yemenis established Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabel, on the border of Detroit and Hamtramck in a former funeral home that could then only accommodate about 150 people.32 To accommodate growing numbers, Mu‘ath leaders moved the mosque into an old church building across the street from the first location in 1980. In 1995, the mosque added a dedicated space for women, and it is also the site of a well-attended weekend school. After several renovations and expansions, the mosque can today hold over a thousand people. Beginning in the 1960s, Muslims from the South Asian area that is now Bangladesh, mainly from Sylhet, followed Yemenis into Hamtramck; in the 1990s, Bosnian Muslims arrived. Each ethnic community built its own mosques and associations where some portion of the services would be offered in the language of its primary members. Those linguistic patterns have ensured that mosques in Hamtramck today still generally attract members along ethnic lines. However, mosque attendance does not depend on sectarian affiliations because almost all Muslims in Hamtramck identify as Sunni.33 When I carried out the main portion of my fieldwork in Hamtramck between 2007 and 2009, there

Map 1.1. Metro Detroit Map

Map 1.2. Ethnic Neighborhoods of Hamtramck

Map 1.3. Muslim Religious Institutions of Hamtramck

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were eight mosques within metropolitan Hamtramck (meaning within Hamtramck proper or directly across its borders with Detroit), including two Yemeni mosques, two Bosnian mosques, and five Bangladeshi mosques. At the time of this book’s publication, the number of mosques in the metropolitan Hamtramck area has grown to at least sixteen.

“South of Holbrook”: Hamtramck’s Yemeni Community The Yemeni community in Hamtramck is smaller and more recently established than its counterpart in Dearborn. All of the Yemenis I met in Hamtramck identified as Muslim, reflecting Yemen’s 99.1 percent Muslim majority (Pew Research Center 2015, 244). While the Yemeni community in Dearborn developed alongside—and through interaction with—a diverse set of other Arab and Muslim communities that had also settled there, the early Yemeni community in Hamtramck represented both an ethnic and a religious isolate. Unlike Yemenis in Dearborn, who benefitted from proximity to the social service agencies, ethnic associations, and religious institutions established by older waves of Arab Americans, the early Yemenis in Hamtramck constituted the only Arabic-speaking community in their immediate area and thus had fewer resources available to them. Additionally, Dearborn is a significantly wealthier city than Hamtramck and Detroit, offering Yemenis living there additional resources.34 These contextual differences are important to understanding the distinctive nature of Hamtramck’s Yemeni community.35 According to interviews I carried out with local elder Yemeni community members, Yemeni men have been present in Hamtramck since the 1960s but were slow to bring their families because of their strong return ideology (Abraham 1978, 23; Swanson 1979, 34). Small numbers of Yemeni women began settling in the area in the late 1970s.36 When I was in Hamtramck from 2007 to 2009, most Yemenis I knew lived in mixed-gender families, and there was a robust community of Yemeni American women. Community leaders estimated that there were to six thousand Yemenis in the Hamtramck metropolitan area. As discussed below, the community leaders I interviewed reported that the population has grown significantly since 2009.37

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Most Yemenis in Hamtramck come from small, mountainous agricultural villages scattered throughout al-muntaqā al-wustah (the Central Region), located in the south-central part of Northern Yemen (Abraham 1978, 26). They mainly hailed from the Liwā Ibb (Ibb province) or Liwā Baidā (Abraham 1978, 25–27). In explaining why they came to the US, the Yemeni families I got to know between 2007 and 2009 described the steep inflation in their country over the past few decades that has prevented them from affording their day-to-day family needs. There are few job opportunities in rural Yemen beyond qat farming (qat is a mild stimulant and the region’s only viable cash crop), so many work abroad (Swanson 1979, 34–35). Hamtramck Yemenis mainly live in a tightly knit enclave at the southernmost end of Hamtramck commonly referred to as “south of Holbrook,” or the South End; some Yemenis call it ‘and al-‘arab (place of the Arabs).38 Although they are in the majority, they share the area with African American, Bangladeshi, and white neighbors. The enclave is about three-quarters of a mile wide and half a mile long and consists of ten one-way, east-west streets.39 It is bisected by Joseph Campau Avenue (usually referred to simply as “Joseph Campau”), whose southern end houses a growing number of Yemeni-owned businesses. In 2013, five years before the Bangladesh mural celebration described earlier, OneHamtramck organized the painting of a Yemeni mural on the side of the Yemeni Sheeba Restaurant, so it is visible from Joseph Campau. Standing at ninety feet by thirty feet, the mural features the faces of a young women in hijāb (head scarf), a child swathed in sky-blue cloth, and an older Yemeni man. It depicts Yemen’s iconic architecture and the Socotra tree, which grows only on one island in Yemen. The enclave’s borders are defined by the county-maintained Holbrook Street to the north; a Conrail viaduct to the south (the GM Detroit Hamtramck Assembly, known as “Cadillac Plant,” periodically threatens to close,40 is just beyond the viaduct); and, to the west, the bright blue retaining wall of what was once the parking lot for American Axel and Manufacturing Incorporated and Omaha Automation Incorporated. As mentioned earlier, the 52,000-square-foot American Axel building was purchased in 2013 by members of the local Yemeni community to house the new Abu-Bakr Al-Siddique Islamic Center (Sercombe 2013). Another group of Yemenis live west of Joseph Campau in a second,

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more southern and eastern Yemeni enclave spanning the Hamtramck/ Detroit border. Due to the way that the Yemeni community revitalized this area, which was once mainly abandoned houses, some activists call it the “Triangle of Hope,” a moniker reflecting its geographical shape and community spirit. This area is organized around the imposing two-story Mu‘ath bin Jabel mosque. Several Yemeni-owned stores and businesses have sprung up nearby. Yemenis have grown increasingly active in Hamtramck’s civic and political life over the years. Dr. Abdul Algazali, the late Yemeni American chiropractor and community leader who founded a mosque in Hamtramck, was the second Muslim American to be elected to Hamtramck’s city council, gaining his seat in 2005. In 2019, Yemeni American businessman Mohammed Alsomiri was elected to serve on the council, following another Yemeni American businessman, Saad Almasmari, who served the previous term. Yemeni Americans have taken a leading role in Hamtramck Public Schools, filling three of the seven seats on the elected school board. One of these is occupied by Jihan Aiyash, the first Yemeni American woman to serve in an elected public office in the state of Michigan (Mozip 2019). As described later, in 2019 a Yemeni woman named Jaleelah Ahmed was appointed by the school board to serve as superintendent of Hamtramck Public Schools. The 2011–2012 revolution against longstanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh destabilized Yemen, leading to a series of conflicts and wars that have been greatly exacerbated by foreign intervention, including that of a US-backed Saudi coalition. In the years following, Yemen became classified by the UN as the site of the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world,” due to the large portion of the population affected by famine and epidemics brought on by the conflict (Nikbakht and McKenzie 2018). The community leaders I talked to mentioned a noticeable rise in Yemenis immigrating to Hamtramck that started around 2014, a few years after the crisis began, when some Yemenis began to realize that Yemen’s situation would not improve any time soon and started planning to reunite with their families in the US. However, the influx of Yemenis came to an abrupt halt with President Donald Trump’s announcement of a travel ban on January 27, 2017, which effectively restricted immigration from seven nations, five of which are Muslim majority, including Yemen.41

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As described in a report from Yale Law School’s Center for Constitutional Rights (2018), the travel ban has fomented a catastrophe for Yemenis in the United States, including those in the Hamtramck metropolitan area. Those with relatives in Yemen have lost hope of reuniting with family members. Many families have spent thousands of dollars and many years investing in the immigration process, only to have their visa applications revoked. Numerous Yemenis are in limbo: some moved to Djibouti, which currently houses the US Yemen Embassy, to complete their immigration papers, and now it is too dangerous to return home to Yemen. Yet Yemenis are not being granted refugee status in the United States. The crisis in Yemen and Trump’s issuing of the travel ban galvanized Yemeni Americans across the United States into increased political activism and community engagement (Nigro 2018). Local Yemeni American activists have been involved in planning a series of rallies at Hamtramck City Hall to demonstrate solidarity with Yemen and opposition to US involvement in the Saudi-led military interventions and blockades (Cwiek 2015; Sercombe 2017). In Hamtramck, increased civic engagement among Yemeni Americans has also fueled local advocacy movements. As of 2019, dozens of area Yemenis were actively involved in a coalition to protect their neighborhoods from the threat of an expanding toxic waste management facility managed by a company called US Ecology. In March 2019, dozens of Yemeni American residents and community leaders joined neighbors in a protest march from Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabel to the company’s headquarters (Albaugh 2019).

Socioeconomic Diversity and an Avenue of Their Own: Bangladeshis in Hamtramck The Bangladeshi American population of the Hamtramck metropolitan area spiked in the mid-1990s; from a few thousand at midcentury, it rose to an estimated fifteen to twenty thousand by the year 2000 (Kershaw 2001; Samaddar 2015), and it continues to grow.42 Some of those who have made a second migration from Queens, New York, have come to the Detroit metro area to take advantage of lower housing costs and greater job prospects (Kershaw 2001). Continued waves of growth since

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Kershaw’s 2001 report are evidenced by climbing rates of Bangladeshi school admissions, home ownership, and shops, as well as investments in other city institutions.43 In 2001, Kershaw reported “at least six Bangladeshi grocery stores in the area”; now, Bangladeshi businesses number in the dozens, including not only grocery stores with imported frozen Bangladeshi river fish, but also clothing stores and restaurants. Most of these businesses are on a stretch of Conant Avenue, several blocks north and east of the Yemeni enclave, that has recently become a destination shopping district for area South Asians. In 2008, at the behest of the Bangladeshi Association of Michigan, the city honorarily designated the northern stretch of Conant as “Bangladesh Avenue”—only the second street in the US named after Bangladeshis.44 As noted earlier, both Detroit and Hamtramck officially recognize areas of their city by the designation “Banglatown.”45 Bangladeshis in metropolitan Hamtramck are mainly from Sylhet, a northeastern agricultural region known for its terraced tea gardens, abundant waterways, and fertile landscapes. Sylhetis have a long history of migration to Western countries, which began when they served as seamen for British colonists during and after World War I and “jumped ship” to establish themselves in countries across the globe (Bald 2013; Kibria 2007, 250; Siddiqui 2004, 6). Sociologist Nazli Kibria recounts that Sylhetis and others from the territory that is now Bangladesh did not arrive in the US in appreciable numbers until Bangladesh’s 1971 independence from Pakistan, when a few—mainly students and professionals—could finally take advantage of the 1965 immigration reforms that increased quotas from their country. The US Bangladeshi population began to climb in 1980, based on mechanisms including employer and family sponsorship and the diversity lottery. Most Bangladeshis settled in New York, where there were small pockets of established immigrants from earlier years (Kibria 2007, 250).46 Kibria notes that with the advent of the diversity lottery, an “emerging pattern of socioeconomic polarization” took place, which “has offered entry opportunities to persons of less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds” than the employment-based provisions that preceded it. Within this polarizing trend, “recent entrants tend to be disadvantaged in comparison to earlier settlers” (2007, 250). Kibria describes the diversity of today’s US Bangladeshi immigrant community: about 50 percent

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of Bangladeshi men in the US are college educated, while about 20 percent have less than a high school education. She also notes that while “30 per cent of Bangladeshi men are in the managerial and professional occupations, 40 per cent hold down jobs in the service of production/ manufacturing sections” (250). This socioeconomic polarization is reflected in metropolitan Hamtramck, which is home to Bangladeshis across classes.The Bangladeshi American workforce includes both women and men who are employed as civil servants working at county and state levels, engineers employed in software design or in upper-level factory positions, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and journalists. I also met Bangladeshis who own small businesses or work as heads and managers of companies that import goods from Bangladesh. Others work in low-wage service professions as taxi drivers, security guards, clerks in stores and banks, and restaurant workers; some work in small-product or automobile manufacturing. During my 2007–2009 research period, the influx of Bangladeshis to the Hamtramck/Detroit area was still ongoing. Yet by the time I arrived in Hamtramck, there was also a marked egress of Bangladeshis from the city. Some families had become successful enough to move into the surrounding suburbs, considered safer, quieter, and with better schools. As some of these financially successful families move out, their numbers are replenished by new arrivals from New York and Bangladesh. Newcomers seek the low rent and a foothold in Hamtramck, perceived by some to be a gateway city. And while more affluent members of the Hamtramck/Detroit Bangladeshi communities have tended to move away, they don’t lose touch with the city: Hamtramck has become a hub for Bangladeshis in the region. Many continue to own and manage residential and business properties there, while others return to visit relatives, shop, and take part in annual Bangladeshi melās (festivals) and ceremonial events. They attend meetings of thriving associations, such as the Bangladeshi Association of Michigan (BAM) and the Bangladeshi American Political Action Committee (BAPAC). Finally, many come to visit the area’s many Bangladeshi-majority mosques. Bangladeshis are remarkably active in Hamtramck’s cultural, political, institutional, and economic life, not least as seen in the establishment of mosques and religious schools. The overwhelming majority of Bangladeshis in Hamtramck are Muslim; however, Bangladeshis in the

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city also identify as Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian.47 According to my interviews with community leaders, Bangladeshi Americans established their first mosque in metropolitan Hamtramck, called Masjidun Nur, in the early 1980s. Housed in a building that was once a gas station, it still functions today in its original location, over the border with Detroit, on the east end of the community’s residential area, where Caniff turns into Mound Road. The Bangladeshi community has since established nearly a dozen more mosques and religious learning centers, scattered throughout metropolitan Hamtramck, that meet social, spiritual, and sometimes economic needs. For example, Masjid Fatimah and its affiliate Hope Center, on Joseph Campau just over the city’s northern border with Detroit, sponsors Sylhet Farm, an urban farming initiative that helps local Bangladeshi gardeners sell their produce during spring and summer months. On November 3, 2015, Hamtramck elected a city council composed mainly of Muslim Americans, making Hamtramck the only city in the US with a Muslim-majority city council. Three out of the six counselors were Bangladeshi men, and one is a Yemeni man. These men joined a robust tradition of Muslim American municipal leadership in Hamtramck that began with the election of Bangladeshi businessman Shahab Ahmed to the city council in 2003. Today’s council maintains the Muslim majority, and includes two Bangladeshi, one Yemeni, and one Iraqi man. Bangladeshi women are also active in city affairs, serving, for example, on the board of community engagement groups like OneHamtramck and the Downtown Developmental Authority. In 2017, a woman named Saiida Miah, who identified as Bangladeshi, Belizean, and Muslim, made a bid for a counselor seat. As discussed later, this bid may serve as a harbinger for Bangladeshi American women’s political visibility in metropolitan Hamtramck.

Conclusion The US Census Bureau data for 2017 estimates that 42 percent of Hamtramck’s population is foreign born, hailing from nations across the globe. More than 66 percent report speaking a language other than English at home. In 2017, about 51 percent of Hamtramck’s population lived under the poverty level, with 42 percent of full-time workers earning

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less than $25,000 per year. Other indications of poverty in Hamtramck include the fact that only 77 percent of the population, including children, are covered by health insurance, which means that Hamtramck has the highest rate of residents without health insurance in southeastern Michigan (Drawing Detroit 2017). As of 2012, Hamtramck was the city with the largest average family size (4.26, compared to the US average of 3.13) and the highest birth rate in the region, with 20 per 1,000 residents, compared to a state average of 11.4 (Drawing Detroit 2014). The area’s housing stock, built mostly around 1910 for factory workers and their families, retains much of its original look: houses are small, close together, and uniform. A few relatively well-off residents live in renovated houses on double lots, sometimes even next to subdivided houses where newly arrived immigrants live with several families. As discussed earlier, some neighborhoods in Hamtramck are marked by especially high concentrations of one ethnic or racial group. In other areas, residents of many different racial and ethnic groups live side by side, as neighbors. For example, when I lived in Hamtramck with my husband on the corner of Caniff and Conant from 2007 to 2009, our neighbors to the left were a Polish family that had been there for several generations. They hosted us for a barbeque the day we arrived, gave us kielbasa for Christmas, and invited us to Friday fish fries at what was then the Knights of Columbus. To the right was a white family with Southern roots. Behind us lived a recently arrived Bangladeshi family that provided us seeds for our garden and taught us how to make mishti low and uri fry. I attended a Qur’an study group at the house of a Yemeni neighbor across the street and formed a front-porch friendship with an elderly African American couple, long-term residents of the area. In our interview, OneHamtramck founder Bill Meyer expressed his admiration for the city’s diversity. In his opinion, residents of Hamtramck have a special disposition and special obligations that come from living in a unique place. Because there is a Muslim majority in Hamtramck, I think the people who choose to stay in this city are probably ones willing and understanding how to work with people who are different than them—speak a different language, have a different religion. [ . . . ] Thanks to that, we have

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a chance to put people together who would not normally be together, to learn about each other. And I see that happening a lot. People are studying and learning about each other.

Several local activists I interviewed echoed these beliefs about the broad-minded nature of Hamtramck residents. Some also expressed the idea that challenges to community cohesion mainly come from above or outside the circle of neighborly good will. Historically, they suggested, municipal governments introduced rifts by embracing big-business concerns over the common people or by enacting national-level policies such as segregation, antimiscegenation laws, urban renewal, or racial profiling. Longtime Hamtramck resident and official city historian Greg Kowalski adopts this lens in his analysis of the 1960s urban renewal lawsuit mentioned earlier: Hamtramck’s history has traditionally followed two parallel paths. The first traces the route of city government, which often proved to be riddled with corruption. The second centers on the social development and community strength that allowed the city to survive the worst disasters engineered by city hall, at the same time serving as points of pride for amazing resilience. (2005, 37)

In the 1970s, in the wake of regional urban renewal crises and the 1967 Detroit uprisings, the relatively stable (but by no means ideal) relationships between African Americans and the dominant Polish majority captured people’s interest. Today, journalists writing about Hamtramck tend to focus on relationships Muslim Americans and the non-Muslim power brokers in the city, who still tend to be Polish Catholic. In both earlier epochs and today, the legend of Hamtramck’s openness in terms of intergroup relations is a motif that runs through scholarly, media-based, and popular representations (including among people I interviewed for this study). That legend is invoked or challenged to make sense of the stories of Poles, African Americans, and foreign-born Muslims in the city: three groups with distinct but interconnected histories.

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I first came to know some Yemeni women in Hamtramck as a volunteer assistant English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor in a women’sonly classroom in the city’s South End. The class consisted of around fifty Yemeni women ranging in age from about eighteen to sixty-five. Most had come to the class without the ability to read or write in any language and were thus classified as “pre-literate.” However, some of the younger women in the class had attended school in Yemen and could read and write in standard Arabic. The class was the result of a joint effort between an NGO for Arab Americans and the Hamtramck public school system in response to some Yemeni women’s desire for a women’s-only classroom. The students were arranged along a gradient according to skill level, with beginners sitting around the two long tables in the back and the more advanced students closer to the front. After a few weeks, the head teacher, a Bosnian woman named Ismeta, took about fifteen students from the beginner’s group and assigned them to me as a middle-level group. These women were mainly in their late forties or older. I used Arabic to smooth over communication difficulties in clarifying assignments, introducing myself, and explaining my position as a university student researching how immigrants from Muslim-majority countries adjust to life in Hamtramck. When I first met Ismeta, I introduced myself as a researcher who wanted to get to know and form friendships with women from the class. She replied that she had been teaching the class for two years and had never been invited to any home or wedding. Then she repeated some familiar stereotypes about Yemeni women in Hamtramck: it would be impossible for me to become friends with them because their husbands and fathers wouldn’t allow it. Since Yemeni women just stayed home and did housework all day, they would not have time for my friendship anyway. Yet my experience defied these stereotypes. A few weeks into my work with the class, a student named Huma—who seemed especially popular 62

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and outgoing and quick to crack jokes—invited me to her house after school. Starting with invitations from students in the ESL class, in the eighteen months that followed I was invited to about twenty different Yemeni homes. I met their daughters, young children, and friends; I helped with English tutoring or assisted with preparation for the citizenship test. My visits were usually a combination of tutoring and socializing. I also accompanied the women on shopping trips, to gatherings at the mosque, and on visits to their friends’ houses for casual social calls or parties. Some of these women told me that I was the only “American” (meaning “white”) woman ever to have been in their houses. The women began to refer to me as al-Amrīkīah (the American) or al-ustādhah (the teacher). Ismeta’s assertion that the women in her class would not want to form friendships with me echoed widely held stereotypes that Yemeni women in the city were remote, unfriendly, and cloistered. To a lesser extent, some of the same stereotypes extended to Bangladeshi and other Muslim women in the city. Stereotypes about Muslim women in the city often hinged around the meanings non-Muslims attributed to Muslim women’s styles of dress and the way some tended to comport themselves reservedly in some public city spaces, avoided hanging out in leisure spaces like restaurants and bars, and did not mix with men who were not from their families. Some people assumed that because the Yemeni women were not publicly visible in certain ways, it meant that they were isolated and tied to their homes—stuck in a private world of domesticity. But my experiences with Yemeni and Bangladeshi women showed me that Hamtramck Muslim women’s ways of imagining their modes of belonging in the city were more complex and nuanced than these stereotypes suggest. I met other Yemeni women while visiting the students from Ismeta’s class at their homes, and these women in turn invited me to their homes. I took on a limited place in their visiting circuits, although it was a lopsided circuit because my home was not included in it. I showed hospitality by bringing baked goods, small gifts for the children, and educational materials. Eventually, I was invited to well-attended, lively parties hosted by Yemeni women. I began accompanying some of them on errands and doctor’s appointments. Subsequently, I began to socialize with Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck as well—and thus was able to engage in two ethnically distinct sets of Muslim women’s visiting circles during the time I lived in the city.

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Civic Purdah Drawing upon my involvement with women in their daily spaces allows us to see how Yemeni and Bangladeshi women and teenage girls establish a particular type of gender organization—what I call “civic purdah”— across a variety of different contexts in Hamtramck. Although there is no exact word for it in Arabic, Bangladeshis and other South Asians use the word “purdah” to signify gender separation, most often in an effort to protect the sanctity of women’s bodies and spaces from the gaze and interference of unrelated men.1 Literally meaning “curtain,” purdah is a Persian term that was carried into Bangla, Hindi-Urdu, and other South Asian languages. In the context of social relations, purdah can signal material, symbolic, and figurative kinds of screens between women and unrelated men or, more abstractly, the ethos that such partitions should be maintained. Often associated with specific interpretations of Islam, such as those popularized by certain strands of global revival Islam, women’s efforts to enact ideal forms of gendered distance can represent a form of pious self-fashioning.2 To echo a term used by people from across the different Muslim groups described in this book, mindfulness of appropriate forms of gendered distance is a form of adab, an Arabic word meaning refinement, etiquette, and decorum linked to morals and good manners.3 Some women preserve gendered distance to express what they consider authenticity connected to a country or culture of origin, such as Bangladesh, Yemen, or the global ummah. Correspondingly, crossing boundary lines between men and women that have become normative among Muslims in specific places may represent a challenge to expectations and a way of unsettling previously accepted notions of identities such as Muslim, Bangladeshi, Yemeni, or African American.4 In the mosque, crossing established gender lines can represent the assertion of new Muslim leadership, religious community, and authority.5 I met some Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslim leaders invested in expanding the city’s mosques—once primarily male spaces—to further include separate women’s spaces. However, I did not meet any Yemeni or Bangladeshi women who were actively engaged in efforts to institute mixedgender prayer spaces at the mosque, or in leading services in groups including male congregants at the mosque.

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Some Muslim women use maxims such as “The true purdah is the curtain of the heart” to assert that those who closely monitor their thoughts and intentions around the opposite sex may not need any other kinds of physical markers to shield visibility.6 Others interpret purdah to mean that there should be some kind of physical screen—dress, distance, or physical partition—between unrelated women and men. However, as we will see, there is a great deal of flexibility in the forms this gendered distance may take, and they differ widely according to context, age, and social circumstances. If purdah signifies the ideal that women should maintain some separation from unrelated men, then civic purdah signifies the way that women interpret and apply the purdah ethos in the municipal context as a means of participating in different aspects of city life. These experiences contradict the stereotype that Muslim women who dress modestly and inhabit city spaces in nonnormative ways are insular and focused solely on home and family life.7 Rather, I sometimes found that the negotiations of Muslim women broke down public/private binaries in unexpected ways.8 When enacted in public spaces and institutions, civic purdah can be considered a means for advancing cultural citizenship, defined as engaging in the dominant society while maintaining differences from the norm.9 In its mainstream use in North American and European societies, “purdah” is usually associated with the private, domestic, feminine realm, and with traditional religious practices divorced from the influence of secularism. By contrast, the term “civic” is most often associated with the public, the rational, the secular, and the world dominated by men. Brought together as a critical term, then, civic purdah suggests the means by which Muslim women create innovative forms of gendered distance—that is, practices associated with a purdah ethos—as they engage in various aspects of municipal life. Civic purdah juxtaposes two terms often considered oppositional. The very concept of civic purdah rhetorically breaks down the binaries that outsiders to these systems, such as Ismeta, associate with the stereotypes about Muslim communities.10 By analyzing women’s civic purdah practices in a variety of different contexts we can see how women reference and modify the norms of behavior they develop in Hamtramck’s Muslim-majority spaces, like homes

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and mosques, and in spaces shared by both Muslims and non-Muslims, like the city’s streets and schools. By juxtaposing an analysis here of Yemeni American women’s forms of civic purdah with the investigation of Bangladeshi American women’s civic purdah that follows, we will see how civic purdah functions as both a religious and cultural formation. As will become clear, civic purdah is practiced by Muslim women from these two different countries of origin in ways that are variously distinct, parallel, and/or intersecting, but usually mutually comprehensible. The dividing lines between public versus private modes of behavior and between Muslim versus non-Muslim spaces are flexible and contested.

Rethinking the Public/Private Divide A focus on civic purdah helps to demonstrate how space-making processes—as described earlier, the ways in which people perceive, organize, experience, and communicate about the local and immediate environments around them—play a significant role in the development of social relations, and that social relations in turn influence how spaces are defined and experienced.11 Muslim women organize gendered spatial and social systems in the city via a creative process in dialogue with multiple reference points, among them their villages, regions, cities, or nations of origin, the global Muslim community, the American Muslim community, and the receiving city.12 It is especially important to point out that when using the country or city of origin as a reference point for how to organize gender and space, Muslim women in Hamtramck are not referencing a fixed, stable point but rather a dynamic range of processes. The way in which gender norms are organized in countries like Yemen and Bangladesh differ widely across different cities and regions and across time. Some women in Hamtramck from Yemen or Bangladesh have experience living in both rural and urban regions and have also seen how gender norms have fluctuated in their lifetimes in the country of origin in ways that are often debated and contested. When referencing gendered practices from the nation or place of origin in the production of gendered space in Hamtramck, rather than bringing the past into the future, or tradition into the modern, these women are merely expanding the field of ongoing debates about gender and space.

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Muslim women in Hamtramck organize space in ways that may affect their status within familial, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as power relations across different Muslim ethnic groups (Yemeni, Bangladeshi) and between different ethno-religious groups and the non-Muslims in the city. In negotiating gendered social and spatial relations that differ from the organization of gender in the dominant society, Muslim women in Hamtramck assert the value, importance, and viability of alternative cultural and moral systems tied to how they perceive standards both in their religion and in their places of origin. These gendered spatial practices represent one way that Muslim women become incorporated into city life, but in a way that differs from how we usually think of assimilation, that is, as a process of losing prior group identity and adopting a generic, nationally-based identity (as in Ford’s melting pot). Instead, Muslim women who engage in civic purdah assimilate while retaining a minority identity established by other Muslim women in the city. Muslim women in Hamtramck organize gendered spatial systems collectively, and in doing so build upon and modify the invisible but tangible maps, passages, and grid lines laid over the city by Muslim women who came before them.13 Assimilation to a minority community influences dominant society, too: when Muslim women establish collective practices that are repeated over space and time in different aspects of Hamtramck public life, they change the shape of the entire city—including streets, neighborhoods, and institutions—in ways that impact both Muslim and non-Muslim city residents.14 My analysis of how Muslim women establish civic purdah in Hamtramck starts with the assumption that any social space is always already gendered (Massey 1994, 179). In European and North American traditions, it is commonly understood that space is divided into public and private realms and that each realm has a relatively discreet and stable gendered meaning.15 Despite post-1960s changes to gender norms and roles, normative cultural traditions in Europe and North America still generally assign public spaces to men and private spaces to women, even if on a symbolic level. These gendered associations carry significant material, political, and economic effects, since private and public are associated differentially with power. Public (masculine) spaces are associated with the political—the place where things happen that are of import to everyone: economic exchange, progress, reform. Private

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(feminine) spaces are associated with the domestic—a place of stasis, tradition, backwardness, children, care, and modes of association, such as friendships with other women, that are assumed to lack political or economic dimensions and that are perceived as concerning women and children only. Historically, feminism in Europe and North America has often linked progress to how far women have come in terms of breaking out of the private domain and gaining access to the public and political sphere of men. Having naturalized this gendered public-private divide, when feminist scholars working from European or North American philosophical traditions represent Muslim societies, many project this gendered dichotomization of space onto those societies. As a result, a large corpus of work on Muslim societies discusses “women’s worlds” as private worlds and “men’s worlds” as public worlds, thereby adopting conventions that minimize the ways in which women’s and men’s spaces are integrally connected and mutually constitutive. Such studies proceed by imposing onto Muslim societies the European modes of understanding the value, meaning, and power associated with those two worlds. A significant tradition of feminist scholarship successfully complicates the neat dichotomization and gendering of the world into male public and female private realms (Benhabib 1992; Fraser 1992; Massey 1994; Rose 1993). The critique of the universality of the public/private divide acquires new dimensions when taken up by scholars of women in Muslim societies. Feminist scholars of gender systems in Muslimmajority societies have helped to deconstruct the opposition between public and private by attending to the ways in which these terms translate, fail to translate, or present incongruities with associated concepts within the language spoken by the community under study.16 For example, in setting up her approach to gendered space in Southern Yemen, anthropologist Susan Dahlgren proposes: “Rather than understanding public as the opposite of private or domestic spaces, I contrast public to the sense of being hidden, silenced, or marginalized” (2016, 88). Here, Dahlgren asks us to consider how spaces that may not be traditionally considered as public, such as spaces occupied mainly by women, may nevertheless be considered spaces in which women are not hidden, silenced, or marginalized but rather as spaces in which women adopt positions of influence in ever-widening circles. Dahlgren’s proposal leads

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us to question the ways in which we assume that being seen and heard by men, or being at the center of men’s activities, serves a prerequisite for engaging in civic life for both men and women. The male-centered view overlooks the rich ways that women contribute to civic life through associations carried out with other non-kin women, sometimes across racial and ethnic divides, with significant social and economic (and thus civic and political) effects. Feminist scholarship on women in Muslim-majority societies has demonstrated that women gain influence in myriad ways in organizing gender and space. In this discussion, I adopt a broad definition of “agency” to mean the capacity to decide for oneself and have an impact on one’s surroundings and social group, either immediately and proximate, or in an expanded way. Some of these studies have examined how women exert agency by challenging existing gendered social and spatial norms that they perceive as patriarchal.17 More recent work focuses on understanding how some women assert themselves to enhance their authority not by challenging, but by mastering gendered roles available to them within these systems. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s 2004 ethnography, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, unlocks the bind between agency and resistance by understanding power as relational rather than absolute, and by theorizing women’s experiences of agency as religious practitioners in a male-dominated system. Feminists writing about Muslim women in Europe and North America often focus on the agency of Muslim women who immigrate to the US or Europe only when they use the immigration experience as leverage to shed the gender norms of societies of origin and embrace the supposedly gender-neutral public culture of the host society.18 Anthropologist Jeanette Jouili effectively writes against this tradition in Pious Practices and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (2015). Jouili further develops a concept of agency in the cases of pious Muslim women living in France and Germany by showing how, in the European context, women gain a sense of agency as pious actors not only in their interactions with other Muslims, but also in asserting piety in everyday interactions with non-Muslims. Jouili explores how Muslim women in Europe perform a kind of everyday life da‘wā, in which they employ their physicality and dress to serve as object lessons for

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all as they negotiate modest dress and fulfill religious obligations while successfully integrating into universities, workplaces, and other public spaces. “Da‘wā” can be translated as “calling,” as in calling to God, to faith, or to Islam (Smith 1999, 160). Contemporary piety movements, such as, for example, those described by Mahmood and Jouili, emphasize da‘wā as it concerns Muslims helping other Muslims perfect their understanding and practice, rather than proselytization (2004, 57). For Jouili, second generation French and German Muslim women add another dimension to da‘wā by tying it to the practice of creating positive representations of Islam to improve the status of the religion in a hostile environment (2015, 87). Integrating Mahmood and Jouili’s frameworks into our approach to civic purdah, we will see that some Muslim women assert agency and enhance their authority and autonomy by establishing and remaining centered in gender-separated spaces and modes of association that reference religious ideologies, cultural norms from places of personal or familial origin, global and national identity constructions, and Hamtramck itself. Spaces of civil purdah—the spaces created by and for women for their own modes of association—bring Muslim women into larger circuits of knowing and being known in the city, thereby putting them in a position to interface collectively with multiple municipal publics on their own terms.

Reading Embodied and Locational Practices at Yemeni Women’s Mosques On a sunny Friday afternoon in May 2008, I joined Huma and her daughters, Aisha and Maysan, for prayer services at their mosque. Every week, Huma’s family attended the Friday afternoon prayer service and khutbah (sermon) at Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabel, the large Yemeni mosque just over Hamtramck’s eastern border with Detroit. In addition to the weekly communal worship, that Friday marked the end of a semester for girls’ and women’s religious study classes, so there would be graduation celebrations in addition to the usual activities. Huma, Aisha, and Maysan were each dressed alike in a black hijāb and loose, flowing bālto; before leaving the house, each fastened a black lithāmah across the lower half of her face.19 Aisha carried a container

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holding a homemade cake for the after-prayer celebration. We set out on the mile walk to the mosque, stopping at the end of the block where Huma’s friend Nuha lived. We also encountered other groups of Yemeni women headed in the same direction. Women greeted each other and fell into conversations with friends and extended family. We passed groups of Yemeni men, but the women and men did not greet each other or join each other’s groups. This gender separation strategy, along with modest dress, facilitated women’s ability to claim the street as part of their sphere of involvement. Throughout Hamtramck, Muslim men and women were heading to local mosques. Generally, Yemenis in the city made their way to the two Yemeni mosques to the south and southeast of the city’s center, while Bosnians headed to two mosques in the north, and Bangladeshis proceeded to five different mosques situated in all directions from the center of the city.20 Among groups walking to the mosque, attire distinguished the ethnic identity of some. Yemeni women almost always wore black baltōs and headscarves. Bangladeshi women dressed in a variety of different styles and colors. Many wore head coverings arranged in a range of different ways, and some wore loose, flowing sārī or shalvār qamīz.21 As we neared Mu‘ath bin Jabel, women turned to the special side entrance marked “Women Only” in Arabic, while men continued to the front entrance. We entered, adding our shoes to a massive pile. Since the women had already performed their religious ablutions at home, we were able to avoid the long bathroom lines. Huma, Aisha, Nuha, and I went directly up the stairs and into the women’s section of the mosque while Maysan went downstairs to drop off the cake in the basement, which on that day was earmarked as women’s-only space. The women’s balcony area consisted of a wide space bordered by a shoulder-high plexiglass wall that overlooked the men’s space downstairs. The men’s area, with enough room for about a thousand people, was already quickly filling. The women’s space was only about a quarter of the size of the men’s space. About a hundred women were already assembled; some were divided into groups and sitting in circles. While Aisha looked for friends, I accompanied Huma and Nuha over to a group of middle-aged and elderly women who listened to a muhādarah (lecture) being given in Arabic by Sister Widaad, an elder woman leader.22 She emphasized the importance of the mosque, explaining that

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it was the place for learning and making an usrah (family) of the mujtama‘ (community). With the call to prayer, women assembled into lines, standing shoulder to shoulder, and began the rhythmic movement and recitation of Muslim salat (communal prayer). Then, the imam gave his khutbah in Arabic. Beginning with a recitation from the Qur’an, he then gave an address exhorting those assembled to increase their pious acts this very hour, since no one knows what will happen tomorrow. After the imam’s sermon, the congregation prayed again. Then, various men of the community took turns at the microphone to give announcements about a local Yemeni association, college scholarships for high school seniors, and the upcoming municipal elections. A few young boys came upstairs with fliers for state representative Abu Sayed Mahfuz, a Bangladeshi American Muslim Hamtramck resident. When the announcements ended, the women split into halaqah (study circles) for Arabic and Qur’an study, which ended with prizes and completion certificates. When it was time to eat, dozens of women congregated in the mosque basement, sitting together on blankets, sharing pizza, ‘asīdah (wheat flour porridge), chicken stew, salads, and other dishes from paper plates, with soda and cake for dessert. Huma and her daughters’ experiences at this mosque gathering illustrate several dimensions of civic purdah. While remaining gender separated, the women widened their social circles and spheres of influence beyond kin-based groups to encompass other residents of the city.23 The importance of this action was explicitly emphasized by the elder female mosque leader in her lecture on the importance of the mosque for making a family of the community. In some Muslim-majority societies, it would be common to express variations of this idea to men but not women, especially in the context of encouraging men to attend the Friday gathering. In Hamtramck, women’s attendance at the mosque allows them direct access to discussions about community and municipal affairs that they might not have otherwise, like the announcements about the municipal elections. Huma and her daughters’ experiences demonstrate how Muslim women produce civic purdah in Hamtramck through two types of spatial operations: embodied and locational practices. I define embodied practices as those concerning the ways that women individually and col-

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lectively negotiate space and produce space with their bodies. One kind of embodied practice includes dress, or the ways in which certain articles of clothing, such as the hijāb and niqāb (face veil), take on specific meanings in Hamtramck and allow women to feel a sense of comfort, mastery, and belonging across a range of urban spaces.24 Muslim women across ethnic groups in Hamtramck wear head coverings to communicate pride; to signal piety, playfulness, creativity; to establish belonging; or to mark their critique of what is considered normative among the Muslims or non-Muslims around them. Our discussion of dress includes analyses of how Yemeni women adopt different standards of dress depending on their relationship to a given space and people. Their decisions about when and how to adopt different modes of dress result from a complex process of reasoning. In some contexts, they aim to maintain in-group anonymity. In others, they act based upon safety concerns, especially outside Hamtramck’s boundaries and in Islamophobic contexts. These analyses of women’s head coverings include a discussion of how women perceive their relative success in communicating the language of dress to their interlocutors and their understanding of these communicative processes. Other embodied practices of civic purdah include those involving gendered proxemics: how, through the way they position their bodies in space, women enact appropriate standards and practices of distance between themselves and unrelated men.25 In Huma and her daughters’ walk to the mosque, for example, we see instances in which women— particularly Yemeni women—travel in groups to legitimate their presence in certain streets and areas of the city, using gender separation strategies to open a variety of arenas to their involvement. We can also note the way in which women collectively alter their bodily positions, gazes, and vocal tones when confronted with males as a way of setting women’s public spaces apart from those of men. Gendered proxemics are sometimes improvised and transitory, such as when women must respond quickly to unanticipated behaviors of others, whether Muslims or non-Muslims. A second set of operations, which I call locational practices, concern how women schematize gender arrangement in specific places through advance planning, design, and shared histories or understandings of how a place or liminal space should be used. Locational practices are

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almost always collective, maintained via the cooperation and recognition of others. Muslim women may discuss these preferences explicitly, both within Muslim groups, as in the case of mosques, and with non-Muslims, such as in the case of the gender-segregated ESL classes. Women invoke locational practices by orchestrating the rhythm and flow of female and male bodies with concern for both position and timing. Locational practices sometimes result in the production of genderseparated spaces that come together and dissolve cyclically—as in the case of living rooms in private homes—or that have perennial physical correlates, such as women-only spaces at the mosque. The activities that take place in gender-separated spaces can facilitate women’s expansion into gender-mixed spaces in sometimes unexpected ways, such as how charitable initiatives stemming from religious gatherings sometimes draw women into different parts of Hamtramck and Detroit to serve the needs of both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Civic Purdah at Hamtramck High School Aisha was twenty years old and a student at a local community college when we were first introduced by her mother, Huma. She was born in the same small village in Ibb as her mother and grandmother and had attended a mixed elementary and middle school for boys and girls through sixth grade. This was the highest level available for girls in the village and the point at which they normally stopped attending school, while the boys would travel to a nearby village to continue their educations. Aisha’s family moved to Sana‘a soon after she graduated sixth grade to facilitate the process of applying for a US visa. Aisha and her sister, Maysan, had the opportunity to attend an all-female middle school for the two years the family remained in Sana‘a while waiting for their papers to get processed. This gave her a chance to participate in English-language education. Soon after coming to the country, Aisha and Maysan enrolled in an alternative educational program called Horizons for high-schoolaged ESL students. This program prepared them to attend the public Hamtramck High School within one year after their arrival. The alternative high school program at Horizons provided a small, highly supervised setting. In contrast, Ham High had been perceived

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at that time as a place in which students regularly evaded the control and supervision of teachers. Rather than entering into the high school’s culture of cross-gender interaction and dating, Aisha integrated into high school by participating in a version of civic purdah that had been established at Hamtramck High School by pious Muslim teenage girls who had preceded her and recognized by non-Muslims. Aisha explained: At the high school it was really diverse, and people knew what Yemeni girls are doing. I didn’t experience a lot of problems. I usually sat just with the girls, you know. When you are at the high school, and you are a Muslim lady, you will say: here is a chair next to a girl, and here is a chair next to a boy. So which one are you going to choose? Next to a girl. [ . . . ] You could still talk to the guys at the school, but certain types of talking you would try to avoid. If I have to talk to some guy, I will talk to him about work, about school assignments, and that’s the point where I stop.

In accordance with her beliefs about appropriate modes of cross-gender interaction, Aisha deliberately avoided what she considered physical closeness with male students to whatever extent possible, as well as intimate friendships with them. An important part of this embodied practice involved a strategy of minimizing conversation and close contact with young men at the school and especially of avoiding situations of being alone—in conversation or in a room—with a male student. Aisha’s assertion that people “know what Yemeni girls are doing” at Hamtramck High School reflects her perception of the success of young Yemeni women’s civic purdah as a communicative strategy capable of sending messages to different audiences at different levels. Aisha’s comments indicate that her comportment at the high school represents a mode of sociability introduced and normalized by Yemeni Muslim girls before she got there; non-Muslims at the high school respect and recognize it. Aisha’s struggles and negotiations were made more legible and buffered by previous Yemeni girls at the school, and continued with her and other girls who practiced these same kinds of behavior. In continuing civic purdah strategies at the high school, Aisha was assimilating not into a mainstream US high school culture, but rather into gendered minority culture that is recognized as a variant

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of the school culture. In further comments, Aisha made it clear that in helping to develop and enact a set of gendered distance standards that she deemed appropriate, she conveyed messages about her interpretation of Islam to both Muslims and non-Muslims she encountered. In Islam, you can talk to a man, but with your scarf on, and when other people are there. And so, I do that at the high school. And some people, they take it as a very strict religion, but it’s really not. If you understand it the way it should be done [ . . . ] you can do what you need to do in Islam.

Aisha and other Muslim women engaged in everyday processes of innovating new configurations of gender and space in Hamtramck are also engaged in a type of operation described by literary scholar miriam cooke as “multiple critique,” which actively evaluates and selectively applies references from both the home and host society.26 Aisha uses embodied forms of communication to show that “Islam is not that strict.” She makes it clear in the portion of the interview that follows that she is interested in communicating this message to two groups of interlocutors: Muslim and non-Muslims. On one hand, she is shouldering a heavy “representational burden” of countering stereotypes harbored by non-Muslims around her who consider Islam to be morally inflexible, tyrannical to women, and worse (Fernando 2014, 48; Jouili 2015, 154). On the other hand, she also directs her embodied communication about Islam to other Muslims whom she believes have overly demanding standards for themselves and their co-religionists. Many Muslim women I met were engaged in this multiple critique, yet remained selfconsciously and deliberately centered in an Islamic perspective. The women represented in this ethnography engaged multiple identities and modes of affiliation while remaining centered in Islam, echoing the “Islamic anchor” style of identity construction described by anthropologist Zarinah El-Amin Naeem (2009) in her study of Muslim American young adults and marriage. One part of this multiple critique comes from reevaluating and assessing daily practices that they perceive as coming from their societies of origin, in some cases separating out those aspects of gendered organization perceived as “legitimate” under Islam from those perceived as “cultural”—and thus arbitrary—and then preserving the legitimate

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ones.27 A second part of the multiple critique comes from evaluating the norms of the society in which they live now—and reckoning with how those standards, and pressures to assimilate to the dominant culture, may either enhance or counter their efforts to enact piety in the spaces of the city. In the chapters that follow, our exploration of civic purdah at the high school for Yemeni and Bangladeshi young women will include an analysis of the importance that decisions about cross-gender interaction have for unmarried young Muslim women in Hamtramck over and above their married counterparts. We will consider the special importance that civic purdah holds for them as they take on the responsibility of representing familial, community, and religious morals among teachers, administrators, and peers who may not be fully aware or supportive of these aims, and we will examine how young women respond and adapt to the schools’ dating culture, which implicitly promotes student romance through events such as dances. We will use the civic purdah concept to describe how Yemeni and Bangladeshi teenage girls fully engage in school culture while maintaining different kinds of gender separation to a degree they find appropriate and feasible, and will analyze the special importance that certain area charter schools with higher concentrations of Muslim students hold for Muslims in Hamtramck, since they are perceived by some as offering a more supportive environment for the elaboration of civic purdah. Finally, we will examine the scope of acceptable extracurricular activities for young women to consider how some gendered school activities, such as civically themed groups, offer young Muslim women a path to greater involvement in municipal life.

Conclusion Many of the Muslim women that I got to know in Hamtramck recognized the development of practices that I refer to as civic purdah as part of a process of assimilation. Yemeni and Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck constructed and evaluated civic purdah practices not only in dialogue with one another, but with reference to the non-Muslim coresidents of the city with whom they shared streets and institutions. By also highlighting how Muslim women in Hamtramck produce space in verbal and non-verbal dialogue with non-Muslims, I implicitly link

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Hamtramck to the heterogeneity inherent in the production of Islamic and Islamicate geographies over space and time.28 Women within and across Yemeni and Bangladeshi ethnic groups engage in ongoing conversations about the meaning and appropriateness of their gendered spatial practices in terms of how well they meet the integrated aims of reflecting Islamic morals while facilitating successful adaptation to the city. The theme of “civic purdah as assimilation” comes to the fore as women describe and evaluate the impact of their own and other Muslim women’s gendered spatial practices according to the ways in which they perceive them as enhancing, or failing to enhance, their status, reputation, legibility, and power among both Muslims and non-Muslims in the city.

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Yemeni Women, Civic Purdah, and Private/Public Divides

The first time that Huma invited me to her home after the Yemeni women’s ESL class, she followed up her invitation with a caveat: “We have to leave the minute that class is over,” she told me in Arabic. “We can’t wait even a few minutes,” She tapped my arm for emphasis. When class ended, we promptly walked with the other women going in the same direction, joining a group of around ten to cross Joseph Campau, the city’s main street. One woman held her hand in the air like a crossing guard and ushered us across the street to the entrance of Veteran’s Memorial Park. Breaking into twos or threes, we cut diagonally across the park and then walked along a chain-link fence until we came to an opening where two ends of the fence were chained together. One by one, we ducked under the chain and crossed into the residential enclave, where the women began chatting with each other and soon split off to their own houses. It was clearly important to Huma that we walk with the entire group of women. Cutting through the park had allowed them to stick together and avoid walking up the southern end of Hamtramck’s heavily populated main street. The walk from the class as a group shared some of the same dynamics with the walk to the mosque described earlier. In both cases, the Yemeni women greeted other women, but not men. They walked in a purposeful way, using hushed tones, while maintaining an awareness of their proximity to the entire group, and did not split off into smaller groups until they reached the enclave. Through walking, Yemeni women are essentially creating a transitory, women’s-only public space within the city itself, using their bodies—and their bodies together—to create this space. I was initially surprised that Yemeni women that I walked with often stuck to alleys in and around their enclaves and avoided more main streets. Dominant US culture teaches women to aim for populated streets and stay away from deserted alleys. However, these directives 79

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may not hold for Yemeni women, who may understand the alleys of their enclave as extensions of their homes that are populated at all hours of the day. Within their homes, women are frequently at the windows, tracking the comings and goings of friends; unusual noises in the street would create alarm and elicit a response from the neighbors. Our discussion about women and space presents a detailed analysis of spatial aspects of Yemeni women’s everyday lives in Hamtramck, continuing the argument that Hamtramck Muslim women’s space-making practices blur the lines between public and private, complicating mainstream modes of organizing space and scrambling the ideological correlates associated with these two discursive realms. Like their Bangladeshi counterparts described later, Yemeni women advance civic purdah, a style of gender organization and set of practices through which they establish distance they deem appropriate with unrelated men.1 As noted earlier, I categorize civic purdah practices into two types: embodied practices that women accomplish through dress and the way they position their bodies; and locational practices that involve women’s collective efforts to choreograph the ebb and flow of different genders in particular spaces. Through our discussion of these civic purdah practices, we will see how Yemeni women across generations choreograph the gendering of space within homes, streets, neighborhoods, mosques, and schools. We will pay particular attention to the ways Yemeni women organize their domestic spaces so that they are neither isolated nor secluded. Rather their lives are enriched with social, cultural, spiritual, and economic exchanges. In so doing, we will see how areas in Yemeni homes, such as women’s living rooms, blur the boundaries between public and private, open to an extended and loosely bounded set of non-kin visitors during times earmarked for visiting, meals, and the home-based halaqah (religious study circle). Our discussion of women-only spaces in mosques draws attention to how women reproduce or echo some features of home-based sociability. And the discussion of locational practices in schools shows how teenage daughters sustain or modify communitybased civic purdah practices to establish comfortable spaces for themselves in an ethnically and racially diverse mixed-gender context. Here, we will see how Yemeni women perceive and evaluate the civic purdah practices of Bangladeshi Muslim women in the city, and we will

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see the reverse in the next chapter. Attention to how Yemeni and Bangladeshi women compare themselves and relate to one another aids the understanding of us-them dynamics and the constructions of a bounded identity around a pan-ethnic Muslim identity versus an ethno-religious identity. In both chapters, I show that Yemeni and Bangladeshi women evaluate civic purdah practices according to two measures, which are seen as complementary rather than in conflict with one another: how these practices help achieve piety, and how these practices foster appropriate kinds of integration into the city. The extended discussion analyzes civic purdah practices across generations, showing the degree to which women believe these practices to be flexible and contextdependent, rather than practiced, as certain gendered Islamophobic stereotypes would suggest, in lockstep with a fixed set of rules.

Education, Career, and Civic Purdah Styles Huma is the daughter of the headman (‘ādil al qarīya) of her village in Yemen. In Yemen, her family had often hosted visitors in their homes, including those traveling through the village to someplace else. I wondered if Huma’s reputation, based on her status and the prominence of her home in the village, was part of the reason that she felt comfortable being the first to invite me into her home here in the US—and perhaps why other women, from different villages in Yemen, seemed to follow her lead with invitations. Some women casually mentioned their family’s near or distant kinship relationship to Huma’s family. Although she had high status in her village, Huma, like most of the women from that village in her generation, had never been to school in Yemen, and she had never learned to read or write in any language. The village’s mixed-gender elementary school that her daughters, Maysan and Aisha, had attended had not yet been established when Huma was a child. Although it was increasingly accepted for Yemeni women in Hamtramck to have careers and drive cars, many women in Huma’s generation—who arrived in Hamtramck as married adults—chose not to become wage earners. This was due to a constellation of socioeconomic and cultural factors involving a lack of educational opportunity, the value placed on the domestic role, and a fading, but still sharply felt, cultural stigma surrounding women’s employment.2 As discussed later,

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there was a marked increase in Hamtramck Yemeni women’s participation in the schools by about 2016, based on the deliberate recruitment efforts of administrators such as Yemeni American Jaleelah Ahmed. But back in 2008, Karima Haddadi, a middlle-aged mother of two who worked in the cafeteria of one of the city’s charter schools, explained:3 There are not many of the older Yemeni women in Hamtramck who are working besides me. But in Dearborn, you’ll find everybody [i.e., many Yemeni women] working. At my job, you will see that many of the women who are working there as teachers and in other jobs are Yemenis from Dearborn. I have one friend, she’s Yemeni from Dearborn, and she’s working to become an immigration lawyer. But when it comes to Hamtramck, the men go home and say to their families: “Oh, that Haddadi girl, she has no life. She is now driving, and working. Why is [her husband] letting her do that? She should stay home.”

Because both Hamtramck and Dearborn have sizable Yemeni populations, it was common for people to compare across the two places. As in Karima’s words above, often these comparisons contained an implicit or explicit critique of Yemenis in Hamtramck vis-à-vis their Dearborn counterpart, but never the opposite kind of critique. Karima described a climate in Hamtramck in which Yemeni women who work, like herself, are sometimes judged as “having no life” by other Yemenis. In these formulations, life for Hamtramck Yemeni women is centered in the home and in visiting networks, an arena of intimacy, sociability, and material exchanges that come in the form of gifts and shared childcare labor. For Yemeni men, learning English is key for advancing in their jobs and passing the citizenship exam, which enables the man to bring his wife and children on visas. Yemeni women who arrive in Hamtramck as married adults do not necessarily feel any immediate pressure to learn English, since they typically don’t work outside the home, and the reunification of families rarely depends upon their citizenship. For Yemeni women who come over on green cards as spouses, or for women who come as widows to live with their children’s families, the citizenship test can be put off indefinitely, as residency cards may be renewed. Thus, proficiency in English and attaining citizenship tend to be postponed for some married women

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as they focus on running a home and family. Due to these factors, older, married Yemeni women like Huma are often the only members of their households without English fluency and citizenship. For some Yemeni women I interviewed, the fact that they were not citizens like the rest of their families brought anxiety and dismay, especially when it came to organizing trips back and forth to Yemen. Even before the 2017 introduction of federal travel bans affecting Yemenis and and others from targeted Muslim-majority nations, it was well known that noncitizens faced additional surveillance, scrutiny, and even criminalization and could be barred from entry back into the US once they left for a trip to Yemen. Hamtramck Yemeni adult women’s literacy rates also affected the likelihood that they could attain driver’s licenses because of the written component of the test; in some families, there is also a cultural stigma attached to women’s driving. However, according to Huma’s daughter Aisha and others I interviewed, this was also changing. Aisha reported that since she and her sister, Maysan, had gotten their licenses, many friends and acquaintances had asked them to help prepare for the driving test, too. When I met them, Maysan was in her second year at a community college, and Aisha was in her first. The girls commuted to college several times a week, with one or the other behind the wheel. I met other young Yemeni women who were in college to pursue careers. With their family’s full support, Aisha planned to become an engineer, and Maysan a physical therapist. I also met several Yemeni women who had attained university-level and advanced degrees and were working as teachers, physicians’ assistants, and dental technicians, among other professions. In some respects, Yemeni women in Hamtramck match their career and educational aspirations to the extent to which they would engage in gender-integrated settings, leading to different variations and styles of civic purdah practiced within the community. Women tend to justify their participation in mixed-gender spaces with references to the exigencies of education and career. This reflects the ancient Greek-derived concept of phronesis—doing the right thing at the right time, or adjusting one’s behavior to meet the needs of one’s circumstances in a way that maintains one’s value structure—that Jouili (2015) develops with regard to how pious second-generation Muslim women in France and Germany organize their gender visibility. Yemeni women I met in Ham-

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tramck who had career aspirations or a desire to participate in institutions of higher learning practiced variations of civic purdah that allowed for a wider ambit of mobility and visibility, including driving, attending mixed-gender schools, and working in mixed-gender settings. On the other hand, women like Huma whose work was centered in the home tended toward a smaller scope of activity, although they did recognize the validity of their daughters’ choices to engage in a wider sphere concerning education and career.

Yemeni Interiors One afternoon at Huma’s house with Aisha and Maysan, we were watching a Mexican soap opera dubbed into Lebanese Arabic on a Syrian network via satellite. There was a knock at the door, and Aisha rose to pull back the edge of the curtain covering the front window and peer out. Seeing her teenage brothers on the front stoop, Aisha opened the front door a crack and positioned her body in front of the gap to block out their ability to see within the house. “Al- mara’ah hunā!” she told them: “that [unrelated] woman is here.” In response, the boys walked around the house to the back door, while Maysan walked over to the doorway between the front sitting room and the house’s middle room and drew the sitārah (curtain).4 I heard the brothers as they entered though the back, found a snack, and settled into the second living room, turning their TV to sports. Maysan nudged up the volume of our soap opera. If I had to use the bathroom, Aisha and Maysan had to clear the boys out of the middle room so that I could cross it, and I was discouraged from joining the sisters in the kitchen when male family members were present for the same reason. When I asked her about this kind of division in the home, Aisha explained: It’s like tradition: Women and men cannot see each other inside the house unless it’s like your brother, or your father, or your husband. It’s different, inside the house and outside the house. If it’s outside, and we are in our hijābs, we can talk to them, it’s OK. But once we get at home, even if we know them from the street, even if we are wearing our scarves inside, nobody wants to talk to you inside the house.

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Accordingly, although I visited Huma’s house many times over the course of a year and a half, I never interacted with her older sons within the home. However, I did interact frequently with Huma’s husband, Salah, who would briefly sit with us in the front room when I visited. When I asked my friends to explain these different standards, they explained that because I was “American” they knew I didn’t mind sitting with men. I did not push for an explanation about why it was allowed for me to sit with Huma’s husband but not her sons, because I was concerned that calling attention to this might unsettle the situation. Other Yemeni friends maintained the separation between all household men and me. For some, it was not a matter of negotiation or accommodating their “American” friend, but rather a strictly defined religious and cultural obligation within their households.5 The gender-separation obligation and various aspects of Yemeni home layout were explained in interviews as part of a Muslim way of living.6 Like Huma’s household, many Yemeni homes I visited had two living rooms, typically separated by a sitārah. Generally, the first living room was the front room, and the second, which might have been originally designed as a dining room, was the room next to the kitchen. When not being used by visitors, the two-salon space was flexible and served multiple purposes, such as dining, praying, and sleeping. For larger families, one or both living rooms might also serve as sleeping quarters if there wasn’t enough space for all family members in the bedrooms. Yemenis I knew usually gather around a sifrah (tablecloth) laid out on the floor of one of the two living rooms to have their meals. Once, when we were spreading out the sifrah before a meal, my friend Sajidah, a mother of two in her twenties, elaborated: In Yemen, you never know how many to expect for a meal, it can be many, many people. With sitting on the floor, there is always more room for another person. Also, with the sifrah, there is never anyone at the head of the table, we are all sitting in a circle, the same. Your people, you sit at tables that have a head and a foot, right? Muslims like to sit like this, on the floor, so there is no head and foot, all the places are equal.

Thus, these two rooms were used for congregating, eating, sleeping, and prayer. Almost all the Yemeni women I knew prayed five times daily

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within the home, while men often went to the mosque for some or all of the prayers, which I address in greater detail later on. If children at home needed attention, women in the household sometimes prayed in shifts. With these overlapping activities, the front room functioned as a prayer room for a considerable portion of the day.

Yemeni Women’s Sociability The flexibility of Yemeni interiors in accommodating gender separation is especially important because visiting is a highly valued part of the lives of Yemeni women I knew. Most were part of regular visiting and party circuits that included the houses of female neighbors, relatives, and friends. The home was almost always the site for socialization; as Paula Holmes-Eber (2003) noted among the Tunisian women she studied, the home was the privileged site for women’s leisure and relaxation and for establishing who was who within the community, mapping social worlds, and situating oneself in the place “where things happen” among one’s peer group. In her study of how co-residents of a housing society outside of Egypt blur lines between public and private spaces in their everyday lives, anthropologist Farha Ghannam describes the spatial dynamics of the sālah (living room), which echo the openness of the living rooms described above (2002, 96). Citing sociologist Barrington Moore (1985, 14), Ghannam identifies one commonly understood aspect of privacy as “an escape from the demands and burdens of social interaction” (97). But the living spaces in the Zawiya housing project that she studies, like those in the Yemeni enclave in Hamtramck, do not strictly operate as the sort of private spaices that are typically connoted by the English language concept of “privacy,”7 insofar as being at home does not remove one from social obligations due to the frequency of unrelated people coming and going between homes. Women in both the Zawiya and Hamtramck’s Yemeni communities make their living room spaces open to unannounced non-kin neighbors and friends, thus fostering a different style of hospitality—and a different connotation of privacy—than is normative in mainstream America. Yet as vibrant and involved as these Hamtramck Yemeni modes of sociability seemed, most Yemeni women described them as a shadow

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of social life in Yemen. Homes were generally more spacious in Yemen than in Hamtramck, allowing for larger, more regular gatherings. Some Yemeni women I knew felt the relatively small size of their homes literally cramped their style: Ebtisam: In Yemen, we had our own dīwān [sitting room] with a separate restroom, separate from men. We also call it majlis. So, one for women, one for men. We could have forty or fifty women in the dīwān, maybe more. The design of American houses, it’s very hard to invite people in. If men are visiting, women have to stay in a different room like the kitchen. It’s not easy for women to be moving around when there is a guest of [the] men. In Yemen, we could be free: separate restrooms, separate dīwān. Aisha: In Yemen, sometime the women have a whole different house from the men. We had a different house for women, in back of the main house, we called it a shaqqah [apartment]. Ebtisam: Socially, it was way different. In Yemen, we would visit every day. We would go out until maghrib [evening prayer] time, which would be around five o’clock. Every day we would be at a house, we would have tea, or pop, and whomever you are sitting next to, you just start up a conversation. And the next day would be another thing, at another house. They would say at the end of it, tomorrow we are going over [to] so-and-so’s house. But here mostly people are into their jobs, are into their schools, we hardly get to meet. Also there are not many people from each family. Here, visiting is mainly from around three and six, or wherever is ‘asr [afternoon prayer] and maghrib. But there it was longer.

Some women connected the ethics of involvement and care cultivated through Yemeni visiting to a sense of obligation indicated by their religion. One day, when I accompanied middle-aged student Fakheka home from school, we found her elderly mother engaged in the delicate work of assembling a sabāyā, a layered, flaky Yemeni bread. Fakheka washed her hands and joined her mother in stretching out the small spherical lumps of dough into dozens of paper-thin, twelve-inch rounds, coating them with oil, and stacking them. This sabāyā was for their Yemeni neighbor who had just given birth. I said it was nice of them to do this

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for her. Fakheka explained: “It’s not just that we are being nice. In our religion, we are responsible for our neighbors all around us, up to the seventh house in each direction.” Here Fakheka carefully set down the layer she was stretching and gestured around her, pointing north, east, south, and west. “So when one has a baby, we are there; or if one is sick, we are there, or for a wedding, we are also there with them.” I found that other Yemeni women I got to know referenced various Qur’an and hadith sources to explain their relationship to their neighbors. These networks of women gather for many occasions. A common, amused observation within the community goes, “We will take any excuse to have a party. [ . . . ] A birth, a graduation, an engagement, a trip to Yemen, a trip back from Yemen, a marriage, a new home, someone new moves in, anything.” Often these celebrations stretch into a series of interconnected visits that take place over several days or a week. Arriving one night at a Yemeni party with the teen daughters of a friend, we got to the door and one of them knocked, rapping the door with her closed fist. Another girl said, “No, that’s not how to do it, you need the Yemeni knock.” She proceeded to slam on the door with her open palm, hard, slap—slap—slap. “That’s the way Yemenis knock,” she said, turning to me. On entering, the girls took off their baltōs and piled them in big, black, glossy heaps over a chair and bed. The older women were dressed in sparkly gowns from Yemen (called gilabīyah and zanah), but the young were dressed in the latest youth fashion, either in American or Yemeni style (the latter known as a fustān—a fitted, contemporary floorlength gown). Generally, at parties like these, older women gather in one part of the house. Overturned food storage bins are used as percussion, and ghannī (songs) are performed, clever couplets improvised, traditional verses intoned. In the other room, the teenage girls feed the portable tape deck with the latest hits from Yemen, Egypt, and Lebanon, and dance. Once I drove up to such a party and could hear the house booming with the women’s music from all the way down the block: the steady drones of the older women’s singing voices coming from the first floor and an overlayer of bass notes from the recorded pop emanating from the second floor. How many people in Hamtramck would link this loud party music with the black-shrouded figures quietly making their way

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through the streets? I let myself into the house; there was no use even trying the Yemeni knock. My experience—feeling welcome to enter Yemeni women’s homes without knocking, as a non-Yemeni and a non-Muslim—contradicts the stereotype, expressed by the ESL teacher Ismeta and others in Hamtramck, that Yemeni women prefer or are compelled to isolate themselves from their non-Yemeni or non-Muslim neighbors. Indeed, during my time in Hamtramck, several people—including school officials, Yemeni men from Hamtramck and Dearborn, and social service workers— used the term “closed community” to describe the society of Yemeni women and to explain to me why my desire to conduct research among them would probably not yield good results. The term “closed,” in these instances, was linked to the idea that Yemeni women were “stuck” in the private world of their domestic spaces, exclusionary by nature and not welcoming to outsiders. But Yemeni women’s homes were not always linked to a North American mainstream understanding of privacy and other domestic concerns; rather, the home could accommodate different kinds of visitors for a variety of social and material exchanges. My first invitation to a Yemeni party had come from an ESL student named Bilqis, who was celebrating the purchase of her new home deep in the South End enclave. Bilqis’s family had been renting the house next door when the new home became available for about $20,000. The family quickly gathered the money and bought it with the help of loans or gifts from friends and extended family. Because of the security it offered and the freedom from rent payments, ownership of a new home occasioned particularly joyous celebration. Yemeni women packed the house, bringing a collective feast of ‘asīdah, chicken and rice, chopped salad, sabāyā with honey and egg, and other dishes. Three big sheets had been spread on the floors of the two interconnected living rooms. We sat around the edges, delicately scooping delicious food into our mouths with select fingers of the right hand, following Yemeni etiquette. About a year later, when Bilqis’s eldest daughter, Hafizah, and her husband and child were hospitalized after a car accident in Yemen, dozens of women came to sit with her throughout the day for about two weeks to wait for news. They gathered as soon as Bilqis’s husband left for work at 1 p.m. every day. On my first such visit, I stopped at Dunya’s house first and we walked together. Dunya, a young mother of two who

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had lived in Hamtramck since she was a child, had been the one to tell me the sad news. She advised me to bring money for Bilqis; when I asked her how much, she said just twenty dollars or so, since I had not known her long. She said other neighbors were bringing large sums of money, as much as they could afford. I witnessed significant amounts of money being collected and exchanged among Yemeni women other occasions, too. For example, money was gathered for Dunya’s sister Bushra to offset her luggage costs when she traveled to Yemen to get married; she also collected money from women in the community to circulate among their relatives, keeping careful track of the names and amounts. In the short walk between Dunya’s and Bilqis’s houses, I noticed Yemeni women coming from all directions. Two were crossing the street, holding small, foil-wrapped packages. Others came up from one of the well-worn back-alley paths that linked the houses. To the right and left, women were drawing near. Watching them, I remembered Fakheka’s deliberate gesture of signaling in all four directions to define the reach of her neighborhood. Here, in the street, women were creating with their bodies a unique gendered gathering space as a prelude to shared mourning. Bilqis’s daughter and granddaughter survived, but her son-in-law passed away. At the house, I asked Dunya if she knew all these women. Tilting her head in one direction, she said: “these, I don’t know, and inside there will be some more I don’t know. But these are the neighbors, everyone will come to a house of death [bait al-maut].” Inside, the space was lined with women, on couches, chairs, and the floor. When all the spaces against all the walls were occupied, a second row formed in front of that row. Within an hour, the two rooms were completely full; it was difficult to move, even to shift position. Women took turns comforting Bilqis and serving tea, sabāyā, and cookies to guests in her stead. Some collected money. By three o’clock, the women’s religious leaders from the nearby Hamtramck Yemeni mosque had arrived with a contingent of girl students, and they took turns reading aloud from the Qur’an, transferring modes of comportment, practices, and hierarchies of religious authority found at the mosque into the home space and making the home into a semi-public place of education and interchange. This was the third day of a packed house; it would continue for many more days.

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The physical experience of sitting in such close proximity with women in Dunya’s house was replicated in other experiences I had in mosque or halaqah groups and at parties. When sitting cross-legged on the floor, sometimes the woman next to me would stack her folded knee on top of my own to lessen the space between us and provide more room for others, and I would learn to do the same on both sides. Sitting together with knees and shoulders touching provided a sense of intimacy, trust, and continuity, and a sense of embodied solidarity. The way women sit knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder echoes body proxemics in lines of prayer. In Islamic tradition, the best prayer lines are the ones with the least space between the bodies of women as they together stand shoulder to shoulder, then kneel, prostrate, and rise again as one collective body.

Mosques and Halaqah Gatherings For some Muslim women in Hamtramck, going to the mosque is a major part of the week. They attend mosque for a range of different worship, learning, and social activities. This was especially the case for Yemeni women, since the two Yemeni mosques in the community that were functioning during my 2007–2009 period of intensive research had ample space set aside for women’s programming. By comparison, of the five Bangladeshi mosques in the community that were functioning during this period, only one had a dedicated space for women. For some Yemeni and Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck, attending the mosque is a novel feature of US life. Some Yemeni women I interviewed described the existence of mosques in urban areas in Yemen with space for women for Friday prayer; others had space for women’s inclusion in Ramadan or other special-occasion programs. Yet most women reported that they had never attended these special programs in their country of origin, similar to Bangladeshi women discussed later. Women’s patterns of mosque attendance are different from those of men, especially regarding attendance at the daily prayers. It is common for both Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslim men to attend the mosque for as many daily prayers as possible, with prayers at intervals from dawn until nighttime. In response to the call to prayer, men close up shops or leave work to attend. By contrast, most of the women I knew

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who attended the mosque did not aim to attend five times daily; rather, they prayed at home, alerted by the timers in the adhān (call to prayer) clocks. They tended to pray at the mosque only on Fridays, or when there was a class or activity that overlapped with prayer time. Collective prayer would punctuate those activities. Sister Widaad, who was mentioned earlier as the leader of one of the elder woman’s mosque group, explained the importance of women’s halaqah at the mosque: We teach women to read the Qur’an. In some cases, we teach them how to read Arabic first and then Qur’an. We also teach how to be a good wife, a good mother, a good neighbor, how to be kind. How to be a good person. They must learn to memorize the Qur’an. This is because when you pray, you have to know the Qur’an the right way. The Qur’an is part of prayer. If she reads the right way, she will have a reward from Allah; if she reads the wrong way, it will be less. If she has the words right, she will feel Allah in her heart. For older women, who can’t read Arabic, we teach them to memorize smaller sūrahs [verses]. There is also the method of teaching by tape and repetition. The important thing is to memorize, no matter how, by reading, or by listening.

Although she was very busy with her household, Nuha found time to make it to the mosque whenever she could. Like the great majority of Yemeni women I knew in Hamtramck, Nuha had never been to the mosque before coming to the US. In Yemen, she had engaged in collective prayer and some religious education at the home. When I asked her why it was important for her to pray at the mosque, she answered emphatically: It is the house of God [bait allāh]. That is why we go there. Praying in our own houses is good. But prayer there, together, is better. And there are women there who teach us about the religion. It is everything. It has given me my first chance to study Arabic. I never learned even the alphabet before. In Yemen, there was no chance for me. Without knowledge of Arabic, it is impossible to pray properly. It is beautiful [halā].

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Nuha here privileges the mosque over the home as a prayer site, since the mosque has the capacity to bring more people together, including women who are recognized as religious authorities and those who teach Arabic literacy. In her assertion that, for women, praying in the mosque together is better than praying at home alone, she knowingly or unknowingly contradicts the assertion of certain widely influential male Islamic authority figures who interpret scripture as asserting that, for women, praying at home is better.8 In Hamtramck, the mosque also provides a larger space for women’s socializing and community building than is available inside the home. These forms of association take place on the walk over to the mosque, as well as within the mosque around classes and during celebrations and activities. Moreover, as a source for learning Arabic and deepening one’s knowledge of Islam, the mosque also offers a leadership role to women more advanced in their studies. In the two Yemeni mosques I attended with women’s programming, there was a cadre of older women who held positions of authority and leadership among the women based on their advanced learning. They teach classes, run halaqah groups, and organize programs and activities for women within the mosque. In both the Yemeni and Bangladeshi communities of Hamtramck, older women have begun to prepare the next generation for this role by handing over some of the teaching and leadership responsibilities to young adult women. Some young women have taken very active roles in becoming religious leaders for the city’s Muslim youth. For example, a young Yemeni woman named Nabeela, who worked full-time in one of Hamtramck’s Muslim-majority charter schools, led a young women’s halaqah that met every week in her home or the home of one of the members. Nabeela founded this group with a close Yemeni friend named Manal. For a couple of years, this group had met at Nabeela’s or Manal’s house every Saturday afternoon to listen to a religious sermon written by Nabeela or Manal, discuss Islam, socialize, and hold group prayer. The young women also used this time to organize collective charitable and volunteer work. Nabeela describes how a university education in Islamic studies at Wayne State University encouraged her to develop an awareness of the ummah ideal to unite Muslims across race, ethnicity, and class lines.9

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The group she and Manal started originally consisted of four or five Yemeni girls and slowly grew to several dozen. During these early stages, Nabeela, who was known and respected in the community for her university degree in Islam, was invited by a Bangladeshi young woman named Tajlia to speak at a young women’s Eid gathering and celebration at the Bangladeshi-majority al-Falah mosque. Tajlia mentioned Nabeela’s halaqah group for young women when she introduced Nabeela, and some of the young women from that group, including Tajlia herself, started attending Nabeela’s group. Word of this halaqah group then spread, so that a Bosnian young woman, an African American revert,10 and a Somalian young woman began to attend, as well. Nabeela described the multiethnic nature of her halaqah as something that she greatly valued—and also as an indicator of how “things are changing” in Hamtramck: I love our group, because it just felt like nobody is different, we are all just gathered to sit and listen and enjoy each other and something beneficial. Because it’s not that different, the experiences we all have. I think the different [ethnic Muslim] communities in Hamtramck used to be more separated. I think it’s changing now. You see it in the halaqah and that’s a great thing, because it’s a step forward.

Women’s study circles, whether in the mosque or the home, are figured as part of a continuum, presenting a linked, multisited arena for women across ethnic and generational lines to develop their devotional practice. The mosque connects with the home, offering tools that will enhance women’s home-based prayer and learning practices with more knowledge and community. Likewise, the home provides a place for women to improve their prayer based on what they learn at the mosque and to disseminate these lessons to friends and family. The creation of designated spaces within the mosques for women’s activities—which might take place strictly within the home in Yemen or Bangladesh—exemplifies the negotiation of public versus private space that civic purdah implies. In fact, the mosque reinforces civic purdah: it offers a semi-public place in which unrelated women come together in gender-separated groups, thus enhancing their connection with one another, as well as the respect they garner vis-à-vis their families and communities as they gain further expertise in their religion. As an in-

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stitution, the mosque mediates the relationship between women leaders and students, selecting them for employment and organizing the space and timing for their classes. In this way, women’s gender-separated groups constitute a form of civic purdah that bridges private and public modes of association, combines embodied and locational practices, and expands networks of association and exchange in the city.

Streets and Stores As I noticed on my first walk home from school with the ESL students, Yemeni women in Hamtramck tend to travel in groups as much as possible and team up for daily activities and errands. Some of the Yemeni women I got to know were very businesslike about traversing city spaces, walked quickly in a tight formation, and spoke to one another in hushed tones.11 Once, as I walked back from a mosque study group with a group of young women, I responded to a comment one had made, and no one answered. Several gave me warning looks, while the girl next to me held my gaze for a moment and then darted her eyes back and forth to a nearby group of Yemeni men. This took place near the front of the corner store on the corner of Joseph Campau and Goodson, right next to the Yemen Café’s original location. I broke off mid-comment. We turned the corner, and a few yards later, conversation resumed. Later, Aisha explained: Yes, you are right, you are supposed to be a little quiet. And the reason is because of Yemeni tradition. You are not supposed to be seen all the time in the streets, and when you are out you don’t want to be the center of attention. Especially when it’s women alone. And this is the traditional belief. It’s not an Islamic belief. But even in Islam, some people say, you should try to have a male relative, we call it mahram, walking with you. It’s just for her protection. It’s not strict. I do it sometimes, I bring my brother if I can. But if he’s not there, I go alone. For the Yemenis, if you go alone, they will look at you, they will start talking maybe. This is why we have this.

According to Aisha’s explanation, some element of Yemeni culture discourages women from drawing attention to themselves in public spaces.

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This tendency is undergirded by a belief that in order to meet standards of piety, it is most appropriate for women to be accompanied by a mahram, if possible, when they go out in public. Aisha’s friend Ebtisam pointed out that she felt there to be more pressure on her to bring a mahram in Hamtramck than there was in Sana‘a: Sana‘a is the place for shopping for everybody. Every street has a big market. The women would spend all our time in the sūq [market]. In the morning, we shopped for food for the day. In the evening, we shopped for clothes. For occasions like parties we shopped morning and afternoon. Here we don’t go around by ourselves as much. Here everything is by car. You can’t get around here. The family trusts more in Yemen for you to go to the sūq yourself. Family is going to go with you here. It’s like: What is this strange place? Who are these strange people?

As reflected in Aisha’s analysis, as well as my observations about everyday life norms and standards, the cultural and religious strictures on women walking in public were flexible and often improvised in order to manage unanticipated intrusions from outsiders. However, some women in the Yemeni enclave believe that their embodied practices are familiar enough to non-Muslim co-residents that intrusions from the latter would be minimal. Indeed, this level of comfort—walking around in gender-separated groups unhindered by the anxiety that non-Muslim neighbors might address them or interact with them in uncomfortable ways—is an example of a successful space-making practice. Here, women perceive that they have managed to convey to their Hamtramck co-residents a complex set of messages and meanings, and corresponding standards and boundaries, to such an extent that they do not anticipate that their way of moving through the city—even though it is different from the mainstream—will be challenged or interrupted by non-Muslims in the course of a typical day. In spite of this relative sense of comfort with non-Muslim coresidents, many Yemeni women I knew had a locational practice, whether traveling in groups or alone, of avoiding public spaces that might bring them into close proximity with Yemeni men. I often accompanied Yemeni women as they ran errands and enjoyed the city,

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and I observed single-sex groups of girls and young women that walked to school together. Even among the Yemeni women who went out alone most frequently, there was a tendency to avoid the Yemeni-owned businesses that were scattered among the others along the southern end of Joseph Campau. Aisha explained: I don’t want to go into those shops. They start looking at you. Oh—a Yemeni girl in our shop. And this is why some of those stores near the Algazali mosque, I don’t like those places, they are all gossipy and stuff. In Sana‘a, it’s fine, you could go anywhere you want. But here, it’s different. Here, it’s because the people know each other.

The pattern that Aisha describes, of favoring public spaces in which she and others might maintain their anonymity, represents a second type of gender separation superimposed upon the first. Within the public spaces of the streets, women enjoy an assumed anonymity, which may be enhanced by wearing the face veil, as detailed in the next section. However, a Yemeni woman among unrelated Yemeni men may be recognized by the sound of her voice, the style of her bālto, or the shape of her eyes. The avoidance of Yemeni men’s public spaces, such as corner stores, cafés, or other unfamiliar spaces, functions as another negotiation of privacy in an otherwise public space.12 The tendency of Yemeni women to avoid stores owned by Yemeni men seemed to hold true within the South End business district and within the knot of stores surrounding the Mu‘ath bin Jabel mosque just over the border with Detroit, but loosened after that. For example, some Yemeni women I knew frequented the grocery store Al-Haramain International Foods on Caniff, owned by Yemeni men from Dearborn. Some Yemeni women reported feeling comfortable shopping at Yemeni-owned stores located on the other end of the city or in Dearborn.13 It seems that these stores are not considered “too close to home.” They were far enough away from the Yemeni enclave zone to count as legitimate, traversable public spaces for Yemeni women. Many new stores owned by Yemenis have opened along Joseph Campau in the past few years, including ones selling clothing, furniture, groceries, and household supplies geared toward the Yemeni population. I have not yet had the chance to analyze patterns of gendered interaction in these new stores.

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Yemeni Dress Civic purdah is facilitated by modest dress, an embodied practice through which women signal their ideologies concerning gender distance. Yemeni women’s dress typically consists of the long, loose, black, one-piece baltō hung over their clothes. It is accompanied by a hijāb of any color, but typically black or a muted tone. Some Yemeni women also wear the lithāmah. Aisha explained: It is part of the religion. YOU have to wear loose clothes. And you are not supposed to show your body to other people, other than to your husband and your family. We call it ihtirām al-nafs, respect for yourself. You don’t have to show everything to everybody. It’s distracting, it’s not good. That’s what we traditionally believe. I mean, if you think about it, you dress proudly. In Islam, we call it, scarf, you have to cover your hair. Some people say your face too, but not a lot of people agree on this. So, like you see, most of the Muslim people, they don’t cover their face. And some do. So they didn’t agree on one thing. But they agreed that you dress proudly. You dress with the scarf. You dress loose, your dress should be loose and not tight enough where you can see everything on your body.

Aisha and other Yemeni women I interviewed dressed to signal pride in the Muslim self. Others talked about modest dress as a means of conveying a message about one’s piety and self-respect to deflect unwanted attention from men. For some Yemeni woman, the muted color of the dress was also an important feature of modesty. Ebtisam explained: “In Islam, it’s just supposed to be a dark color that doesn’t attract attention, but it doesn’t have to be black. It’s just a cultural thing.” The women I knew often obtained their bāltos directly from Yemen, either shipped by friends or brought for them in heavy suitcases. Sometimes they purchased these garments in one of the Islamic clothing shops in Dearborn or at the small bālto shop in the Hamtramck enclave. Since 2009, many more shops have opened on Joseph Campau that sell bāltos and other clothing preferred by Yemeni families. Along with the bālto, Yemeni women utilized a specific form of veiling in which all the hair, the ears, and the neck are covered. This type of

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veiling is associated with a “modern” Muslim form of veiling that some scholars refer to as al-ziyy al-Islāmī (Islamic dress).14 Wearing a headscarf in accordance with al-ziyy al-Islāmi references a global Islamic standard recognized by certain Muslims across the world, rather than a form of veiling associated with one particular culture. For Aisha and others, this form of veiling is strictly defined and excludes the veiling styles she sees practiced by some of her Bangladeshi friends: Some of the Bengali [Bangladeshi] people they don’t cover their hair, and some of them, I don’t know if they call it hijāb. If you were asking an imam from Yemen, or from Arabic countries, I don’t think that they are going to consider what some of those Bengalis are wearing as hijāb. Because what we call hijāb, your whole body has to be covered, and your hair.

While some Yemeni women question the legitimacy of some Bangladeshi women’s head coverings when they fall short of al-ziyy al-Islāmī standards, the reverse is also true. Some Bangladeshi women joke about Yemeni women’s excessiveness—adding the bālto and lithāmah to the hijāb, the Yemeni preference for black—by good-naturedly calling these women bhūt (“ghosts” in Bangla). Even when Muslim women disagree about the correct standards for dress, they share an interpretive repertoire informed by Islam and familiarity with global Islamicate culture so that the meaning of a certain veiling style is at least partially comprehensible to the other. Aisha and Maysan both liked to experiment with different veiling styles in a wide range of colors. Aisha was known for her ingenuity with the scarf, sometimes pinning a red plastic flower into one of its side folds or tying it up in elaborate styles inspired by televised or internet images of Arab fashion shows from Dubai or other countries: As long as it covers all the hair it can be done in any way you want. Some people say, “Why are you wearing your scarf different? It’s going to attract people more, it’s gonna bring more attention, and people will talk about you, and this is bad.” I’m trying to help Islam in this. If people see me with the same scarf every day, they will say, “What is this! She doesn’t change [her clothes]?” Or they’ll say, “I’d rather not be Muslim, I wouldn’t want to wear the same

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thing every day!” So, if you bring different designs, different colors, different styles, and enjoy it, you show how you really enjoy your life, being Muslim. It’s not like: “I don’t care about myself or my life, as long as I go to heaven after I die.” Islam is not that strict. And I am saying with my scarf, don’t be strict with Islam.

For Aisha, dressing proudly meant dressing according to a kind of Islamrelated modesty, but it also meant dressing in a way that showcases one’s personality, individuality, and zest for life. The expression of both piety and fashion sense were important for her as an American Muslim trying to negotiate society while wearing an often-stigmatized article of clothing. Aisha’s explanation that she was “helping Islam” through wearing her hijāb in a manner that will appeal to non-Muslims reflects Jouili’s analysis of the representational burden that second-generation pious French and German young women accept as a form of da‘wā related to maslahah, defined as devotion to the common good (2015, 138–40). According to several women I interviewed, over the past few decades, the lithāmah has grown in popularity among Yemeni women in Hamtramck.15 For some, like Sajidah, Nuha’s daughter-in-law, the lithāmah represents a highly meaningful component of public dress related to piety and ethics. The lithāmah came up in discussing her education and work history. Sajidah’s father was a prominent doctor in Aden who owned several pharmacies and helped found a hospital. Alongside her other siblings, Sajidah had pursued higher education in Yemen, earning her degree in pharmacy; had she remained in Aden, she figured she would have worked at one of her father’s pharmacies. Her husband was also a pharmacist, with a US-earned degree. Yet neither of them worked as pharmacists in the US, as they had hoped. Sajidah’s husband, unable to find work in his chosen field, had a quick succession of jobs in factories, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. Sajidah had not even tried to get a job related to pharmacy or to pursue education that would allow her to practice in the US in a way commensurate with her skills. When I asked her why she didn’t look for work as a pharmacist, she took her finger and slowly traced a line across the middle of her face, back and forth, from ear to ear. “No one would hire me at a pharmacy with this,” she said, based on stories that she heard from friends in similar situations. When I asked her if she would be willing to go

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without the lithāmah during work in the backroom of a pharmacy, so she wouldn’t interface directly with customers, she shook her head. It would be impossible for her. She had been wearing the face veil in public and in the presence of unrelated men since she was a young teen. She said that she was not going to compromise what her religion taught her to do for anything. While most of the Yemeni women I met in Hamtramck hailed from rural villages in north and central Yemen, Sajidah came from a relatively wealthy, urban family in Aden. She had gained fluency in English while still in Yemen, she had a driver’s license, and she was willing to mix with unrelated men in a professional setting. The only thing stopping her from pursuing a professional career was the perceived stigmatization she would confront as a niqaabi (woman who wears the face veil). Similarly to Sajidah, Umat Rahman, a married woman who had arrived in Hamtramck from Yemen about ten years before I met her, wore the lithāmah whenever she was in mixed company. She explained the face veil as directly connected to Muslim forms of modesty: As I told you, because they think your face is where the beauty is mostly. And they say, the face tells everything. And if they see already your face, that’s it, it’s like they have seen the whole body. This is what they say, and that’s why the Muslims wear the lithāmah.

Other Yemeni women were more casual about the lithāmah and attributed both cultural and religious meaning to it. Huma rarely wore the face veil in her Yemeni village, yet she did so with more frequency and regularity in Hamtramck. She explained that she began wearing the face veil more often when she noticed that most of the Yemeni women her age in ESL classes and at mosque programs wore it. She explained that customs regarding the lithāmah changed from village to village, but in Hamtramck women liked to do things together. Therefore, for Huma and some other Yemeni women in Hamtramck, adopting the face veil was a form of assimilation to a minority community. Huma added that the lithāmah was a “good thing,” although not required: it helped fulfill ideals of modesty and allowed women to surpass religious expectations. Although Huma habitually wore the lithāmah when she went out, she didn’t put pressure on her daughters to do so, and they almost never

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did. I saw Aisha and Maysan wear the face veil on just one occasion. This was when I accompanied them to a banquet hall in Hamtramck to accept a scholarship award from a Yemeni American organization. They explained to me that they were wearing the lithāmah because they knew a lot of Yemeni men would be there. The self-conscious collective production of standards for appropriate dress represents an important aspect of civic purdah. Here, the lithāmah has become attractive to Huma in Hamtramck in part because she is showing solidarity with others who wear it. By making the lithāmah more popular it becomes less remarkable, and therefore individuals who wear it will not stand out as much.

Dress and Stigma Some Yemeni women I knew who regularly wore the face veil in Hamtramck got into the habit of taking it off past the city borders. I first noticed this tendency in Dunya, when she called me from a hospital in Detroit, about ten miles outside of Hamtramck. That morning, she and her husband had taken their two children there for some tests, and they had already been waiting several hours for the results. Now the husband had to leave the hospital for work, and she called to see if I could drive her and the children home. When I got to the hospital, she was waiting for me outside with one child on each arm. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t wearing her lithāmah. It was the first time I had seen her without it outside of the home. After she arranged herself in the back seat with the children, she laughed at my surprise and explained: No, I don’t wear lithāmah outside of Hamtramck. No one will know what it is, and everyone will stare at me. Also, if I wear it in the hospital, the doctors and nurses won’t treat me as well. A lot of us take off the lithāmah once we are outside of Hamtramck. When we are away from the city, no one knows us anyway, there is no point to hide our faces!

Then Dunya related the first of many versions of a cautionary tale that circulated among different groups of Yemeni women in Hamtramck. A Yemeni woman from Hamtramck went with her husband to a fruit and vegetable market called Randazzo’s. Although Randazzo’s is

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past 14 Mile Road—in other words, in a place where, in Dunya’s words, “there are no Arabs”—the woman had made the half-hour trip to shop there because she had heard about the superior quality of their produce. She was wearing her lithāmah like she normally would, waiting on the checkout line behind her husband, when an “American” (meaning white) woman got in line behind her. When the American saw the Yemeni woman in her black bālto and lithāmah, she shoved her, yelling: “I can’t just stand here next to you! My son died in Iraq. You people killed him.” Dunya told me how the Yemeni woman’s husband tried to calm the American woman down, but ultimately couldn’t, even after he carefully explained that that they had never been in Iraq. They just got out of line and left the store. “That’s why a lot of us won’t wear the face veil out of Hamtramck or Dearborn. It’s not safe for us there,” Dunya explained. In all versions of this cautionary tale, it was the face veil, not the hijāb, that was blamed in these stories as the article that provoked fear, hatred, and discrimination. As mentioned earlier, a common theme among Yemenis in their narratives about Hamtramck was a particular feeling of safety and belonging in the city and the idea of the city as an oasis from discrimination and Islamophobia. Significantly, I first heard the term ‘and al-‘arab (place/home belonging to the Arabs) when interviewing a young married woman named Fawzah about her patterns of travel around the city. I asked her to draw me a map of the places where she felt safe walking around on her own. Foregoing the pen and pad and echoing Fakheka’s definition of the circle of care in her neighborhood, she gestured to the right and left, indicating all the directions around her house, which was located in the western part of the enclave. “This whole place is ‘and al‘arab. This is where the Yemeni people live, so of course I feel safe here. There are always people in their houses, women are watching by the windows, we feel safe here and watch out for each other.” Here, Fawzah’s words help us understand how ‘and al-‘arab is achieved by the embodied and locational practices of Yemeni women. She experiences herself as living within “the place of the Arabs,” even though the Hamtramck Yemeni enclaves are heterogeneous, with African American, Bangladeshi, and white families mixed in among the Yemeni majority. Fawzah’s sense of safety echoes Aisha’s sense of comfort in adhering to Muslim practices in Hamtramck, even among non-Muslim co-residents.

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I found that some Yemenis valued Hamtramck deeply, even young, successful Yemenis. When I asked Nuha, a young teacher at a charter school in Hamtramck, whether her future plans including moving away from Hamtramck, she told me: You know what outsiders, like people from Dearborn call this place, where the Yemenis live in this city? They call it “Hamtrash.” Don’t think we don’t know about it. Because we don’t have all the nice things some other cities have. But we have our people here, we have our schools, we have our mosques and we are free to live the way we want. So, no, I don’t think this is “Hamtrash.” I think this is our home.

When I asked some young people whom I knew—like the high school students I met in halaqah groups—about the future, their plans also centered mainly on Hamtramck and return visits to or residency in Yemen, rather than moving to Dearborn or other more affluent parts of metro Detroit. Some members of the community have noted the tendency of Yemenis to stay in Hamtramck, or to move between Hamtramck and Yemen, without expanding out to the suburbs. This tendency stands in contrast to the way some other immigrant groups, such as Bangladeshis, Albanians, and Bosnians, see Hamtramck, with its high crime rate, failing schools, and low property values as a kind of “gateway city,” a place to live until they become more established. The Yemeni pattern of coming to Hamtramck and staying there contrasts most notably these days with that of the city’s Bangladeshis, many of whom are moving on to the suburbs once they become established. In the years since the time of my residence and intensive daily research in Hamtramck (2007–9), a couple of the women I was close to did move away to more affluent cities in Michigan, but the majority remained in Hamtramck, taking trips back to Yemen. However, as discussed earlier, this pattern of traveling back and forth from Yemen has been curtailed sharply in recent years due to the civil war in Yemen that began in 2011, and the Trump travel ban. It is not Yemeni exclusivity in certain enclaves of Hamtramck that lends a sense of safety and makes it the “places of the Arabs”; rather, it is the fact that there are enough Yemenis in the area that the group— and the women within it—has collectively carved out its own place, so

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that these women perceive that their ways of doing things appear unremarkable to their neighbors. Through their embodied and locational civic purdah practices, women have established what they experience as recognition and a sense of safety within the borders of the city that they may not always experience in other places.

Yemeni School Withdrawal Some Yemeni families in Hamtramck withdraw their daughters from school once they reach adolescence. A controversial practice, it is heavily criticized both within and outside of Hamtramck’s Yemeni community. Since mixed-gender secondary education facilities are not a common feature of the rural communities from which most Hamtramck Yemeni families originate, sending adolescent girls into a mixed-gender setting goes against some of the logics of everyday gender division that are practiced as a sign of morality and status in Yemen (Alwujude 2000; Aswad 1994; Sarroub 2005). Some families consider Yemeni girls’ attendance at mixed-gender schools in their preteen and teenage years as a risk to their reputations, which could interfere with their ability to make good marriages. Some Yemeni teenagers actually withdraw from high school for marriage.16 Furthermore, there was the general perception of Hamtramck’s public high school as a challenging environment due to its size and reputation for student fighting as discussed below. Along with Horizons alternative high school, certain charter schools presented an attractive alternative to some Yemeni and Bangladeshi families, due to their smaller size and the higher concentrations of Muslims among their students, faculty, and staff. Bilqis’s daughter Lubna was the first school-age Yemeni teenager I came to know in Hamtramck who was not attending any school. Lubna was sixteen years old when I first got to know her, the oldest among Bilqis’s five children who had come to the US. She was fourteen when the family first arrived, and though they had sent all the other children to the public elementary school just a few doors down from their house, Lubna was past elementary school age and thus not eligible to attend this neighborhood school with her siblings. Instead, she stayed at home with her mother and youngest siblings. Her younger sister, Kawthar, was allowed to move on to middle school after graduating from elementary

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school at age thirteen. After I got to know the family, I began asking Bilqis and Lubna why Lubna had never been enrolled at school, while Kawthar was. They both explained that it was because Lubna was needed at home. I brought up the issue of Lubna’s schooling with Dunya, who explained that since the family was trying to arrange a marriage for Lubna in the next few years, they were particularly concerned about her reputation.17 For example, she explained, there would be bad consequences both for Lubna’s and the family’s reputation if Lubna was seen walking around with male students or if she was involved in any kind of disciplinary incident. According to Dunya, it didn’t matter that some of the potential spouses for Lubna were in another country, as “there is a gossip chain extending from Hamtramck all the way back to Yemen.” Dunya told me that gossip that might injure a girl’s reputation travels particularly fast, and news about a girl’s misbehavior potentially could travel “from Hamtramck High School, to Ibb, and back to Hamtramck” so quickly that the girl’s family might find out about it from extended family in Yemen before they even heard from the school. Dunya further explained that Kawthar was allowed to go to middle school because she was enrolled in an “Arab” charter school recently opened in a neighborhood near their own, with a significantly better reputation among Yemeni families than the public middle school. The charter school was not yet open when the family first arrived. If it had been, Dunya speculated, Lubna might have been allowed to attend. In explaining her perception of Lubna’s situation, Dunya recounted that she herself had been in a position similar to Lubna’s as a teenager. She arrived in Hamtramck when she was five years old, and the family had enrolled her in a nearby public elementary school. Dunya had gone on to the public middle school. As she was finishing her first year of middle school, her father passed away after a long illness. Her brother, a young man just out of his teens, took over some of the decisionmaking capacities that had been held by the father as the head of the family. While her father had been enthusiastic about Dunya pursuing her education, the family now felt it was on rocky ground socially and financially. The idea of Dunya remaining in school caused too much stress for her older brother. If something happened at school

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to compromise her reputation, the family would have less chance to recover. The brother withdrew Dunya from the school. She recounted the story with regret: “no girls ever want to be taken out of school early, they all want to go to school,” she explained. “But this is how it goes sometimes.” In her late teens, Dunya went to Yemen, accompanied by her family, and secured what she believed to have been a particularly good marriage to a university-educated Yemeni man (in Sana‘a) who was fluent in English. Although Dunya had been in school until seventh grade, her reading level was quite low; she sometimes had trouble reading package directions on food items or the driver’s instruction manual, which impeded her ability to get a license. Even though she was an American citizen and had been educated in the US, when Dunya’s Yemeni husband arrived, he was thus more literate in English than she was. Dunya was highly motivated to improve her literacy, especially by helping her children on their homework when they reached school age. She and her husband planned to keep both their male and female children in school for as long as financially possible, and Dunya particularly emphasized their shared expectation that both son and daughter would finish high school and attend college. I spoke with several other Yemeni women who were certain that education leading to careers would be open to their daughters. The attitudes of these women and other Yemeni community members reflect a shift in which it was becoming more normative to expect daughters to complete high school and move on to careers. As reflected in the stories that follow, the Yemeni young women who were attending high school and college during the time of my fieldwork represented the pioneers of this change. Later on, I will discuss the experiences of Bangladeshi young women in Hamtramck schools. This push among some Yemeni and Bangladeshi young women to pursue their education through high school and college while maintaining norms of gendered comportment represents further embodied and locational dimensions of civic purdah. Continuing on at the high school allows young women to interface with a broad range of others and prepares them for entry into civil life. These stories, presented here and later in the book, detail how Yemeni and Bangladeshi women enact civic purdah as a part of their secondary education experiences.

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Hamtramck High School’s Yemeni Young Women About a year after arriving in Hamtramck, Aisha had mixed feelings about transferring from Horizons, a small, well-regarded alternative high school for ESL students, to Hamtramck High School, based on its reputation among her friends: “They were saying that Hamtramck High School is bad, that there is a lot of fighting.” These perceptions were not held by the Yemeni community alone. Situated in a large brick building near the center of the city, as the city’s only public high school, Ham High serves nearly one thousand students. During the time I was in Hamtramck, descriptions of intensive levels of high school student fighting within and just outside of school grounds, and police involvement in these incidents, would periodically appear on the front page of the local Hamtramck Citizen and other venues, like the Detroit News. When I first learned about fighting at the high school, I assumed that the tensions would relate, at least in part, to ideologies related to antiMuslim sentiment.18 Yet Muslim high school students, alumni, teachers, and administrators with whom I spoke rarely attributed the tensions to religious intolerance. Rather, those I interviewed consistently asserted a sense of Muslim centrality and belonging in the school, one that similarly reflects the sense of comfort and safety Aisha and Fawzah found in Hamtramck as a whole. According to Sarwar, a recent Bangladeshi American alumna: Basically, religion was never a hot issue in the high school. Because most of us over there are Muslim. If you point out every ten people in a row, like nine out of ten of them are going to be Muslim, or it seems that way sometimes anyway. And so if you picked on us Muslims, then you are going to be in trouble, because we are the majority and you guys are not. Like we had Bengalis, we had Pakistani Muslims, we had Arab Muslims, we had Bosnian Muslims, we had Albanian Muslims, so we were kind of like overcrowded with Muslims.

Although the ratio Sarwar asserts is too high an estimate, Muslim centrality and the denial of any sense of scapegoating or marginalization was a consistent theme in other interviews with Muslims and

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non-Muslims in the school context. Despite its strong Muslim presence, Aisha, like other Yemeni young women, had been warned to steer clear of Hamtramck High School due to its reputation for fighting. Yet she wished to attend it rather than a charter school. She valued the public high school experience as a mode of inclusion into mainstream young adult life. Earlier, we saw how Aisha and some of her friends engaged in individual and collective practices of civic purdah at Hamtramck High School to mark their modes of social engagement as distinct from the forms of cross-gender interaction normative at the high school. Aisha describes how part of these strategies involved limiting conversation with male peers: In Islam, we believe men and women can’t really go together alone for too long. So, we don’t really sit with guys or walk with them [ . . . ]. If you want to talk to them about work, and there is a point where if the conversation starts to go on to something else, you just have to go change the subject. I have these red lines, and once I feel that these lines are being crossed, I have to get out of it. If this happens, then next time I see him, I’m just not going to talk to him, just hi, bye, from far away.

In one of Aisha’s earlier comments, she described using her headscarf to convey the message that Islam did not have to be as strict as others make it out to be. Aisha explained how she can use the scarf to facilitate appropriate engagement with her male peers, as another way to show that Islam is not that strict.19 In terms of cross-gender interaction, she did not wish to be so strict with herself as to appear unfriendly or to disallow appropriate forms of cross-gender relationships. What resulted was a constant process of negotiation, experimentation, and self-correcting, in which she learned how to navigate contact with unrelated male peers at the high school to maintain her own comfort levels without unnecessarily cutting herself off from positive and appropriate kinds of interaction. These strategies draw on both embodied and locational dimensions of civic purdah. They involve certain ways of interacting with male peers that take place exclusively within the boundaries of the school, and not, for example, on the street.

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Besides being vigilant in conversation, another form of embodied civic purdah for Aisha and other Muslim students concerns negotiating casual physical contact in school: A guy comes to you, or a teacher, and wants to shake hands with you. We have to explain: we don’t shake hands, we just talk without shaking hands! But it’s more than that, there is other stuff too. It’s like sometimes someone is standing next to you, and you are talking and they touch you over here, on the arm [she demonstrates a friendly, jostling touch]. So at this point you have to explain to him: we don’t do that. A friend of mine, she got into an argument with a teacher over this at Hamtramck High School. She was sitting at the computer and you know how sometimes, the computer teacher is going to come around from the back, and he’s gonna touch you here [demonstrates tapping on the back] or here [demonstrates guiding my hand with her hand over the keys]. And she had to tell him, stop! You are not supposed to do that, it’s not allowed.

Casual touches—handshakes, collegial pats on the shoulder or back, or a male teacher’s guiding hand as he positions a student’s hand correctly over the keyboard—occur so regularly and frequently among male and female students and teachers in the US school context that they often are carried out unconsciously and taken for granted. Yet these forms of physical contact can be considered compromising. It’s another act of civic purdah for the young women to educate the teacher or the other students about how to behave with them. When interacting with non-Muslims who are unfamiliar with these strategies of proximity and contact, some Muslim men and women have adopted the convention of putting their hands over their hearts and smiling warmly instead of accepting a handshake, in an effort to express friendliness without engaging in behavior that is against their comfort levels. Aisha describes one such experience, at her graduation: But sometimes I do shake hands. At the graduation, Principal Victor was handing us certificates. And I just did this from far away [gestures to put hand over heart] so by the time I came to him, he knew that he didn’t have to shake my hand. But, in the park, afterward, everyone was

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crowded around, and shaking hands, and I didn’t know what to do, so I shook hands. Yeah . . . [trails off in a way that expresses both frustration and humor]. Although . . . I told myself [laughing], I’m not gonna shake hands, I’m gonna tell them I can’t, or I’m gonna move a little and stand behind them, or whatever. But when the time came I just couldn’t, I was already there, and I had to shake their hands. But it was all right.

Aisha noted that Principal Victor was already aware, from previous experiences, that some Muslim girls would not shake his hand, so he was prepared for this, and everything went smoothly. But when she joined her fellow graduates and teachers in the park after the graduation ceremony was over, she did not have time to communicate her intentions clearly enough to refuse gracefully the extended hands of her peers. On this last day, she felt a few handshakes in the park were not a big deal. Within this generally positive narrative about her experience at Hamtramck High School, Aisha regretted that she “never joined anything” at the high school and “never stayed after school.” With some exceptions, there was a general tendency for young Yemeni women to avoid after-school activities and clubs as part of a system of regulating their activities, minimizing their visibility and contact with males. Also, like the older generation did at the end of the ESL class, they tried to leave together so that they could walk home with groups of female friends after school. Aisha sometimes described these kinds of self-imposed limitations with a sense of frustration and regret. In comparison to young Yemeni women, some young Yemeni men at Hamtramck High School also limited their interactions with girls as part of their cultivation of piety and self-discipline. Yet other Yemeni boys in Hamtramck dated freely and openly with girls across racial and ethnic spectra. The notable exception to this was a strong proscription against Yemeni boys dating or even forming friendships with Yemeni girls. Yemeni women recognize Yemeni men’s networks as representing a public-within-a-public that they wish to avoid, since they would be unable to preserve their anonymity within it. Additionally, Yemeni boys—especially brothers, cousins, or members of extended kin networks of Yemeni girls at the high school—were known for keeping tabs on their female Yemeni relations. Both male

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and female Yemeni high school students and alumni noted the way that Yemeni boys were quick to intervene or report home if they felt that the girls were engaging in inappropriate behaviors.20 Although some Yemeni girls recognized external pressure and the sense of surveillance as factors influencing the high school scene, Aisha and others whom I got to know placed far greater emphasis on their own internally generated sense of self-discipline as the primary motivator shaping the repertoire of activities and behaviors that they practiced in the school context.

Charter Schools Although many Yemeni girls have successfully employed civic purdah practices at Hamtramck High School to negotiate modes of cross-gender interaction in accordance with their beliefs, some young Yemeni and Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck prefer to participate in alternative educational milieus, such as the local parochial school described previously, Al-Ikhlas, and charter schools in the area organized and patronized by Muslim majorities. These parochial and charter schools were perceived by some Muslim students, parents, and school personnel I interviewed as offering Muslim students a greater measure of recognition and support when it comes to dealing with gendered distance-setting. During my research, there were three charter schools in Hamtramck and at its immediate borders with Detroit that Muslim families referred to as “Muslim schools” or “Arab schools,” based in part on the high concentration of Muslims among their founders, teachers, staff, and student bodies.21 Like the Islamic private school, these schools catered to the preferences of Muslim families by scheduling half-day Fridays, providing halal fare, and offering Arabic language instruction. In interviews, some students, families, and school personnel described the teachers and staff at these schools as maintaining greater vigilance over the interactions between girls and boys than did teachers and staff at Hamtramck High School. However, unlike the parochial school, the charter schools are publicly funded institutions and do not offer religious education. These schools have an Islamicate rather than Islamic culture; their production of a Muslim milieu is based on concentrations of numbers and cultural factors, rather than the direct or dogmatic transmission of Is-

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lamic doctrine. According to Mr. Malik, an administrator at one of the Muslim-majority charter schools: It is true that some of the Yemeni parents don’t want their girls to go to school because the boys are going to the same school [ . . . ]. And sometimes I beg those parents, keep your daughter here. We will make sure that your culture, your civilization, your everything is respected. And that’s why every hour you see me standing there in the hallway during transition time. Making sure that there is no complaint about boys and girls not respecting each other, or not respecting their culture, or their religion, and things like that. So, that’s why the community feels comfortable bringing their kids here [ . . . ]. They feel like it’s a safe place where their students really can get good education with strong moral background.

Murshidah, a young Yemeni teacher at one of the Muslim-majority charter schools, explained the importance of having Yemeni and Bangladeshi teachers and faculty as opposed to Hamtramck High School, where teachers are the opposite of who [Muslim students] are and how they are raised, where it’s difficult for [Muslim students] to accept certain forms of authority from these people. [ . . . ] There is no one who is looking out for them who understands how they are supposed to live [ . . . ]. But when they come to my school [ . . . ] well, that’s a different story. A guy and a girl, for example, holding hands, they will completely hide from me, they will be careful about the things they do in front of me. They know I am coming from an Islamic background.

Some families involved with the charter schools were hopeful that the schools would grow to reflect and meet their needs even further. For example, staff and faculty at two of the “Muslim” charter schools confirmed that parents were asking about the establishment of separate, gender-segregated campuses or classrooms, which the charter school company was seriously considering implementing. Accordingly, in 2009, Frontier Academy initiated gender-separated classrooms, which became part of their advertising campaigns. “Gender separated class-

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rooms” were touted along with halal food and Arabic language instruction in block ads in the Hamtramck Citizen. These features were also highlighted in the digital signage in front of the school.

Recent Changes in Hamtramck Public Schools Between 2009 and 2019, there were notable changes in Hamtramck’s education system. On one hand, the number of charter schools continued to rise, so that by 2019 there were “about a dozen charter schools operating in the city and just outside of it in neighboring Detroit” (Sercombe 2018b). This includes an increase in those that could be classified as Muslim-majority charter schools. Gender-separated facilities continue to be an attractive and defining feature of these schools for some Hamtramck Muslim families. On the other hand, the Hamtramck public school system has also changed. In the words of a Yemeni American education activist I interviewed in 2019, through a “campaign of targeted recruitment” Hamtramck Public Schools has changed from a “white-dominated system” into a one that has actively sought out more diversity in its faculty and administration. Along with great improvement in its financial health, this has resulted in the hiring of Yemeni American Nabil Naji as principal of a new elementary school that was opened in 2017, of Yemeni American Jaleelah Ahmed as the district’s director for English Language Development, and of other teachers and support staff, including Hamtramck women from both Yemeni and Bangladeshi American backgrounds. Perhaps most notably, Dr. Niczay’s retirement in 2019 led to a superintendent search with two Muslim American candidates as finalists: Yemeni American Jaleelah Ahmed and Lebanese American Dr. Youssef Mosallem, both of whom lived and worked in Dearborn at the time of the interviews. As mentioned earlier, Jaleelah Ahmed was appointed, in what a Yemeni American News reporter described as a “stunning development that would have been unthinkable a few years ago” (Yemeni American News 2019). Additionally, as of 2019, four out of seven members of the HPS board are Muslim American, including two Yemeni American men, one Yemeni American woman, and one Bangladeshi American man. It would be reasonable to assume that these rapid and dramatic changes in Hamtramck’s school system will impact how Muslim Ameri-

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can students and families understand their sense of belonging and inclusion within the city and its public school system, but it is too early to confirm any long-term effects. In 2018, Hamtramck’s public school enrollment held steady, although previous years had seen a decrease in admissions due, in part, to the pull of charter schools (Sercombe 2018b). The United States has been in a phase of “intense school reform and demographic transformation” (Minow, Shweder, and Markus 2008, 3) over the past few decades. These changes may be especially meaningful in places like the Detroit metro area, which is facing mass closures of public schools due to population decline and disinvestiture. In these contexts, citizens advocate for options such as charter schools, magnet schools, pilot schools, publicly funded vouchers, and scholarships to attend private or parochial schools as particularly urgent alternatives. Muslim Americans are some of the most active and imaginative innovators of these sorts of alternative educational solutions in Hamtramck and metro Detroit. They are actively engaged in building parochial schools. They are also among the fast-growing national demographic of homeschoolers. Partially driven by embodied and locational dimensions of civic purdah, the charter school context represents one of the ways that Muslim Americans in Hamtramck are using public spaces and resources to devise their own specific solutions to incorporation, taking a leadership role not only in their own communities, but in the heterogeneous communities of the city. By incorporating civic purdah principles into the structure of charter schools, members of Yemeni and Bangladeshi Hamtramck communities create the option for non-Muslim students and families to enter into and become part of a publicly funded Islamicate cultural milieu.

Conclusion Orientalist stereotypes represent Muslim women who practice gender separation strategies as deferring to Muslim men’s insistence upon their submission. Yet I found that Yemeni women in Hamtramck creatively draw on multiple reference points to inform their decisions about how to organize gender relations in various arenas of public and private life. Their efforts reflect desires to align their behavior as much as possible with their interpretations of pious comportment, to advance what they

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see as culturally appropriate standards, and to successfully integrate into Hamtramck. In line with these aims, Yemeni women orchestrate civic purdah via dovetailing strategies that involve embodied and locational practices. While embodied practices such as use of the bālto and hijāb were almost ubiquitous among Yemeni women I got to know across generations, considerable variation existed in women’s use of the lithāmah. The dynamism of the lithāmah particularly evinces the complexity and flexibility of civic purdah practices, as well as context dependency and how civic purdah relies on women’s judgments about the felicitousness of place. In discussing their civic purdah practices in Hamtramck, some women indicate that they perceive Hamtramck as a space set apart from the rest of the region in two respects. First, they see it as a zone of relative safety in that violent expressions of bigotry against Muslim women would not be as likely in Hamtramck as in other cities. Second, they understand Hamtramck to contain a Yemeni men’s public-within-a public with its own standards for engagement in contrast to other mixedgender spaces. As we have seen, community norms mark spaces such as the home, enclave alleys, women’s mosque areas, and the Yemeni women’s ESL class as places for family and women’s community. In such spaces, women’s interaction with unrelated men is minimized and regulated by collectively understood locational practices. On the other hand, spaces of encounter between unrelated women and men include Hamtramck’s main streets and certain stores. Hamtramck High School represents a zone of interaction between Yemeni young women and young men, as well as between Muslims and nonMuslims. Here, Yemeni young women shoulder the responsibility for integrating community standards in the school space. In Muslim-majority charter schools, meanwhile, Yemeni young women’s efforts to maintain gender separation in line with community norms are supported by Muslim teachers and administrators. Charter schools, like the women’s-only ESL class, thus represent community-recognized and municipally supported spaces of Yemeni-style civic purdah. The civic purdah practices reviewed here connect Yemeni women’s experiences in homes, mosques, streets, stores, schools, and other places in Hamtramck, so that each arena is part of a broader canvas upon which Yemeni women express beliefs about piety, modesty, social

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obligation, and municipal citizenship. The construction of Hamtramck as a zone of safety and familiarity for Yemeni women has been accomplished by these women themselves through the way they have consistently and creatively negotiated their embodied and locational forms of civic purdah across various spaces of the city, making themselves legible, respected, and valued. As a result, Yemeni women’s gender separation practices that might be considered remarkable and objectionable by mainstream society in most cities across the United States are now perceived by some Yemeni women as normative in Hamtramck.

4

Bangladeshi Women and Gender Boundaries

My introduction into Bangladeshi women’s communities in Hamtramck came from Kolsuma, an employee at a county-based social service agency. I visited the agency, which served mainly Bangladeshi women, to interview the director. The director introduced me to Kolsuma, who took interest in my project and agreed to help me with my research periodically for an hourly fee.1 Kolsuma managed daycare and made home visits to families served by the agency. She introduced me to her clientele and helped set up interviews. I also accompanied her on home visits to enrolled ESL students, and through the city’s main commercial streets to interview Bangladeshi women business owners and clerks. Kolsuma also took me to weddings and celebrations and introduced me to Bangladeshi women who had relocated to more affluent nearby suburbs. Finally, we also attended public events sponsored by the Bangladeshi community, such as Baishākhi Melā (New Year’s) and Victory Day (Bangladeshi independence) celebrations. Kolsuma’s daughter Samia, a woman in her early twenties who was attending community college, helped me meet and interview people in her age group and took me to events. Samia introduced me to her old friends from high school, as well as her newer friends from the Muslim and Bangladeshi Student Associations at her university. In addition, Kolsuma and Samia also introduced me to some women religious leaders who were active in the mosques’ youth groups and adult women’s groups, through whom I was able to attend mosque and halaqah programming. Like Yemeni women, Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck were also very deliberate about issues related to gender and space, including dress, proximity to men, and the establishment of women-only spaces. Some Bangladeshi women would draw comparisons between more conservative Bangladeshi women and Yemeni women. Sometimes they were 118

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disparaging and sometimes admiring. In short, however, Bangladeshi and Yemeni women saw themselves as engaged in parallel processes of what I call civic purdah, although the normative standards and practices differed both between and within communities. The civic purdah practices discussed here include an analysis of how Bangladeshi women across generations organize the gendering of spaces within paid labor, public and private celebrations, streets, mosques, home-based religious gatherings, and schools including Hamtramck High School. As in our look at Yemeni women, the emphasis here reflects my fieldwork experience and where the participants of the study led me, rather than a preconceived research plan. Therefore, we focus here less upon domestic spaces, in favor of gender-mixed, semi-public spaces.

Bangladeshi Women and Work Across socioeconomic divisions, it is common for Hamtramck Bangladeshi women who arrived in the US as adults to work outside the home. Most women and men had been educated in Bangladesh, where many learned some English. Adult education directors and ESL providers in the city described a trend in which the Bangladeshi women in their programs are known as hard workers who excel in their language training; they are strongly motivated to improve their skills because they believe mastering English will open more professional opportunities. The Bangladeshi women I met in Hamtramck worked in a wide range of jobs. Some Bangladeshi women of Kolsuma’s generation pursue work in various parts of the service sector, such as restaurants or retail, or in small-product manufacture. Many need ESL training mainly to develop their spoken-language skills, which lag behind their reading and writing—a pattern common among South Asian immigrants. Some Bangladeshi women who arrived as adults described the way they advanced their language skills as a kind of sink-or-swim, on-the-job language training, like Kolsuma’s friend Farzana: Back home, we learn English reading and writing, but we didn’t speak too much English. When I first came to New York, I tried to go to language school here for the first time. And then I did a month or two or three and

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then I moved to Georgia, and I started going to school there too. Then when I moved to Hamtramck, I continued further. I got my driver’s license in Georgia, and I got my citizenship when I started working. My husband used to go to work at TGI Fridays, and I wanted to work too. [ . . . ] The manager used to work with [my husband], like they were very friendly. So they gave me a job as a cashier. And he thought they were going to start me on something simple. And I had to pick up the order, and call people through the speaker when his order is ready. They said they were going to teach me, and they helped me a lot [ . . . ] and I learned in a week! Because counting money I know from back home. The only thing is speaking when customers are lined up like from here to my backyard, in lunch hour and two cashiers! There would also be students working, and sometimes they didn’t show up, so I used to take care of all their customers. So that made me more able to speak and be outgoing with people. [ . . . ] [W]e used to go hang out there in the morning before the bar opened. And I remember that when I was doing my citizenship, the two managers recorded the question and answer on tape to the citizenship test, and that way I could listen to it. The manager and her husband did that for me. I learned all the hundred questions.

The restaurant job facilitated Farzana’s incorporation into the US, giving her a context in which she could practice and refine her English, as well as take advantage of extra resources offered by her boss and his wife, who helped her with her citizenship exam as a professional investment in her. Though Farzana is a devout Muslim, she did not report feeling any contradiction in being employed in a place that served alcohol. She shrugged when I asked if she felt comfortable engaging in mixed-gender interaction. She explained that Islam makes allowances for people to earn money. Rather than avoiding certain places in which her ethics were not reflected, Farzana’s way of practicing civic purdah here was linked to embodied practices such as modest dress, represented by shalvār qamīz2 and hijāb, and her internal code of behavior allowed her to facilitate alcohol consumption without partaking in it. Suburban female relatives of Bangladeshi women living in Hamtramck who had come to the US with advanced degrees or who had attended American postsecondary schools pursued an unlimited range

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of professions, including psychology, social work, law, medicine, and engineering. However, I also met Bangladeshi women across generations who chose not to work outside the home or engage in vocational training due to personal preference or because they considered it more culturally or religiously appropriate to remain within the home.

“Broadminded” or “Conservative” Bangladeshi women remarked often on the range of ways their peer group organized their visibility and interaction in mixed-group milieus. Here is Kolsuma’s perspective: It’s family to family, what the women will do. But actually, Muslim women can go where they want. These ideas that they should not go here, or work there, are only cultural. And the ideas that we cannot be seen, and the ideas of we cannot be mixing with men, they vary from person to person. You have broadminded ones, you have the conservative, and I swear God did not create everyone the same. He did not create us all to be broadminded.

Although originally from Sylhet, Kolsuma had lived alone as a divorced mother in Dhaka for years before coming to Hamtramck. She connects her liberal views about women’s mobility and her “broadminded” interpretation of her religion to Dhaka cosmopolitanism rather than to assimilation that occurred after she moved to the US. Kolsuma considers herself broadminded partially because she doesn’t mind interacting with unrelated men in the workplace or in social situations. Yet she described the way she sometimes squelched those inclinations out of respect for others’ more “conservative” expectations: And, like suppose my brother’s friend, if he is a real good friend of my brother, if he comes and eats with us, that is fine, I can eat with him, I can talk with him. And if I see him in the store, or coming and going, I can go talk to him, I don’t mind. But some women, they say this is wrong. They won’t talk to him, and he won’t talk to them, they don’t say hi-hello. And for me, I can say hi-hello, I don’t mind, but also, who knows, he might get offended if I try to get into some kind of conversation with him. So,

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I don’t linger. I might say quick hi-hello, how are you, come visit us, and then I walk away.

Kolsuma described a process of negotiation: she balances her inclination to publicly converse with male acquaintances with an awareness of how the interaction might appear to others. On the whole, she found social norms governing women’s visibility and mobility more “conservative” than what she experienced in Dhaka. For Kolsuma, this kind of social conservatism was one of the disappointing and disagreeable factors about living in Hamtramck, along with the tough winters and the small size of the city’s houses and yards. Kolsuma characterized Bangladeshi women to whom she introduced me as either broadminded or conservative based largely on her perception of how they position themselves in both subtle and overt systems of gender separation practiced in the community. Certain public spaces were definitively coded as male and avoided by almost all Bangladeshi women. This included most council meetings at City Hall and official meetings of various Bangladeshi American associations and the Bangladeshi American Political Action Committee. There are exceptions to this, such as Saiida Miah, a young woman who identified as Bangladeshi and Belizean who, as we saw earlier, ran for city council. Other spaces, such as streets, stores, restaurants, and places of education and employment were more flexible, offering Bangladeshi women an arena for experimenting with limits of gender mixing or separation through locational strategies of civic purdah. Although Bangladeshi women were often seen in restaurants with male family members, I rarely encountered Bangladeshi women in single-sex groups in restaurants, in contrast to men, who often sat together for hours drinking chai at restaurants and cafés. For the most part, during 2007–09 Bangladeshi women coded restaurants as male spaces that a woman could comfortably enter only when accompanied by a male relative. But sometimes exceptions were made here, too. Once Samia was near graduation, Kolsuma occasionally allowed her to spend time with girlfriends at a restaurant called Maine Street, a popular hangout for Hamtramck High School kids. Girls had to arrange permission from their parents, who discussed it with one another before granting permission, and the girls had a short, specific time limit on their visit.

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Kolsuma and other career-advancing women sometimes imposed their own “broadminded” thinking against those they viewed as “backward” female Bangladeshis or “overly” conservative Yemeni women: The people of Bengali Para [a neighborhood associated with Bangladeshis newly arrived to Hamtramck], they are like those from London, we call them Londoni.3 The men are just working in restaurants, not changing, not adapting to the new country, never wanting things to be different. They work in stores and restaurants, or the best they do is to own stores, they aren’t seeking better opportunities. The women just stay at home and gossip all day. They are not emphasizing education the way we do.

One day as we were driving around the city on a shopping expedition, Kolsuma took me on a guided tour of Bengali Para. She called my attention to a Bangladeshi family emerging from a van. Among them was a teenage girl wearing a hijāb, face veil, and a long, loose garment, which seemed exactly like the bāltos the Yemenis wear, only in maroon. “You see?” Kolsuma gestured toward the girl, as if proving that Bengali Para people were backward. She then pointed to a porch where a bunch of boys were playing, seemingly to signal the crowdedness and noisiness of the scene. “This is what is meant by Bengali Para,” she reiterated as if we had crossed the border into a different country. A few houses down, she pointed to a man in a lungī.4 “These people don’t value education,” she said, as if the lungī or other aspects of the man’s appearance were in themselves signs of illiteracy. She continued: These people don’t allow their daughters to try new things, to go out and learn about where they are. To wear pants, or jeans. I have an older relative in London, whenever she talks to me, she tells me “My daughter is still wearing shalvār qamīz” again and again as if she has something big to brag about. And because of this, their girls end up just copying the worst American habits. Speech-wise, clothes-wise, they are copying, picking up the worst habits. Because they are not letting them out of the house, not letting them change, letting them see the good things they can do in America, that is why these girls end up with the worst habits. They rebel, like punk?

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They take off hijāb out of the house, they wear jeans, they have white boyfriends. They take off their veils even in school, they are learning the worst American customs.

Such anecdotes about Bengali Para were echoed by other Hamtramck Bangladeshi women, reflecting class differences as well as the ways that poverty and recent arrival were stigmatized by more established members of the community. In these formulations, signs of what some more established community members considered “backwardness,” such as women staying at home, were projected onto the poorest and more recently arrived community members—even though it was well-known that many of the more established and affluent families also practiced what Kolsuma characterized as similarly “strict” forms of hijāb and gender separation. For Kolsuma, the tendency for some Bangladeshi families to maintain what she saw as excessive forms of gender separation was interpreted as a failure of assimilation. In narratives about her experiences as a single mother raising a teenage daughter, she described how hard she worked to strike the appropriate balance between permissiveness and protectiveness to allow her daughter to socialize without alienating herself from their ethnic community. Stories about the rebellious daughters of Bengali Para depict “unwholesome” forms of assimilation and serve as cautionary tales to “broadminded” women like Kolsuma about the perils of interpreting civic purdah principles too strictly.

Bangladeshi Public Gatherings Patterns of gender mixing regularly occur within the Bangladeshi community, in private and public settings. Extended families or friends visit one another’s homes or backyards for festivities such as marriage celebrations; other well-attended cultural and Bangladeshi nationalist events, gatherings, melās (festivals), picnics, and parades regularly take place in parks, halls, streets, and other public venues. In these kinds of gatherings, locational purdah in the form of semi-unstructured gender separation was practiced: some women and men concentrated in singlesex groups, spontaneously establishing male and female sides or sections of the room. But even these groups remained tenuous and fluid.

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Other events were organized by a more structured separation model, in which women and men were directed into different spaces. This was the case at the wedding celebration of Farzana’s daughter. The celebration took place several weeks after a nikāh (marriage contract) ceremony— the official part of the Islamic marriage that takes place in the mosque or the home and is usually officiated by an imam. Normally attended only by the couple’s closest family and friends, it consists of reading from the Qur’an and the signing of a nikāh indicating any preconditions set by either bride or groom. In contrast to Tajlia’s nikāh ceremony, which took place at her home and was attended by less than a dozen people, the wedding celebration took place in a Detroit hall and more than five hundred families were invited. I attended with Kolsuma, Samia, and Kolsuma’s mother, Majeda. As we approached the building from the parking lot, male wedding guests stationed at the door directed us to the separate women’s entrance. Two adjacent doors were clearly marked “Men’s Entrance” and “Women’s Entrance” in Bengali and English. Yet after entering, we found that these separate entrances led into the same mixed lobby space and therefore seemed to serve a symbolic rather than a practical function. The separated entries were not part of a design that blocked visibility or interaction between the sexes as was the case at Yemeni functions I attended. After mingling in the lobby, women and men then entered gender-separated rooms marked “Women Only” and “Gentlemen” to sit with friends and enjoy the wedding meal. However, as noted below, this separation was not strictly observed, as men entered the women’s space at different times during the event. Samia said that, at weddings, families scope out girls for possible marriage. Care was taken with marriageable girls’ appearance. To preserve an embodied civic purdah, most women at the wedding were dressed in modestly cut sārīs that covered arms and midriff, and many wore hijāb. Some younger women wore the lehenga, another kind of generously cut long dress with churidar (leggings) underneath. Some of the young women who were not wearing hijāb wore their sārīs to bare wide swaths of their midriffs, and blouses were cut to expose most of the back. Some also wore heavy makeup, and some wore no head covering at all. Periods of mixing and gender separation were orchestrated by the organizers. For example, gender separation among the guests was gen-

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erally preserved for the first couple of hours, when women tended to stay inside the women’s room and men inside the men’s room. Yet even during this time, handfuls of preteen and teenage boys and clutches of adult men came into the women’s room, which surprised me, given the “Women Only” sign on the door. Kolsuma said it was normal; I asked her if any of the women were going over into the men’s side, and she said that would never happen. About two hours into the event, everyone crowded into the entrance hall to watch the “negotiation ceremony,” a playful confrontation between the bride’s female representatives and the groom’s male representatives behind two sides of an outstretched ribbon, positioned over an open doorway to signify a barrier or gate. The negotiation involves a fair amount of male-female physical jostling for position and even some shoving across this “gate” before money is exchanged, and the gate crashed. The negotiation ceremony represents a ritual practiced broadly across South Asia, and is found in Muslim as well as Hindu communities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as well as those across the South Asian diaspora. After the negotiation ceremony, the wedding meal was eaten in single-gender rooms. Men came into the woman’s side again when it was time for the groom to take his place on the dais next to the bride. Men and women remained together to watch the ceremonial exchange of mālās (prayer beads) and milk. During the bridal photo session, younger men and women congregated in the back of the room in tight circles to exchange the latest gossip with their old high school friends, compare college experiences, and undoubtedly to check each other out. Over the loudspeaker, an elder male voice asked the men in Bangla and English to return to their separate room. No one moved, but some people exchanged glances. A few minutes later, the voice again urged men to return to their separate facilities. These announcements, which grew increasingly aggrieved and irate in tone, were responded to with more amused glances. After some time, a group of men came into the women’s room to usher out the men. After the wedding, a young man named Faiz explained: I don’t like the way they did that; they didn’t have to do that. I am used to mixed weddings, the way most of us are doing it now. The way they did

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it was definitely stricter than most. Some of these guys coming in were just friends of Tajlia, they just wanted to come in and say hi to her, to get a glimpse of her. But she had to go and get married into a family of those bearded ones, and that’s how it goes.

In conversations that I heard during and after the wedding, it was obvious that these decisions about when and how gendered spaces could be crossed was of great concern to the community. These practices were dynamic and open to intergenerational influence. The tension and exasperation in the older man’s voice projected on the loudspeaker directing people back to their seats and the bitter edge to the young man’s comment about “those bearded ones” bear witness to the weight of these negotiations. Indeed, the wedding provided an example of women and men working together to negotiate embodied and locational civic purdah practices. The wedding organization provided structure and space for both single-gender and cross-gender interaction, leaving room for women and men to spontaneously decide how and when to participate in single- or mixed-gender interactions. The tension and possibility of gender lines was playfully dramatized in the ribbon-crossing ritual. Throughout the event, women bore greater responsibility to maintain gender separation. They did not have the option to enter the “male only” spaces. Men in women’s spaces was somewhat tolerated, but when men entered those spaces, women had an option of how to handle it. Some formed tighter groups with other women, positioning their bodies to dissuade interaction, while others, especially teenagers, formed mixed-gender clusters with friends.

Bangladeshi Mosque and Halaqah Gatherings Akin to their Yemeni counterparts, Bangladeshi women described most mosques in their country of origin as primarily male spaces, with exceptions on special days or during Ramadan. Some said they had been curious about investigating the local mosque prior to coming to the US, but had never gotten around to doing so. When I carried out my fieldwork in 2007–9, only one of the five area Bangladeshi mosques— al-Falah, the Bangladeshi mosque just over the northern border with

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Detroit—had dedicated women’s space and programming. The other mosques were not frequented by women, except on occasions when special programing was made available to them. Tajlia, whose wedding served as the central example of Bangladeshi gendered space negotiations, was a university student and religious youth leader. She expressed some resentment at being excluded from male mosques and holy sites when she visited Bangladesh as a teen, and irritation with some Hamtramck Bangladeshis: A lot of Bangladeshi women, even here in the US, think you are not allowed to [visit the mosque] in our religion. And when I tell them, like yeah you can, they don’t believe it, because they are so used to believing they are not supposed to. But I don’t like that. Because the way I grew up after I moved to Georgia [US] from Bangladesh, I always went to the mosque. So, like if someone told me I can’t that would shatter my world, and everything. For me, as you know, I go to the mosque for the halaqah group every week. And also on Fridays, I go whenever I have a chance I go.

Some Muslims regard the definition of the mosque as a male space as part of religious doctrine, based on particular hadīths or examples from the Qur’an, but these sources are open to conflicting interpretations. When I spoke to women who chose not to attend the mosque, or to men who disapproved of their attendance, I was sometimes told, “We have a hadith which says, for women, to pray at home is better.”5 These women link gendered patterns of mosque participation to Islamic teachings that men are obligated to pray at the mosque, particularly for Friday prayer. Along the same lines, women may pray at the mosque or at home, but receive no extra merit for mosque prayer—and in fact might be better off praying at home so as to not attract additional attention. However, some women argue that since women are also heavily involved in community activities, and some have become teachers and other kinds of community leaders, they should attend the mosque and have the benefit of hearing the imam and other lectures to better understand the community issues for which they share responsibility. Tajlia explained: For men, it’s mandatory to meet and pray at the mosque because they are the ones building the community. And they have to stay together and

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keep in touch. But for women, it’s not mandatory, because it’s mainly our job to take care of the household, and take care of the kids. So you can’t be expected to do both things at once. But when you can, then you are fine, but you don’t have to go.

When I attended Friday prayer at al-Falah, there were approximately forty to fifty women gathered. Most were Bangladeshi, but as in the case of the Yemeni Mu‘ath mosque, a small number of African American women were present, too. The women’s space at al-Falah was located on the same level as the men’s, but partitioned to one side. Since the men were separated by a screen, I could not assess their numbers, but I was told later that about a hundred men had attended that day. We sat and listened to the imam’s address, piped over loudspeakers from the other side of the room. An AV system was set up for broadcasting images, but it wasn’t in use that day. Many Bangladeshi women in the community were involved in halaqah groups. For both Yemeni and Bangladeshi women, some halaqah groups took place at home, others within the mosque. But since there was much less mosque space accorded to women at Bangladeshi mosques, the home-based halaqah took on additional importance for Bangladeshi women. The Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA, a national organization headquartered in New York with a primarily Bangladeshi membership base) organized one style of halaqah meetings for Bangladeshi women. According to Tajlia, who leads a youth section of MUNA, and Farzana, there are about 150 to 200 Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck and Detroit of all ages who are involved in the MUNA group. Although there were some general meetings for this large group, most of the weekly meetings took place in smaller groups of about fifteen to twenty women, which met in various locales. Some were organized for women at the mosque, some in their homes, in order to make them as accessible as possible for participants, some of whom didn’t drive. There is considerable coordination among local, state, and national MUNA chapters, facilitated by a multilevel reporting system in which leaders keep records of member attendance and progress. Farzana, a MUNA member since moving to Hamtramck in 2001, explained that the group is important to her due to the “call from the Qur’an to come together be-

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cause that’s the way we can better ourselves. And if you make mistakes, it’s OK, if you are all together, and everybody is sharing the knowledge of what is right and wrong, you can decide what to do.” She continued: Also, we keep track of all the things we do during the month. If you help your neighbor. If you go to somebody’s funeral, or go see somebody’s baby to help them, with a ride, we think about all these things as community service, to be very helpful. That ladies can do it too. Sometimes at the end of the month, we do the reporting of what we all did that month, like this: what you’ve done that was good, and this is what you should work on. And also, we are in a different country now. So we need to keep in communication with one another. Because when different Bengali families come, they feel like, we are lost in the world. You know, we don’t know how to speak, or anything. That was the hardest thing in my life, when we moved down and I could not speak or anything, we don’t know the system here, or how to talk to people, or what is [correct] behavior. And I had to learn, just like baby again.

In Farzana’s involvement with MUNA, as a locational civic purdah practice, the halaqah provides a forum for unrelated Bangladeshi women to come together as Muslims for their mutual benefit and aid. In other words, religious gatherings allow women to make a family out of the community.

Bangladeshi Dress Bangladeshi women adopt a range of styles to meet different standards of appropriate dress. As variations of embodied civic purdah, several distinct styles of veiling were practiced. Some women didn’t use head covering at all outside the mosque. Others, like Tajlia, have a very strict definition of what counts as proper veiling: In our culture, people do wear a scarf. But they are wearing it in ways that wouldn’t be considered proper because it’s showing the neck, and some of the hair is showing. Because there are certain requirements: it’s not supposed to show the neck or the ears. Like the Arabics [sic; i.e., Yemenis] are

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wearing it. And my Mom started wearing her scarf properly a few years after I stared wearing mine. Before that she just wore it in that traditional way. So I think that a lot of the time the younger generation have been learning and teaching the older generation, and now there is starting to be that kind of understanding level.

In the narratives of young women like Tajlia, the word “traditional” or “cultural” is used to indicate a deviation from Islam and often carries a highly negative charge, and it is the younger generation of Bangladeshi girls who are teaching the older generation how to “veil properly.”6 Indeed, Tajlia attributes great importance to all Muslim women veiling the same way for the sake of the entire American Muslim ummah: But it’s not like everyone here who veils understands why they wear the veil. They don’t get it and they don’t do it right. Like just putting the scarf over the head and taking it down when you feel like, that is not veiling. And when a stranger comes up to you and asks, and you don’t have a good reason, they are going to take your word for it and assume that everyone else is just as confused as you. And I think that everyone has to go through their own personal journey and understand, this is why, and make those spiritual connections to everything before they start wearing the veil. For me, it’s important because it makes people look at you for who you are inside, and really listen to what you are saying. And it’s kind of also like inviting people to your religion, without saying anything. And it identifies you as part of the modesty thing—when you are wearing it, you are always spiritually kind of brought back to this one thing, your religion, it reminds you who you are.

Here, Tajlia’s idea that dress conveys subtle messages about religion— and can be used to teach about religion nondidactically—elaborates one aspect of how Muslim women in Hamtramck understand their civic purdah processes as modes of communication, both to Muslims and non-Muslims. For Tajlia, “veiling properly” concerns messages a woman sends both herself and the outside world. A woman who veils is in a key position to serve as a kind of ambassador for Islam. It is thus important that Muslim women dress carefully, in a conscientious, consistent way, with attention to the image they are projecting.

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Yet other Bangladeshi women have different ideas about what counts as a proper mode of Muslim self-presentation. According to Farzana’s friend Suraya: You know how we wear shalvār qamīz and dupattā [scarf]? Like, in my culture, they make it like you should not show off your beauty. You should dress modestly. So people take it as you should cover, especially you should cover your breasts. The dupattā goes over the chest for this reason. Some also place it over the head depending on where they are.

In the form of head covering described by Suraya, veiling was achieved by arranging the dupattā around the chest or head. A similar style of fluid veiling may be achieved by women in sārīs, who have the option of pulling the sārī up around the head. In these modes of veiling, which would be discounted as “traditional” or “cultural” by Tajlia, the hair is still partially visible. Since the head covering tends to slip as the woman moves, requiring frequent adjustment or rearrangement, it is mobile and fluid. As was the case for the women of the Beni Mellal in Abu-Lughod’s 1986 study, women may also arrange their head coverings differently depending on the spaces they’re in and the people they are encountering. For example, Bangladeshi women may pull their scarves around their heads when inside a mosque, and let them slip back to their shoulders on the walk home. As Suraya describes, a woman may arrange the covering more carefully around her head when encountering senior, unrelated Bangladeshi men, or her own father, but let it slip among male and female age-mates. According to Suraya, these patterns varied depending on an individual woman’s preferences at any time. For other women, such as Kolsuma and her college-age daughter, Samia, who do not cover their heads for piety, the question of dressing modestly is a purely subjective and personal one that is not tied to any specific form of dress (such as the hijāb or the dupattā). Kolsuma and Samia explained that, according to their shared interpretation, Islam does not demand any particular article of dress or style of clothing for women, other than to suggest that they dress modestly as determined by their own common-sense interpretation of the scripture. Kolsuma added that, according to her understanding of Islam, what counted the most in making decisions about dress was the niyyah (intention) of the

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person in question. As long as one was not deliberately trying to use dress to provoke the sexual desire of others in public, most forms of dress would probably not cause harm: Islam says you have to cover. But Islam never says to cover everything. Because of modesty and that, you can definitely do that without covering. Like in one of my jobs here in US, the dress code was, not to interrupt the attention of your colleagues, you should dress appropriately. It’s the same thing I think they are trying to do in Islam. It is also man’s duty to watch how he looks at a woman, it’s not only the woman’s responsibility.

Kolsuma followed up these comments by narrating a story from a hadīth source where a woman comes in front of the Prophet uncovered, but the Prophet, rather than telling her to cover, chastised one of the men standing with him for looking at her with lust. Kolsuma explained to me that some people interpret this verse as evidence that women have the freedom to cover or not. Kolsuma explained that none of her relatives had ever placed demands on her to cover in Bangladesh. Yet in Hamtramck, family members pestered her to cover her head in a particular way, which she refers to as the “extra scarf.” She attributes this to a new, highly concentrated strain of Sylheti conservatism: We used to go in Sylhet to visit my paternal grandparents. They are more pious than my mother’s side. But I never saw any of them wearing extra scarf. The same way that my mom did, they used to wear a longer blouse. Both my grandmas when they went out, they would always have a full sleeve, and long blouse, and white sārī. But my mom and aunties all, when they went out, they would just cover with the end of the sārī. My mom’s older brother would say to me and my cousins, hey you don’t cover your head. We are from Dhaka! Never my mom or my dad told us to cover our head. But here some of them are rejecting that and looking for the extra scarf.

When Kolsuma was a young, married woman, working in a factory in Bangladesh, she favored the shalvār. Yet when she moved to the US, she began wearing a specific type of clothing that she coded as “Western,”

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adopting a style of dress that is popular among Hamtramck Bangladeshi women and girls, often referred to simply as “pants.” “Pants” designated a style of dress modified to meet Muslim ideals of modesty such as “loose,” “legs covered,” and “chest covered.” Kolsuma managed the “pants” style of dress by wearing loose tops and generously cut trousers with a scarf arranged across her chest. This was the mode of dress she favored for work and her public life outside home and family contexts. However, Kolsuma reported that she faced some criticism among her Bangladeshi peers for adopting the “Western” style of dress. As described by Kolsuma, the instability of expectations for Bangladeshi women’s dress differs remarkably from the relative uniformity of Yemeni women’s dress in Hamtramck. Yemeni women that I talked to explained that they made decisions about dress to conform both to their understanding of Islam and with respect to what their Yemeni neighbors were doing—it was important to them to “do things together” as a group, and they found a sense of power in collectively adopting a form of dress. On the other hand, Bangladeshi women that I talked to explained that there were many different Bangladeshi Muslim ways of dressing, and they were concerned with taking part in the dress practices that most closely reflected their personal belief system, rather than advancing a collective Bangladeshi Muslim standard. Bangladeshi women told detailed stories of how standards of dress in their country of origin were unstable, changing according to region and time period. Their dress narratives foreground two principles important to understanding how this form of embodied civic purdah works in Hamtramck, which extends to Yemeni women there as well. First, some women who take part in negotiations over dress in Hamtramck see themselves as participating in much older conversations and contestations, rather than seeing themselves as coming from a fixed tradition. Second, the process of immigration does not lead to one-way dress adaptations that mimic styles of dress found in mainstream US society. Rather, some Muslim women in Hamtramck perceive that they are dressing more in line with a global Islamic standard, or standards from their nation or region of origin, while others feel that their dress choices reflect standards found in mainstream America. These conversations about dress show that some women see their civic purdah practices in Hamtramck

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as a continuation of Islamic and Islamicate practices spanning different historical periods and geographical differences, and that they perceive civic purdah as inherently flexible, collective, and open to change.

Bangladeshi Girls at Hamtramck High School Young Bangladeshi women generally have the reputation of being among the most dynamic and engaged students at Hamtramck High School. As a group, Bangladeshi teens achieve high grades and take on leadership roles, and many continue to college. This dynamism is jokingly referred to as BTO—Bangladeshi Take Over. Starting around the year 2000, Bangladeshi girls regularly served as valedictorian and salutatorian and dominated the top-ten GPA list. Families, students, and school staff attributed this success to the value that Bangladeshis placed on education and to the competitive and intensive culture of schooling found in Bangladesh and carried over to the US. Kolsuma and others described how, in Bangladesh, it was customary for students to attend school the entire day and then engage in several hours of “tuitions” or tutoring throughout the afternoon and into the evening, as well as during the weekend—a course of study that, importantly, included English. The legacy of this educational intensity can be seen most directly in the achievement patterns of Bangladeshi daughters rather than sons. Although both are considered high achievers, many perceive Bangladeshi daughters on the whole as receiving more structure and discipline at home, while sons may have more freedom and activities that take them away from their studies. Additionally, although some Bangladeshi students of both genders work part-time in after-school jobs, it is more likely that young men will assume some financial responsibility within their families during high school, which is also seen as detracting from a focus on schoolwork. Students of both genders aim to continue to college and to pursue a wide range of professions. Bangladeshi students and alumni that I interviewed about their views on education tended to emphasize the complexity of cross-gender relations among Bangladeshi youth. Tajlia describes young Bangladeshi women’s dating at Hamtramck High School:

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It’s very common, especially in high school, you will see it all the time. And when I used to be in high school you knew everyone did it, so you wouldn’t say anything. But now that I am older [ . . . ] I understand that it is so wrong, and why it’s wrong.

Young women like Tajlia and her sister Fatima consider themselves to be a minority at Hamtramck High School because they self-consciously limit cross-gender interaction, attempting to initiate locational civic purdah patterns. Fatima describes this mode of discipline as one manifestation of “taking her religion seriously,” which also includes “veiling seriously,” praying five times a day, and engaging in community service. Tajlia explains: Well, it all depends on your religious background and it’s kind of delicate. Because with my sister and I, we went to Sunday school when we were growing up down in Georgia. So we kind of knew the basic stuff that you are not supposed to do. So our parents were like OK with us having male friends, but not hanging out with them too much. We could talk to them in school, but as long as it is school related, and it isn’t anything like touching, or hitting them, or laughing, or that kind of things, then it’s OK. Not touching is a very important thing, not even handshake. And I think for us it’s OK as long as you are hanging out in a group, and as long as it’s in school.

The system of cross-gender vigilance described by Tajlia comes across as similar to the way Aisha described the “red lines” constraining her own interactions with males. Yet other young Bangladeshi women I interviewed described a more relaxed set of embodied civic purdah standards; they did not consider friendships with boys to be in conflict with their ethical sensibilities. Some Bangladeshi teens described socializing in mixed-gender groups outside school. Additionally, even with the social stigma attached to dating and premarital sexual activity within the Bangladeshi community, it is increasingly common for male and female Bangladeshi high school students to date one another. Tajlia explained the unwritten rules of the high school dating scene: Bengali girls will usually date Bengali guys. The Bosnian [Muslim] girls and Yemeni boys kind of go together, and Yemeni girls don’t date, and

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even if they do, no one would know about it, it would be very very hush hush. And with Bengalis, they are a little more open about it. But if you do date as a Bangladeshi girl, you have to date Bengalis only. And if you don’t, then everyone will kind of talk about you. So, in a way, it’s almost as if it’s OK, but as long as you are dating a Bengali. But then, obviously, you know you are not going to end up with him.

Several Bangladeshi teens and young adults I spoke to attributed this intra-group dating to the fact that Bangladeshis could sustain the fantasy that these relationships had the potential to turn into marriage. With some exceptions, however, this outcome was thought to be highly unlikely due to the fact that evidence of a prior, premarital relationship would lower, rather than raise, the estimation of a potential spouse in the eyes of the families involved. Nevertheless, there were enough cases in which these “love marriages” did occur to spur on the hopes of Bangladeshi couples. One of my study participants described Bangladeshi girls’ dating as “the biggest open secret within the community.” It was pointed out to me repeatedly that Bangladeshi girls who engage in this form of mixing at the high school usually do so without the knowledge of their families. According to Tajlia: In terms of Bangladeshi kids who date, I would say like 5 percent of their parents would know. The other times, it’s behind their parents’ back. And even if the parents know, it’s more like, I’m going to do it, I don’t care what you say. It’s not that the parents are so OK about it. And a lot of time these kids feel like, look: we are not allowed to date, but we are allowed to choose who we marry. So there is a problem here. And a lot of times, kids, you know, they take it the wrong way. They say, oh, we can choose who we are going to marry, so it only makes sense, we’re gonna date them and see if they are right for me, and then tell their parents.

None of the Bangladeshi girls I interviewed admitted to having ever been involved in dating, but all of them described close friends who had dated.7 By contrast, male Bangladeshi students were open with me about their histories of dating. For example, one Bengali college student named

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Moustafa cheerfully ran down his dating history for me during an interview, describing all the different girls he had formed relationships with during and after high school. In the context of such diverse sets of standards for gender mixing among their peers, some Bangladeshi girls navigated cross-gender friendships and dating in ways that reflected other civic purdah practices, finding ways to participate in public school life while still maintaining certain key boundaries.

Yemeni and Bangladeshi Youth Leaders and the Multiethnic Halaqah Just as some Bangladeshi young women in Hamtramck considered themselves leaders and authorities for the older generation regarding proper dress, there was also a tendency for the younger generation of self-consciously pious women to consider themselves as leaders when it came to establishing an ethnically and racially inclusive ummah in Hamtramck, both in the mosque and the halaqah.8 Some Bangladeshi and Yemeni Muslims I knew in Hamtramck described the city’s mosques as places for the development of both religious and ethnic identity. While Hamtramck mosques tended to be divided according to ethnicity, with the great majority of attendees belonging to a particular ethnic group—Yemeni, Bangladeshi, or Bosnian—several mosque leaders and members that I interviewed across generations nevertheless described the mosque as a place with the ideal of being open and inviting to all Muslims regardless of language, race, or ethnicity. In these instances, they tended to describe any ethnic or racial diversity in their mosque as a point of pride and as something they wished to cultivate further. They often cited Islamic scripture to back up their ideals of equality and connectedness among all members of the ummah. The most often cited Qur’an verse, cited here in the Sahih International translation, was interpreted to mean that it was part of the divine plan to create human diversity, as a mean to teach people to unite across differences: O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allāh is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allāh is Knowing and Acquainted. (Sūrah al-Hujurāt, 49:13)

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On the other hand, many mosque leaders I interviewed seemed to be of two minds about mosques as multiethnic spaces. While they believed that uniting Muslims in worship across spaces of ethnic or religious difference was a noble aim, they also valued the intimacy and coherence of the single ethnicity mosque, in which khutbahs (sermons) and other activities could be carried out in the common language of an ethnically based membership (at least, the common language for new immigrants and older generations). As a young woman leader of a youth group, Tajlia had made it a priority to create a context for multiethnic congregations for women. When she started university, she began attending the mosque near her school with her friends from the Muslim Student Association for Friday prayers some of the time and the Bangladeshi mosque near her home at other times. Tajlia cited the dynamism of a women’s program at a masjid near Wayne State as the main factor that drew her away from her neighborhood mosque: she appreciated its ethnic and racial diversity and speakers from all over the world. Tajlia had received Islamic education since early childhood, yet she was motivated to lead a halaqah for Muslim young women in Hamtramck only after she began to learn about Islam away from her community, within the university, at MSA, and in mixed-race, gender-integrated settings, such as the annual Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention. Tajlia continued: The older women will encourage their daughters only to stay with the Bengalis, and not to make friends with the other kids. So what do you learn from that? One of the [Yemeni] girls, last time, she said, “Well, I feel like I belong here, and I don’t feel like I’m different from all of you.” And that really touched my heart. Because that’s not what I expected to hear from this particular girl, but I am glad that she can come to someplace, I am glad she can come to a place where she feels that she belongs.

Tajlia began her halaqah group separately and without knowledge of the Yemeni Nabeela’s activities, as we saw earlier, yet the two soon met and sometimes merged their groups. This crossing of boundaries between Yemeni and Bangladeshi groups opened the way for the inclusion of others, such as African and African American Muslims. This shift

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constituted a notable crossing of ethnic and racial lines in Hamtramck, where ethnically diverse Muslim communities mostly congregate in their separate sites. African American Muslims were most likely to leave Hamtramck altogether to attend mosques in Detroit. As noted previously, some older religious leaders in Hamtramck spoke of their desire to cross these boundaries, but young women like Tajlia were providing one of the most effective examples at the time of how to do this in Hamtramck. While I was in Hamtramck, I witnessed how the leaders of these gender-separated halaqah groups brought Yemeni, Bangladeshi, African American, and other young Muslim group members into contact with others across race, class, and gender divides so that they could be of service to the wider community, through projects such as Habitat for Humanity and clothing and food drives. These cross-ethnic, mixed-gender engagements in which gender separation standards are more relaxed constitute another kind of civic purdah, in which women’s embodied practice of arriving as a group with an authorized leader allow them to blur the lines between private (mosque based) and public (community service) kinds of sociability.

Bangladeshi Women’s Student Socialization and Extracurricular Activities Some of the young Bangladeshi women who “take their religion seriously” and reject romantic involvement work hard to create all-female activities for themselves and their friends in ways that combine embodied and locational forms of civic purdah. These activities offer alternatives to certain adolescent rites of passage enshrined by the dominant society in ways that conform to a civic purdah ethos. For example, Tajlia’s younger sister Fatima and a group of her girlfriends organized a movie night in lieu of prom at Fatima’s house in order to create an alternative way to celebrate their passage out of Hamtramck High School: At first, I thought I was going to go. My parents would have let me go. And at the same time, whenever we went to halaqahs, I would be thinking about the prom. I wanted to become a stronger Muslim, I would try to think of it in an Islamic way. If I am not doing it for God, then there is no real point to going. And, if I went, I would have to hide from cer-

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tain people we know. And if it’s something you are doubting, you just stay away from it. And then some of my friends were like: well, you can just go only for the dinner part, and leave, like they were doing. But I kept thinking about it, and I realized I didn’t really want to go. I was curious, but I didn’t really want to be a part of it. That was my decision. After the prom, I saw some pictures that some girls posted on Facebook. I am really not used to all that skin showing, and cleavage, so it made me feel pretty uncomfortable. So I’m glad I didn’t go.

After Fatima gained her parents’ permission to go to the prom, the decision was hers. She took weeks to make the decision, carefully measuring her reasons for wanting to go against the value system she was learning within her halaqah and other Islamic study groups and found some conflicts that she was not able to reconcile.9 So she gathered a group of like-minded others who agreed to meet during prom night for their own celebration to mediate their feelings of loneliness or being left out. With their aunts and cousins baking them cookies, it seemed as though the girls were celebrating their religious identity, friendship, and solidarity as much as they were celebrating their passage out of high school. Fatima and some of her friends also celebrated graduation by taking part in an All Girls’ Prom organized by the Bangladeshi Student Association (BSA) at Wayne State.10 Fatima recounts: That kind of takes your mind off the high school prom, it kind of fills in for it. And it’s fun for us, because we can say we went to a prom, and there were just girls. And in a way, it is more fun for us than the high school prom would have been. Because if there were guys there, I can’t do my hair. You know, I would wear my scarf. And I can’t wear jewelry. I’m not going to dance with guys. It’s just like it would have been nothing. So, when it was the girl’s prom, I actually got to do my hair, wear earrings and a dress that I liked. And I could just have fun with my friends. So it was just more fun than if I went to prom anyway. It was like ninety or one hundred girls. It was more of a mix this year. Last year it was more Bengali girls. This year especially, there was a lot of Pakistani, Indian, white girls, black girls. So there was a huge mix of

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people. There was people from Canton, from Dearborn, people that I’ve never met before, too. It was kind of cool.

Like the involvement in the BSA prom, some Bangladeshi young women described their participation choices as partially influenced by religious sensibilities that guided them away from cross-gender leisure interaction toward extracurriculars with female-majority membership that would contribute toward career or community building. These extracurriculars were imagined as a bridge to wider civic participation in which women would also be able to maintain gender separation, demonstrating the tensions and interests of civic purdah and its implications for municipal and national citizenship. But those who made the choice to stick to female-only or female majority extracurriculars were among the minority of Bangladeshis at the high school. According to Tajlia: I found that a good way of keeping myself busy was to get very involved in after school activities. [ . . . ] [T]hat was probably like the best part of high school. So Student Council, Key Club, National Honor Society. Key Club was all Bengalis, mostly girls. NHS was mostly Bengalis girls. [ . . . ] And Student Council also was a lot of Bengali girls.

Tajlia’s sister Fatima graduated from Hamtramck High School a few years after Tajlia. She later went on to become a political science major at a local university. Like Tajlia, she described her four years of involvement in Student Council as member and officer as the most meaningful and exciting part of high school. She explained that there were limitations on the range of activities that some Bangladeshi girls could pursue at the high school. Some viewed particular activities as culturally inappropriate, dissonant with ideals of modesty: sports, which required special kinds of possibly immodest dress and away games, and drama club, which required “making a public spectacle of oneself.” But activities like Student Council and Key Club were acceptable. One young woman named Namira found that her activity in Student Council offered a direct route into Hamtramck political life. As a Student Council officer, she became involved in the Student Youth Council, a project organized and funded by Hamtramck’s city council to promote student involvement in the city, improve student life, and curtail vio-

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lence. Namira and other youth representatives traveled to Lansing along with city council members for a conference. She periodically attended city council meetings with her mentor, a youth advisor named Maxine. Namira spoke at City Hall meetings on issues pertaining to youth on several occasions. Additionally, Namira negotiated an opportunity to serve as an intern at Hamtramck City Hall. When I was photocopying archives on a weekly basis at City Hall one summer, I would see Namira walking through the building in consultation with the city clerk or other municipal staff. This “Bangladeshi Take Over” of the Student Council and other aspects of student life at Hamtramck High School echoes a larger trend of a strong Bangladeshi presence in Hamtramck politics. This dominance is reflected in the high concentration of Bangladeshi men who serve as councilmen and run for election in local races, and in the active and vocal role some Bangladeshi men take in affairs concerning the city. As noted earlier, Bangladeshi men of Hamtramck are also heavily involved in associational politics, and hundreds of area Bangladeshi men belong to organizations such as the Bangladeshi Association of Michigan and smaller groups devoted to regions such as the Jalalabad Society.11 Yet leadership in these organizations and associations, as well as participation in the city meetings and leadership, is mostly limited to men. When I lived in Hamtramck during 2007–9, I did observe a few Bangladeshi women who were active in the political life of the city, such as a businesswoman who was involved in the city’s Downtown Developmental Authority, female members of particular action groups that were organized by a Bangladeshi city councilman, and a Bangladeshi woman who was heavily involved in the Obama campaign. Since 2017, I have witnessed more examples of Bangladeshi women’s increasing participation in Hamtramck’s formal political organizations. For example, as noted earlier, a young Bangladeshi-Belizean woman named Saiida Miah ran for city council in 2017. In 2018, about a dozen Bangladeshi young women participated in a OneHamtramck committee to create a large Bangladeshi mural in the city, and one Bangladeshi woman had a permanent role on OneHamtramck’s board. But, during the time that I carried out the bulk of my research in Hamtramck, I did not observe many Bangladeshi women formally participating in municipal politics or the city’s formal political or civic groups in this way. It

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remains to be seen whether the gender lines of political participation in Hamtramck will continue to blur as the younger generation of Bangladeshi girls who have become accustomed to taking leadership roles at school attain majority age. Perhaps Namira’s taking on a summer internship at City Hall, Saaida Miah’s 2017 campaign, and the dozen or more Bangladeshi young women who worked with OneHamtramck together are a harbinger of Bangladeshi American women assuming a more active role in the political life of the city.

Conclusion This analysis of Bangladeshi women’s embodied and locational civic purdah practices in Hamtramck details women’s activities and perceptions in a range of different settings, while demonstrating how practices in each arena reflect a unifying logic that defies mainstream notions of the public/private divide. The embodied civic purdah practices described here relate to the flexible way that some Bangladeshi women across generations negotiate dress and proximity in their interactions with Bangladeshi men. The examination of locational practices shows how certain gender separated spaces are set up and maintained, such as the older women’s mosque and halaqah spaces, or regularly crossed with impunity, such as at weddings and in volunteer work. These dynamics reflects the malleable nature of gender boundaries as well as the limits of this flexibility. They demonstrate the way that some community members make collective efforts to be inclusive and accommodating to a range of different styles of gender separation within the same spaces, such as at Tajlia’s wedding, but also how other spaces are considered inviolable when it comes to gender boundaries, such as certain worship spaces. The discussion of women-only gatherings focused on those taking place in mosques and home-based halaqahs. Within this context, I have emphasized generational differences in religious gatherings and pedagogy styles. By comparing Bangladeshi and Yemeni youth leaders across this chapter and the last, I have aimed to illuminate certain parallels between the experiences of young women from each community, and to emphasize how young women are initiating a kind of religious practice that crosses ethnic lines. The discussion of Bangladeshi young women’s

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locational practices at Hamtramck High School has shown how teenage daughters reference and refashion the gender separation strategies practiced in other places in the community, in ways that open new social and political possibilities for them while remaining rooted in civic purdah. In tandem with the prior two chapters, this chapter has demonstrated how Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck are renegotiating conceptualizations of the public-private divide through their ongoing interpretive and explorative spatial practices while remaining centered in an Islamic or Islamicate framework. Bangladeshi and Yemeni Muslim women in Hamtramck are self-consciously and actively engaged in a process of negotiating their relationship to the urban space, searching to interface with the city and its institutions in ways that match their understanding of religion as well as their needs and imaginations, maximizing their sense of mobility, mastery, and centrality within the city’s public, semipublic, and domestic spaces. Bangladeshi and Yemeni Muslim Americans women in Hamtramck who elaborate variations of civic purdah as a mode of incorporation into municipal life, and those who contribute to the creation of minority-majority public options, such as the Bangladeshi Student Association, All Girls’ Prom, and charter schools, reflect these ideals. In doing so, they advance new agendas of cultural citizenship and help municipal environments and institutions become more democratic spaces that represent and uphold the values of those who participate in them.

5

Prayer Calls and the Right to the City

In a public hearing on April 13, 2004, at Hamtramck’s City Hall, the room was filled to capacity with residents from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Polish, black, Bangladeshi, Yemeni, and Bosnian. The secretary of a small Hamtramck mosque approached the podium to speak: Al-salām ‘alaikum, councilmen and distinguished public. My name is Masud Khan, and I live on 4423 Whalen Street, Hamtramck.1 We are all here as immigrants, everybody comes from other countries. [ . . . ] We must live together. We must look after each other’s problems and try to solve them. That’s how a city becomes great. With respect to that, I am a Muslim and I practice my prayer five times a day, it’s part of our religion. [ . . . ] My request is simply to allow the call to prayer.2

In the historically Polish Catholic city of Hamtramck, the mosque’s request for city regulation of the adhān from loudspeakers was met with expressions of fear, anger, and resistance on the part of some local residents, but was embraced as a civil rights issue by others.3 From April to August 2004, public debate about the mosque’s request rose steadily in pitch, as Hamtramck residents weighed the pros and cons of scripting the adhān into the city’s noise ordinance.4 Local, national, and international media channels reported on the issue in ways that highlighted social discord, prejudice, and confusion, casting the city into an uncomfortable national and international spotlight. Yet the debate over the adhān and the extended legislative process that accompanied it also brought about a productive caesura that afforded room for creative negotiation of the city’s relationship to its expanding Muslim populations.5 An interfaith movement to support the adhān challenged and changed conceptions of Hamtramck city spaces. A series of “public ritual events,”6 hosted by the interfaith coalition, worked to figuratively re146

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construct boundary lines between Muslims and non-Muslims in the city, “symbolically transform[ing]” and recoding urban spaces by “channeling emotion, guiding cognition, and organizing social groups” (Kertzer 1988, 8). In carrying out these public events and demonstrations, interfaith actors publicly reinterpreted specific histories, hierarchies, and idiosyncrasies of place, sometimes in unexpected ways, to facilitate the incorporation of Muslim newcomers into particular city spaces.

The Hamtramck Call-to-Prayer Debates The adhān, or the Muslim call to prayer, is traditionally broadcast into the streets five times each day in Muslim-majority nations. In the Hamtramck debate, the city council and citizens deliberated the introduction of noise ordinance legislation that would “permit” and “control” the sound. By analyzing debates over the call to prayer using a practice-based approach to space-making that focuses on the way expressive forms affect the spatiotemporal order and how different groups interpret and negotiate the meanings associated with them, we can see how some of the Hamtramck residents became, to borrow Henri Lefebvre’s concept, rhythmanalysts in their own rights as they entered these debates (2004, 19). The call to prayer changed the city even as the debates added new meanings to the call to prayer. By again taking a practice-based approach, we will explore the broadcasting of the call to prayer as an expressive form that affected the spatial order for both Muslims and non-Muslim city residents. Over the eighteen months I lived in Hamtramck for fieldwork from 2007 to 2009, I immersed myself in the city’s everyday life and documented my sensorial experiences. Interestingly, in doing research on callto-prayer debates that preceded my fieldwork by four years, I found that some Hamtramck residents had been engaged in a similar process of selfreflection about their sensory engagements with the city.7 Residents addressed city rhythms in detailed, self-conscious, and analytic ways. They drew on their own visceral reactions to diagnose the call to prayer as eurythmic or arrhythmic in relation to the already-established polyrhythmia of the city (Lefebvre 2004, 20). Some asserted that the new city rhythms represented by the call to prayer produced a pathological state, both in the self and in the city. Others countered that these new rhythms had a vitalizing effect—again, interestingly, both for the self and for the city.

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Urban Sensorium Charles Hirschkind’s human sensorium, which he defines as “the affects, sensibilities and perceptual habits” of particular “discreet listening publics” (2006, 9), can help make sense of connections between embodied, sensory, and social dimensions of urban spatial change.8 The concept of the urban sensorium highlights the production of shared and collective sensory experience and interpretive repertoires that invest the sensorium with meaning based on a history of interactions.9 In Hamtramck, the call to prayer was rehearsed, invoked, described, and repeated many times during the debate as the city engaged in a shared listening practice through which it defined itself collectively in relation to the sound, whether for or against it. For theorists such as Hirschkind and Lauren Berlant, there are certain qualities related to the act of collective listening that bind listeners together.10 Building upon Hirschkind’s 2006 work, for Berlant, a frisson (a strong and sudden thrill of excitement) may accompany the act of listening together, which “can involve, like love or any attachment, the surprise of discovering that one has already entered into an intimate relation whether or not one remembers intending [to do so]” (2011, 341). Elaborating on Hirschkind, Berlant observes: The feeling tones of the affective soundscape produce attachments to and investments in a sense of political and social mutuality that is performed in moments of collective audition. This process involves taking on listening together as itself an object/scene of desire. The attainment of that scene produces a sense of shared worldness, apart from whatever aim or claim the listening public might later bring to a particular political world because of what they have heard. (341)

Besides outward divisiveness, the call to prayer also led to new intimacy between neighbors, based around this period of listening together and collective reflection on auditory experience. Here, we will consider how sustained shared listening achieved a sensorial incorporation of Muslim difference within the center of the city, regardless of the outcome of the referendum vote.

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The Democratic City Five times a day, seven days a week, the adhān, customarily sounded both inside and outside mosques, calls Muslims to prayer. In Europe and North America, the right for Muslims to externally broadcast the adhān is often contested on local and national levels (Allievi 2009, 50; Cesari 2005a). In some North American and European cities, the schedule of the adhān is adjusted to conform to what are understood to be waking hours, and mosques may be required to refrain from sounding the first and last prayer calls of the day during months when daylight hours are short. Since the external broadcast is not an obligatory part of the religion, some mosque officials in European or North American cities take it upon themselves to restrict it altogether as a precaution against angering the community (Allievi 2009, 50). For some Muslims, including a vocal majority in Hamtramck, the adhān constitutes a significant mode of marking space. During the callto-prayer debates, some Muslims described it as a transnational sound, connecting them to countries of personal or ancestral origin. It also represented the achievement of a strong, connected, and self-consciously constructed Muslim community in diaspora.11 Much as church bells are thought to define a parish (Corbin 1998), when the adhān reaches the ears of Muslims, it serves as a reminder of the relationship between mosque and members. Additionally, for some Muslims in Hamtramck, the call to prayer reflected demographic changes in the city, asserting a claim to sound and space based on an ideology of the “democratic city” (Amin and Thrift 2002), or a city in which important landmarks and “soundmarks” represent and reflect its people (Lefebvre 1996; Young 1990). At a public hearing on April 13, 2004, for the proposed ordinance,12 one African American Muslim man noted: The adhān has been going on for many years, long before any of us were even here. It has been practiced for maybe fifteen hundred years. So for them to try and hinder us from being able to practice that [here] would cause a feeling of oppression in our hearts. In a country that claims freedom for everybody, I think that at that point we would all have to accept the hypocrisy of that. (“Public Hearing” 2004)

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Here and in other narratives, the call to prayer is an expression of a democratic spatial politics, in which different groups are allowed to stake their own claims to city spaces. An elderly Yemeni Hamtramck resident who was also a mu’adhdhin (one who calls the prayer)13 at a mosque just across the Detroit border echoed similar sentiments in his speech at City Hall: Twenty-seven different ethnic groups live in Hamtramck. That is the beauty of Hamtramck. Only what we need is to learn to tolerate and respect each other. [ . . . ] I call the prayer. It is less that one minute and a half. You can’t give your fellow citizens, and your neighbors, for one minute and a half to call each other and to meet? [ . . . ] We have to respect each other, and trust the council [ . . . ]. You know how many times the church bell rings? No one is complaining about that. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

Here, besides the meanings that the call to prayer transmits within Muslim populations, it is also a way for Muslims to define themselves to non-Muslims and a way for non-Muslim populations to respect and accept Muslim neighbors. For Allievi, in European countries, “the adhān’s symbolic value remains unchanged and is perhaps even stronger—as a declaration of existence in the public space, and a recognition thereof, so to speak” (2009, 49). For adhān proponents in Hamtramck, the act of scripting the call to prayer within a noise ordinance would bring the community into greater awareness of its differences and promote a more harmonious whole.

Sound and Belonging In a city without minarets, the adhān in Hamtramck sounds from loudspeakers affixed to the roof of a modest two-story mosque. In addition to calling Muslims to prayer, the adhān also divides the day according to the Islamic calendar. The first call comes in the early morning hours of dawn, as soon as the eye can distinguish between a black and a white thread. The second follows at around noon, the third during midafternoon, and the fourth comes at dusk, when black and white threads can no longer be differentiated. The final call sounds in the evening. The timing of and length between prayers varies over the seasons.

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From al-Islah mosque in Hamtramck, the adhān reaches the adjacent African American–owned Envy Me hair salon,14 the Polish Krot funeral home beside it, across the street to a public school, and onto the city’s main street, even stretching south and east to City Hall when the wind is blowing in the right direction. During its broadcast, it overlays other city sounds, filtering car horns, conversations, hard rock music pumping out of party stores,15 church bells, school bells, car alarms, or the crunch of shovels as people dig their cars from the snow. In summers, it can be heard through the jangling of the ice cream trucks and the polka of Polish street festivals. The call to prayer is accompanied by the sight of men locking their stores and houses before making their way to one of the city’s mosques, whether solo or in groups. As detailed earlier, women walk to the mosques as well, usually in separate groups. Newcomer groups often test and challenge a city’s tolerance for immigrant difference, and sound flows without regard for existing racial and social hierarchies, leveling distinctions between people. Although individuals perceive sound differently, everyone in the same space is subjected to the same thing at the same time, since sound is less containable than visual manifestations of alterity. Perceptions about the unruly nature of sound echoes fears about immigrants themselves, who can be perceived as threatening to drown out the nation (Conquergood 1992, 138; Santa Ana 1998). Familiar ways of compartmentalizing immigrants in the city—such as “the city as mosaic” (Krase 2006, 67), the “immigrant enclave” (Portes and Manning 2005), and the “public versus private expression of difference” (Young 1990)—lose their metaphorical function when immigrant sounds are amplified from the city center. The marking of public space with sound raises acute anxieties relating to the vulnerabilities of the ear.16 Individuals can shut their eyes to visual manifestations of difference, but sound cannot easily be evaded (Schafer 1994, 11; see also Tuan 1977, 15). Moreover, in a cultural reading of the senses, sound or “heeding” sound is associated with subterranean, irrational, and unruly dynamics that can signal the listener’s loss of independence and even their integrity (Hirschkind 2006, 13–14). While “sound phobias” (Schafer 1994, 146) may develop around fears about the potential for audible stimuli to penetrate the individual, some also harbor anxieties about the disruptive effects of sound on the social body of an urban locale and on extant city rhythms.

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In discussions about the call to prayer in Hamtramck, the adhān’s power to inculcate the city with a new dominant sensory experience was sometimes articulated in anti-Muslim terms, joining fears of the unfamiliar with Orientalist fantasies about the incompatibility of Islam and “the West.” Both local and national press and televised media had a determinative effect on the tenor of the debate, presenting Hamtramck with myriad reflections and refractions of itself, while also making the city a site of national and international fascination—and a symbol of a national destiny.17 On a national level, the issue represented the first time in US history that a municipality would create legislation to specifically regulate the call to prayer. Although the adhān has been sounded in US cities at least as far back as the 1980s,18 the adhān had never before been named and described in city legislation.19 Typically, the adhān attracts municipal attention only when residents living near a mosque bring complaints to City Hall. But in Hamtramck, the adhān debates also represented the first time in the city’s history that its sizable and ethnically diverse Muslim population would come out on the municipal political stage to define itself as a unified, rights-seeking community. Indeed, it was not just the adhān that was at stake, but the official regulation of Muslims’ “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996) that drew negative attention. The proposed regulations over sound, which would have afforded the city a great deal of control over the adhān, represented a contract of recognition between Muslims and the city government that raised anxieties about Muslims’ incorporation into the municipality. Here, the right to produce public sound and rhythm was linked to communitarian-based senses of belonging within city spaces, articulated in an exclusionary way by some residents and inclusively by others. The mosque’s request for the city council to legislate the call to prayer was a demand for the “right to the city,” calculated to move the mosque from the periphery to the center (Cesari 2005a, 1020). Not only would the call to prayer be marking the urban soundscape from a central site of commerce, but also the legitimacy to do so would be scripted into the center of municipal power at City Hall. In “The Right to the City,” Lefebvre emphasizes the historical importance of the urban center as the site “between the church and the market” (1996, 169); in the modern city, the center stands as a site of power and privilege.20

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It’s Our Right, Anyway Hamtramck mosque leaders repeatedly asserted that sounding the adhān was within their constitutional rights; they sought city mediation to be good neighbors. As the mosque secretary explained: We could have done this without permission as some of the other mosques are doing. But as good citizens of Hamtramck, we tried our best to work with the community, to be legible and do the right thing for the city of Hamtramck. [ . . . ] Muslims, Christians, Jews, we are all together in Hamtramck, we are trying to get this thing passed for every religion. So everybody can be benefited by this law. Please be calm.21 (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

One Detroit Free Press reporter compared the “recent immigrants from Bangladesh” who made the request at City Hall to “a naive Jimmy Stewart in ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’” (Crumm 2004). Rather than unilaterally imposing the sound of the call to prayer on the city, mosque leaders trusted the city to mediate and to limit the rights to the adhān in accordance with community standards. The interpretation of the Muslim group’s stance was also reflected by the unanimously supportive city council.22 Yet many people and press reports consistently represented the debate as one over the “right for the mosque to issue the call to prayer” rather than over the city’s regulation of the adhān. Some opponents claimed that the call to prayer represented a form of proselytizing, and they believed that the constitution incorporated some kind of First Amendment right that protected them against proselytizing. Opponents also represented the amendment as giving preferential treatment to Muslims over Christians. These interpretations resonated with people’s expectations and understandings of the law and its relationship to religious minorities. Like other religious sounds, in the US the call to prayer is afforded the highest level of protection under the First Amendment as protected free speech. As Laura Barnett explains, “[e]xcept where serious issues of individual safety or public order” are in question, it is generally assumed that religious symbols will be “granted free reign in the public sphere

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both by legislation and by the courts” (2008, 8). In contrast to the situation in some European countries like France, which actively enforce secularism by curbing religious expression in public and official spaces, US secularism, with its attendant ideology of pluralism, is intended to accommodate religious expression, regulating when needed in an ostensibly neutral manner.23 Accordingly, ruling authorities are tasked with striking a balance between the rights of individuals and communities to express themselves, and the rights of others in the vicinity who may be disturbed by these expressions. Due to sound’s fluid quality, its regulation is constantly in flux and subject to debate. Since sound levels are only meaningful relative to the level of background noise—and because sound cannot be properly understood outside its context—issues pertaining to technical aspects of sound regulation are most often left for municipal agencies to arbitrate. When it comes to questions concerning the details and technicalities of sounds, municipalities have the right to set limits on the type, duration, and volume (quantitatively or qualitatively interpreted) of public expressions through local noise ordinances as long as they do so “with neutrality” and “within reason” (Schafer 1994, 8). Thus, within the Hamtramck call-to-prayer debate, references to the First Amendment “neutrality clause” played a key role. Self-identified nonreligious person Bill Meyer’s24 statement on the opposition to the call to prayer made an indirect link to the “neutrality clause” that shows how influential—and yet slippery—this clause can be: My name is Bill Meyer, on [X] Street. I apparently represent a minority in the city here. I am not a Christian, and I am not a Muslim. [Laughter from those assembled.] However, I do believe in the freedom of religion. And I believe that everyone has a right to practice their religion as long as it doesn’t offend anyone else. I came to this town because of its diversity. And I look forward to learning about other cultures, other religions. And I think if we can find a way to live together, that would be the greatest thing. I do recognize however that this is more of a noise issue than it is a religious issue or an ethnic issue. In my mind, I don’t care what kind of noise it is, whether it’s bells, whether it’s buzz saws, or my neighbor’s dogs, whatever it is. When I try to sleep, and I get woken up, I get offended. Not because of religion, not because of ethnicity, but because of the dogs

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in my neighbor’s yard, they are not controlled. So as long as the council takes into consideration the volume, and the factor of the annoyance that it may cause in any specific situation, it’s going to be a beautiful sound. Church bells are beautiful. And when we hear it [the call to prayer], we will think of our brothers and sisters that came here from war-torn countries and poverty, and they came here to find a new life. So good luck everybody.

Given the history and social context in Hamtramck, it’s easy to see how neutrality would be an appropriate line of argument. Al-Islah mosque is located directly across the street from an old, large Catholic church that rings the hours, like many Hamtramck churches. Sometimes these church bells ring out very early and very late. Mass or music is also sometimes amplified from the churches and through the streets on holidays, yet as far as my search into municipal public records revealed, no attempt was ever made to regulate these sounds.25 In the adhān debate, Hamtramck’s church bells thus became a major point of focus. Many who took part in the debate either for or against the call to prayer hinged their arguments upon similarities or differences between the adhān and the church bells, in terms of their function, meaning, and sound qualities and their compatibility with what was understood as a “secular” ideal. Taking the principle of neutrality into question, the Bangladeshi mosque leaders who requested the adhān regulation believed in their constitutional rights to broadcast the call to prayer at as least as loudly and for as long as the church bells that had been ringing through Hamtramck for decades. Furthermore, in making this request, the mosque leaders were also cognizant of a second factor that might work against their claim to issue the call to prayer with impunity: Ordinance no. 434, which imposed a blanket restriction on the amplification of any and all sounds in the streets of Hamtramck along with a wide range of other noises.26 According to some critics, legal experts, and the consensus of Hamtramck’s city council, Ordinance no. 434 was flawed and probably unconstitutional due to its vagueness (Clark 2004). Furthermore, Hamtramck was often filled with unchallenged amplified sounds, from polka music broadcast in the main street during heritage festivals to hard rock anthems spilling out of corner stores. Council members reasoned that

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if they used this ordinance to restrict the call to prayer, they would be establishing a precedent for its use against not only church bells but the sounds of lucrative city events. The city responded to the mosque’s request by drafting Ordinance no. 503 to amend the original noise ordinance to significantly empower the municipality.27 As then–city council president Karen Majewski28 explained: What this ordinance does is give the city a mechanism to regulate [religious sounds]. [ . . . ] Before this, there wasn’t even an opportunity to regulate. Now we can say, “These are the hours.” Before, they could have done it any time they wanted, at any level. Now, we can say, “Only between these hours.” And we have the right to tell you: “You have to turn it down, you have to change the direction, you have to stop amplifying.” We have a way now legally for us to regulate. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

The amendment freed religious sounds like the call to prayer from the unconstitutional blanket restriction imposed by Ordinance no. 434, while at the same time subjecting the call to prayer and other religious sounds to specific, strict municipal regulation and discretion. The amendment regulated the hours and duration of the adhān, church bells, and other religious sounds, and gave the city powers to arbitrate complaints and issue decisions about the resolution. This included the ability to prohibit the adhān in the city—a highly significant and until now unheard-of power in any US municipality. While this amendment thus put Hamtramck on the map as the first city in the nation to formulate legislation that specifically allowed the adhān, it is also made it the first and only city that gave the municipality the power to terminate it. So while adhān proponents praised the ordinance as the best means of protection for minority sound, legal experts and critics pointed out the ways the new ordinance was fundamentally flawed and potentially problematic.29 In allowing for some specific kinds of amplified sounds (call to prayer, church bells) but not others, Ordinance no. 503 introduced an undeniable bias into city legislation by differentiating religious from nonreligious sounds and giving preferential treatment to organized religious groups over secular organizations and individuals. Some

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critics pointed out that this was a violation of the equal protection clause stating all people should be treated equally by the law, disregarding factors such as race, creed, color, or religion. Other critics argued that the ordinance afforded the city far too much power, granting the council members sole authority to legislate as well as judge noise offenses and execute decisions pertaining to infractions. Critics suggested that a new ordinance be created in which the regulation of all sounds, whether religious or secular, would be codified equally and in which executive and judiciary power would be shared with other municipal offices. These concerns were significant to legal experts and a small number of local community activists who were vexed by the way in which the legislation was prepared and by the potential effects of such legislation on freedom of expression in Hamtramck. However, these critiques either never came to the attention of, or were brushed aside by, most people who were engaged in the realpolitik of the debates.

Request and Referendum The Hamtramck adhān debate can be traced to August 16, 2003, when then-mosque president Abdul Motlib sent a letter to City Hall asking the city council to consider amending Hamtramck’s noise ordinance to allow the Muslim call to prayer (Motlib 2003a). The first request was dismissed in 2003; the city attorney found that the adhān would conflict with the existing municipal noise ordinance (Sobota 2003).30 On December 28, the mosque president issued the letter again in order to make a more felicitously timed request (Motlib 2003b). Its receipt coincided with the first meeting of the recomposed council that included newcomer Shahab Ahmed, the first Bangladeshi and Muslim member of Hamtramck’s city council. The first mention of the December 28 letter appears in the council meeting minutes of January 6, 2004, the first session of Ahmed’s term. It was passed to council members at the same time as invitations to a party to celebrate Ahmed’s election, and read within the council chambers the following week.31 This time the letter got more attention. Council members and the city attorney looked closely at the noise ordinance in question. It was not the adhān request but the noise ordinance itself that was found to be unacceptable. Led by Ahmed, the council began discussing and draft-

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ing an amendment that would allow for the broadcasting of the adhān and other religious sounds and provide the city power to regulate them. This process took place from February to April 2004, during which time the city council finalized draft copies of the amendment prepared by the city attorney. On April 13, the city hosted public hearings about the amendment so that residents could express their opinions before the council voted on the new ordinance the following week. The first, second, and third readings of the ordinance took place on April 13, April 20, and April 27, and many people expressed their opinions on it. These meetings were telecast and videotaped. People crowded into the council chambers, and public comments lasted from two to three hours on each occasion. On April 27, 2004, the ordinance passed through council, having been carried unanimously. On May 6, the city officially published an amendment to the noise ordinance.32 The ordinance was due to go into effect on May 25. Al-Islah began to make its plans to issue Hamtramck’s first municipally regulated call to prayer on the following Friday, May 28, at noon, the time of the week in which the greatest number of Muslims congregate to hear the khutbah and engage in collective prayer. The issue, however, was far from resolved. During the city council meetings of April 13, 20, and 27, former city council clerk and longtime Hamtramck resident Robert Zwolak, a Polish Catholic, reiterated his position that the noise amendment should be a matter for public referendum rather than the decision of the council alone. After the passage of the amendment on April 27, Zwolak led a repeal campaign to bring the ordinance to a referendum. By May 18, three weeks later, he furnished City Hall with a petition signed by 623 people, which nullified the amendment and forced the issue into public referendum (Zwolak 2004). In public statements, Zwolak explained his position in the repeal campaign as anti-noise rather than anti-religion (Singer 2004). During interviews with residents four and five years after these events, most of the people I consulted, both Muslim and non-Muslim, took Zwolak’s actions at face value and resisted labeling his repeal campaign as discriminatory.33 Rather, his stance was generally understood to be “anti–Solidarity party.” The Solidarity party was the relatively new, multiculturalist, local political party (of which Ahmed was a part) that had supported and crafted the amendment. According to the perspective of Hamtramck Muslims I interviewed, Zwolak’s criticism and his action against the noise

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ordinance amendment legislation, as well as that of his followers, is better viewed as an expression of political rivalry within the context of Hamtramck’s political history rather than as opposition to Muslim religious sounds. Nevertheless, Zwolak’s campaign became the rallying point for anti-Muslim sentiment, and was partially overtaken by a language of bigotry disparaging Muslims, as I explore in the following section. With Zwolak’s petition, the noise ordinance amendment was suspended until the referendum vote, scheduled for July 20, 2004 (Bukoski 2004).34 Mosque leaders decided to begin issuing the call to prayer anyway. Moreover, they pledged to continue the practice regardless of the referendum vote. So although the petition campaign didn’t stop the adhān from being sounded, it extended the ordinance debates for an additional three months.

Not in My Ear While many non-Muslims in Hamtramck supported the noise ordinance amendment and expressed empathy for its Muslim proponents, some sorely resented the Muslim bid for an amplified presence and the attention it generated. Others portrayed Muslim and non-Muslims in Hamtramck as having enjoyed exemplary relations until the Muslims stepped over the line, upsetting the proper balance between public and private space. This is reflected in the narrative of Anna Dembrowski, a senior Polish Catholic woman who spoke at City Hall: I live in the middle of Bangladeshi people. They’re lovely people [ . . . ] and I see them pray through the door in the summer time. They are avid, they love their God. And I admire this. But they don’t say, come into my living room, and pray with me, nor do I tell them, come into my living room and pray with me. And that is how it should be. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

Here Dembrowski claims that by issuing the call to prayer, Muslims in Hamtramck were obliging her to participate—even if only auditorily—in their religious practice. As Dembrowski imagines it, this group prayer would take place in the living rooms of homes, implying an uncomfortable intimacy and crossing of boundaries.

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As Dembrowski’s narrative suggests, even though the adhān was to be broadcast no longer or louder than the church bells, opponents of the call represented the call to prayer as disturbing and threatening the social order. One speaker at City Hall explained: I respect the Muslims, their religion, their God, but I don’t have to hear their God praised in my ear five times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And where can I go? I was born here! You want me to go? It’s my country, too, just as it is yours. I have no malice for any of you, I just want my rights also and that is to adore my God in my own home and not have to listen to a God I don’t believe in. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

Besides its perceived capacity to chase the Christian faithful away, others dwelled upon the capacity of sound to invade private houses, detailing how the call to prayer would traverse the sanctity of the front porch and living room and seep into bedrooms. The call to prayer was also represented as out of sync with the natural rhythms of sleeping and waking. The adhān schedule was represented as unpredictable and illogical in contrast to church bells that chime in perfect sync with the hours—the Gregorian, Christian, publicly sanctioned form of keeping time in the city that is synonymous with the Western calendar. Some arguments against the call to prayer assumed further rhetorical force by relying on a set of divisions between “immigrants” and “Americans,” between Islam and “the West,” and between Hamtramck’s older Polish Catholic population and the expanding Bangladeshi and Yemeni communities. At City Hall, another elder Polish Hamtramck resident stated: My parents came as immigrants with their beliefs and their traditions and now I’m being asked five times a day to listen to someone else preaching or calling out a prayer to their God. [ . . . ] I do not want [voice rising] this noise to be invading my privacy and the sanctity of my home. [ . . . ] And if this council passes this noise ordinance then you are going against the Constitution because you are not giving me the right to force my religion on somebody, you are forcing their religion on me. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

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In this narrative and others, speakers identified the call to prayer as in itself coercive to non-Muslims. That the message would be in Arabic and therefore not readily comprehensible to most Christians did nothing to assuage these fears. According to one account: They’ve made sure that you understand what they’re saying in this foreign language, [ . . . ] being “Allāh is great” four times in the very beginning of it, and “Come to prayer,” and “We believe Mohammad to be his only prophet.” It’s disgusting, and it’s just absolutely intrusive upon everyone’s rights that this takes place. (Groening 2004b)

Others presented the incomprehensibility factor as another main point of argument against the adhān. In these formulations, exposure to an unfamiliar, heterogeneous linguistic soundscape was construed as a negative experience, presented as provoking frustration and anger in the listener. The perception of language difference as “parasitic” or otherwise contrary to the unity and prosperity of the nation underlies the “intense reactions frequently expressed to public recognition of languages other than English” (Urciuoli 1996, 16). Yet these negative associations with foreign languages superseded the familiar “English only” nativist logic to index the particularly stigmatized status of Arabic in the post-9/11 consciousness (Hirschkind 2006, 17–18): How sad, another thing to remind us of 9/11. The thought of a broadcast over loudspeakers of calling Muslims to prayer five times a day will only make me think five times a day of 9/11. If the church bells bother the Muslims, they should move out in the country, where they can build their mosques and broadcast all they want. (Detroit Free Press 2004)

In these narratives, the call to prayer and, by extension, Muslims were coded as un-American. Several speakers at the hearings described Arab immigrants’ countries of origin as un-American and anti-Christian. One speaker suggested, “If we were to go to an Arabic country and try to establish a religious foothold there we would be treated like dirt. We would be looked on as the American insurgents.”35 In this way, some speakers constructed a war between Islam and “the West” during the

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debates, a sense of two distinct and hostile cultures and worldviews that could never exist in the same place. Here and in other addresses, the call to prayer was constructed as a “matter out of place,” a kind of social “dirt” or polluting agent that spoiled the purity of an imagined homogeneity in the national soundscape (Conquergood 1992, 134; Douglas 2002, 2, 164). The call to prayer was represented in some accounts as a powerful force spilling over its rightful boundaries. According to one speaker at a city council meeting: If there are five mosques in the city36 and each one of them wants to have the call to prayer at the same time, you are opening the city up to a cacophony of sounds that would be enough to drive anyone crazy. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

Another speaker extrapolated from the city to the nation: I believe strongly in what the other people have stated here, tonight, that we are setting a precedent, not only for what we will have to have here as a community, but for what we as a nation will have to open up the gates to. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

At a subsequent council meeting, a speaker elaborated: And I’m here because if it passes here, it’s going to be passing everywhere. I wonder if the city is prepared for every religious organization that is out there, including the Satanists, including the Wiccas [sic], and what happens after we get through with the religious organizations—the civil groups, use your imagination, imagine the civil groups walking down the street, using a bullhorn, 365 days a year, spewing out their garbage. Think about that before you pass this. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

The association between the adhān and pollution relies on a familiar set of anti-immigrant conflations. Following this logic, the call to prayer is polluting because those who produce it are people out of place (Conquergood 1992, 137; Stallybrass and White 1986, 38, 107)—here, improperly assimilated foreigners who will not give up public expression

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of their religion. Flood, pollution, and disease metaphors are usually associated with fears of the impoverished newcomer economic migrant (Silverstein 2005). Yet, as detailed earlier, some incoming Muslims, particularly the Bangladeshis in their second migration from Queens, New York, are seen as a relatively moneyed people with more resources in comparison to the average Hamtramck resident. People may associate Americans who originate from non-European nations with poverty regardless of their actual economic status. In the case of Hamtramck and other US urban locales with similar demographic situations, however, Muslims may be “othered” not so much due to fears linked to economic neediness relative to their neighbors, but because they are unwilling to part with their public religious traditions and, in this way, threaten to upset cherished ideologies about what it means to be “American.” Most critics of the call to prayer in Hamtramck were thus careful to point out that they did not question the right of Muslims to inhabit the city, and some related that they considered the Muslims in the city as good friends and neighbors. It was only when Muslims overstepped certain lines by insisting on a municipal-level recognition of their religion and incorporation of its signs that the welcome mat was pulled out from under them, in line with the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” dynamic elaborated by political scientist Mahmood Mamdani (2004) and others (Cainkar 2009; Cesari 2005b, 46). Implicit within such messages was a warning that the welcome had its limits, and would only be extended if Muslims in the city, and by extension in the US, did not attempt to mark or “dominate” public space.

Jesus Is Quiet In contrast to Muslim prayer calls, at the public hearings Christian church bells were defended as appropriate sounds for a modern city, rather than frankly religious noise. In its wordlessness, Western melodiousness, and timekeeping functionality, church bells were contrasted with the “intrusive[ness]” (Angel 2004b), “crushing [sound]” (Heim 2004), and “bombardment” (Kalellis 2004) of the call to prayer. These arguments hinged upon two modes of justifying the church bells while opposing the call to prayer. In one, the church bells are recognized as Christian with a Christian message, thus appropriate for America, a

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Christian-based nation. In the other, it is argued that church bells have become secular. In the former claims, the assumption is that church bells are inoffensive even though they are a specifically Christian sound, because they blend with established norms. In these narratives, church bells are naturalized: “I do not impose Jesus on them because He’s quiet. [ . . . ] Jesus calls in a quiet, gentle voice—He doesn’t have to blare over a PA system to call His followers” (Groening 2004a). Others argue that even though church bells were once understood as specifically Christian, they have now become such a customary, traditional feature within American cities that they have lost their religious specificity. This argument is capped with the claim that since church bells carry the function of marking the hours, they are now merely utilitarian sounds: My name is Mary Urbanski. I have lived in this city all of my life, I am 48 years old. I have never heard any ethnic group complain about the bells that tell time from the churches. Excuse me, the bells are music, this is not somebody screaming over a loudspeaker as a call to prayer. [ . . . ] You can’t even hear the bells ringing anywhere. They signal a mass time, they signal noon, when it’s time for lunch—this is not just a call for prayer, this is “what time is it.” (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

Furthermore, even if recognized as religious sound, church bells are assumed to be appropriate because America should still be considered a Christian country, and public space should be open only to Christian symbols. Urbanski continues: This country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. We are not a Muslim-based nation. [ . . . ] And let’s face it too. The churches have been here for almost one hundred years. St. Florian will be celebrating its hundredth anniversary in 2008. [ . . . ] I want you to remember that we have been here all of our lives and we have rights too.37 (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

Some speakers expressed resentment toward the “secularizing forces” that eliminate Christian signs and symbols from the public sphere. The

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call to prayer was represented as particularly troubling because some Christian and Catholic groups feel constrained by public restrictions on nativity scenes, school prayer, and representations of the Commandment tablets in public space. One local woman said: Everyone keeps talking about their rights. The rights of Christians have been stripped from them for the last thirty years of this country. And you are doing the same thing. This [City Hall building] used to be a Catholic hospital. With a cross. With the Ten Commandments. Bibles, with prayers, but it’s now a city building, and you cannot, by law, allow any religious artifacts, or any religious undertones to take place in this facility. Yet last week, there was Muslim prayer allowed downstairs, during the council meeting. I will guarantee you, that if Christians had tried to hold a Bible study downstairs, it would have lasted fifteen minutes. I also guarantee you that if Christians were trying to do what Muslims are doing here, the ACLU would shut us down in seventy-two hours. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

While some assertions about the adhān evaluated the appropriateness of its sound within the national, American soundscape, many others focused on the local particularities of Hamtramck. In some of these, Polish or Eastern European history was emphasized. The call to prayer figures as a wrong note that would interrupt the harmony of its older European populations. In these discourses, the “invasive” sound qualities of the call to prayer come to personify Hamtramck’s Muslim population, with their “discordant” modes of assimilation. They are compared unfavorably to the city’s European immigrants who have allegedly lost the public aspects of their religions in order to assimilate: I’ve lived in Hamtramck all my life over eighty- one years and I have this to say. [ . . . ] The Muslims are allowed to pray in their mosques, there are hardly any cities that face this problem. And I think that the grace belongs on the other side. If you really think about it, intolerance doesn’t come from the few people who object to this, because they have a right to object, but it comes from the other side. Before this, everybody got along. They speak their own language in their homes, they

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teach their children the religion they want, freedom of religion is not denied to them. [ . . . ] Why agitate this entire community? (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

Another Hamtramck resident opined: When you come to this country [ . . . ] adjust to the customs and beliefs of this country. I respect their religion. I respect their faith. But you cannot wear this on your sleeve. [ . . . ] Fifty-two years ago when I came to this country, every nationality lived in their own community, and really, it was peaceful. And now politicians made a melting pot where you can live anywhere you want. That made a disaster. (Angel 2004a)

Arguments like this fail to take into consideration the ways in which many Hamtramck Polish Catholics maintained religious traditions in highly public ways, including Catholic schools, a tradition of visible nuns, myriad church-centered social service agencies, the marking of public spaces with items such as front lawn “bathtub Madonnas” and nativity scenes, Christmas music played in streets and stores, municipal Christmas decorations, observance of Christian religious holidays in school, and Friday fish dinners in many restaurants. It also ignores the city’s support of Catholic symbolism by subsidizing the Polish Day Parade and Paczki Day38 and maintaining Pope Park as a public amenity.39 The Polish Catholic immigration narratives also ignore the ways in which our understanding of American secularism, such as modes of telling time and inhabiting public space, has developed around a sense of Christian normativity and includes a set of Christian-encoded standards for public behavior and expression.

Shared Indignities During the debates, several African American community leaders came to the podium at City Hall to offer a counternarrative to such exclusionary discourses. Some of these were prominent community leaders, known for their engagement in another struggle over urban space: the movement described earlier to gain long-awaited compensation for families forcibly displaced by a 1960s urban renewal project. During the

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call-to-prayer debates, African American community activists linked the call-to-prayer struggle with the forms of discrimination that forced blacks out of Hamtramck, articulating a politics of resistance against the longstanding Polish Catholic domination of the city.40 In one of the public hearings, Beatrice Woods, a well-known African American elder and community leader, constructed a retelling of Hamtramck’s history that foregrounds African American centrality and emphasizes the fact that Polish Catholics were once newcomers to the city as well: My name is Beatrice Woods. To me, this is really a disgrace. The reason I’m saying this is, I was born here on Joseph Campau up over the Thom McAn shoe store in 1925. My parents came here before 1900. And the grounds didn’t have sidewalks, and my parents along with other blacks helped build this city. [ . . . ] When I was in school, many people came from Europe. And the teacher asked us African American kids to help the Polish kids learn how to speak English. [ . . . ] People would come from Poland, with just a cardboard box of clothes, and knock at our doors. My dad and mother would let them in and make a pallet on the floor and let them take a bath and feed them, and take them over to the Dodge brothers to get a job. They wanted to stay on with us, but my father would say, “You know there are rooming houses in the city,” and take them over to the rooming house so they could find a place of their own. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a)

The next week, Woods added: And what is everybody so afraid of? If you have your own religion, regardless, you know there’s many other religions, and people pray to God from the culture they come from, and everybody has their own culture, except the black people, and that’s a fact. Because we were stripped and brought to this country, but we helped build this country. Hamtramck was built by many blacks, because the Poles were not here in the beginning. [ . . . ] I am just telling you, be fair with everyone. One section, just because you may have the largest here in this country, to take away the rights of someone else, is wrong. And that’s what I believe. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

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In line with this critique of exclusion, African American activist and community leader Yvonne Myrick stated, I am a former school board member. I was elected in 2000, and I was the first one elected as a minority since 1924. Listen to me, since 1924. There are many things that have happened to us as a community here in Hamtramck just as Mrs. Woods has stated. I am not here to fight prayer. [ . . . ] But what I want to talk about is this, when the bells stop ringing, when you stop praying five times a day on your knees, don’t jump up, and put your feet on the black man’s neck, as what has been done on this community as Judge Keith declared as “black removal,” and is still not settled yet after thirty-five years.41 So you see that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t fight you as my brothers and sisters, because you are also of a darker race within this community. And you have perhaps felt some of the indignities that we black folk have been through, through the years. [ . . . ] And I hope that all of you see, it’s not about nationality, it’s about prayers to the Almighty God to keep all of our minds together. (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004b)

William Hood, a self-identified black revert (i.e., convert) to Islam also chided call-to-prayer opponents for their hegemonic stance: Just like you today, you have a cell phone, you have internet, you have a regular telephone in your house, you have all different modalities for people to get in touch with you. And you don’t think that God Almighty has that same power that he can call his people in different ways? In the book of Daniel, I think it’s the fourth chapter, Daniel, the same topic came up, in the Christian Bible, in the Jewish Bible. It came up and the council of the people on that day made a proclamation that the people could only pray to the King Nebuchadnezzar. And Daniel went up into his house, and he hollered, “There is no God but God.” OK, so it’s the same thing I see it repeating itself.42 (“Public Hearing” 2004)

Hood links the city’s Polish Catholic power brokers to the Babylonian rulers after the siege of Jerusalem, when the Jews were deported and exiled to Babylon. In his interpretation, the Jews and Daniel represent

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the Muslims being forced to live under a repressive regime, subject to the laws and religion of the dominant Babylonians/Christians. In Hood’s telling, when faced with the erasure and denial of his religion, Daniel shouts out, “There is no God but God”—which also happens to be the second line of the Muslim call to prayer.

In Pope Park In response to proliferating negative interpretations of the call to prayer, other adhān proponents in Hamtramck of various religious backgrounds began to use interfaith vocabulary to invest the call with a message for the dominant Christian majority. A central claim in this interfaith counternarrative was the call to prayer’s equivalence with church bells, that both sounds were calling the faithful to pray to the same Abrahamic God.43 In an editorial, the prominent Polish Catholic elder community leader Thaddeus Radzialowski44 wrote: Let us be clear on the matter: the ringing of Catholic Church bells are a call to prayer. [ . . . ] The first step for both sides [ . . . ] is to recognize that they do share a common belief with each other and their Jewish “elder brothers in the faith” in the God of Abraham. (Radzilowski [Radzialowski] 2004)

Subsequently, Radzialowski set forth the history of the church bells as Angelus bells and insisted on their foremost importance as religious sounds, thus rebutting the secular arguments. Radzilowski continued his efforts by helping to organize a fundraising rally in Pope Park underneath the city’s towering, municipally owned Pope John Paul II statue. The statue itself served as an object lesson for the way Catholic spatial markers are sanctioned and supported by the city. By 2004, the Pope statue had begun to suffer signs of wear and tear, and the municipality could not afford the needed repairs. Radzialowski actively sought Muslim participation in the fundraising and then called together prominent Muslim and Catholic leaders from Hamtramck and the surrounding areas for a ceremonial event in Pope Park to honor the joint effort of the two communities (Swiecki 2004). In the context of the adhān debates, the invocation of a Polish Pope who famously prayed in-

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side a mosque complicated lines some Hamtramck residents had drawn between Muslims and Catholics. After the speeches and communal prayer, participants planted flowers around the base of the Pope statue. The group reconvened at Polonia restaurant, with food donated by its owners and by a local Bangladeshi restaurant called Alladin Sweets and Café. Participants enjoyed a mixed repast to the extent possible, considering that pork is central to Polish cuisine but proscribed by Muslims. This kind of “breaking bread together” is an important component of urban ritual events, with the potential to foster a deep and elemental sense of community between diverse groups of people (Kertzer 1988; Sanjek 1994). As the day’s events ended, Muslims from al-Islah invited the group to visit their mosque, about a quarter mile from Pope Park. During the visit, dozens of interfaith leaders and city residents gathered together inside the mosque to take part in an “Adhān Ceremony” to mark the occasion of the first sounding of the call to prayer since it had been suspended. The ceremony was attended by a number of the city’s most prominent civic and religious leaders. The director of a local Islamic association spoke: If this issue had not been brought up, we would not have been here today, creating a deep understanding and the sharing of both religions. Now there is a feeling of love we are receiving from the other end. (“Adhān Ceremony” 2004)

Victor Begg, a Muslim community leader from a nearby suburb, took the podium: I want to greet all of you with the greeting of peace, with the greeting of our ancestor Abraham, peace be upon you, and in Arabic, al-salām ‘alaikum. [ . . . ] The Holy Qur’an makes it incumbent upon all Muslims to establish cordial dialogue with people of the book, the Christians in particular. [ . . . ] And I want to congratulate the Muslims who made the commitment to work with their Christian neighbors to work together. [ . . . ] Let us repeat Jesus’s call to be good to thy neighbor, and the Prophet Mohammad’s call that to be a good Muslim, your neighbor must be happy with you. (“Adhān Ceremony” 2004)45

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Echoing ideas central to Radzialowski’s editorial, Begg connects Christian acceptance of the adhān with the idea that Christians and Muslims share a common spiritual ancestor in the prophet Abraham, using the Muslim formula “people of the book” (ahl al-kitāb) to rhetorically link the two communities. Then Begg makes a link between Jesus’s and the Prophet Mohammad’s teachings about the importance of relationships with one’s neighbors, thereby stressing the mosque’s movement for adhān legislation as an important and appropriate mode of local community activism from a Muslim or interfaith perspective because it led to interaction among many different community members, which increased familiarity and understanding. Following a series of similar speeches, the Bangladeshi mu’adhdhin approached the microphone connected to the loudspeaker box in the mosque interior. He arranged his hands around his ears, fingers partially fanned out, in the characteristic gesture of calling the prayer. Those inside the mosque, Muslim and non-Muslim, male and female, circled around him. Visiting non-Muslims pressed in close against the mosque’s male daily attendants. The mu’adhdhin took a deep breath and began: “allāhu akbar.” The Muslims among those in the crowd around him murmured the response formula. The slow, rhythmic call and response was punctuated by the quick staccato sounds of press camera shutters. The faces of those gathered around the mu’adhdhin were serious and concentrated as the Arabic words moved through the amplification system and into the city.

The Press in Their Stocking Feet During his address to the mosque assembly, former Polish Catholic Hamtramck mayor Gary Zych, who had traveled from New York for the adhān ceremony, jokingly observed that, like the other mosque visitors, members of the press had removed their shoes before entering the mosque out of respect for Muslim convention: Al-salām ‘alaikum, good afternoon. We have a lot of religious leaders and civic leaders and community people here today to celebrate a very important event. And I think that this is a very historic event in Hamtramck. In my ten years in Hamtramck city government, I’ve never seen

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the press cover an event in their stocking feet, so this is a first. (“Adhān Ceremony” 2004)

Along with the visitors’ willingness to sit on the floor and the Polish Catholic city council president’s donning of hijāb, the removal of shoes indicated a new mode of engagement between Muslim and non-Muslims in Hamtramck. During the adhān debates, this included growing media sophistication with mosque etiquette. The opening of al-Islah was the occasion for changes and preparations for both host and guest. The call-to-prayer debate made al-Islah—primarily a single-ethnicity, Bengali-language, and first-generation mosque—into a space that was more accessible to outsiders, at least temporarily, by exerting pressure on the mosque to quickly compose a public face to address the local, national, and international reporters. Until that point, the main prayer space of al-Islah had functioned in ethnically and religiously uniform ways, and it was certainly an all-male space. Interfaith activists temporarily transformed the space into a multicultural, gender-integrated space of congregation. Other area mosques quickly followed suit. This is a prime example of how the city’s complicated reaction to the adhān debate served as the catalyst for mosque leaders and interfaith advisers to open their spaces, create programs, and organize meetings within the mosque to present a self-conscious, mainstream, and integrationist public image. On July 20, 2004, Hamtramck residents voted in favor of the mosque by a margin of 262 out of 2,662 votes (Associated Press 2004).46 Local papers described a joyous scene outside of Hamtramck City Hall, with people cheering, chanting, and holding up copies of the election results. About a month after the noise ordinance amendment vote took place, the Hamtramck Interfaith Partners held a dinner “in celebration of the Hamtramck Call to Prayer.”47 The dinner, held in the Bosnia and Herzegovina Association Hall, was billed as “A Celebration [ . . . ] Moving on to a Call for Dialogue and New Community.” Speeches by Muslim and Catholic leaders rhetorically linked the “Islamic call to prayer” with a new “call to dialogue” to remind Muslims and non-Muslims in Hamtramck of their community unity, forged in faith, peace, and respect (Buttry 2004).

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Rights and Permissions In his exploration of rights, power, and ideology, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek translates a passage by French linguist and philosopher Jean-Claude Milner as follows: Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission. [ . . . ] A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes [the receiver’s] life easier, which is not nothing.48 (2009, 59–60)

Following these definitions, the Hamtramck noise ordinance amendment was an instrument of permission, rather than rights, for the Muslim-minority community. Yet, as explored by Milner and Žižek, such “permissions masked as rights” are “not nothing” for those who receive them. Understanding what “not nothing” means for Muslim minorities who face political, social, and cultural forms of disenfranchisement in some Western countries points toward the difference between rights and citizenship in an abstract sense (where all members of a nation are considered to be equal) and rights as lived experiences (in which freedoms that are technically granted to all are out of reach for some). The mosque leaders’ decision to handle the issue at City Hall demonstrates how the citizenship experiences of immigrants and minorities take on meaning in an “uneven and complex field of structural inequalities and power relations” (Siu 2001, 9). In this sense, the “not nothing” that emerged from the adhān debate can be understood as reflective of the complex processes of cultural translation and accommodation by which members of minority communities establish cultural citizenship from states of disenfranchisement and stigmatization. Considerations of rights and permissions were central to the interfaith gathering inside al-Islah mosque on May 28, 2004, when mosque secretary Masud Khan handed a key to the adhān speaker system to then–city council president Karen Majewski, a Polish Catholic woman who had donned a hijāb for the occasion. Khan said:

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We have our amplification system locked up. [ . . . ] I will offer this key to our President of the Council Karen Majewski. [ . . . ] She will say, make it loud, we’ll make it loud. She’s gonna say, make it low, we’ll make it low. So please accept this key. (“Adhān Ceremony” 2004)

Along with the municipal regulation of the call to prayer, the transfer of the key demonstrates an exchange of power, in which Muslims had to give up some of their abstract guarantee of rights in exchange for the city’s official permission. The noise ordinance amendment allowed the city to legislate the adhān, including the possibility of prohibition. The city did not have this power before. City leaders used this new power to grant the mosque permission to exercise constitutional rights that they technically already possessed. As such, rather than affording minorities new rights, the noise ordinance amendment movement further solidified dominant majority control over the urban sensorium. In practical terms, the new legislation potentially made the adhān more vulnerable than it had been before. In my interviews with Hamtramck residents, including interfaith movement leaders, most people were glad for the community building instigated by the call-to-prayer debate. However, some were simultaneously critical of the noise ordinance amendment as a piece of legislation that ultimately compromised Muslim freedom of expression. For example, in 2008, about four years after the noise ordinance vote, when I asked a Bangladeshi Muslim community leader if he had been involved in the call-to-prayer movement, he shrugged dismissively: It’s like you and me walking down this sidewalk here, in front of this house. No one questions our right to do it, it’s public property. But if one of us should go up and knock on the door of the house, and ask the people inside if we have their permission to walk on the sidewalk in front of their house, then they might start thinking about it. Who knows, it might end up as some kind of big issue.

Other residents also questioned the necessity of the call-to-prayer movement, stressing that if the city council’s original noise ordinance had been legal in the first place, the whole fracas never would have happened:

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You know what the city council should have said when the mosque leaders came and asked them for permission to broadcast the call? They should have said, by all means have your call to prayer. It’s your constitutional right. It’s not for me to give it to you or to take away. Then, they should have gone ahead and rewrote any part of the noise ordinance that might have been used against them in a quiet way, without bringing Muslims or call to prayer or anything else into it.

Other city residents I spoke to pointed out that the city could have easily resolved the original amendment problem in a less controversial way, without introducing issues of religious identity and/or Muslim minorities’ status. People like this resident, who were particularly cynical about the council and the Solidarity party, described their sense that the local political ruling faction had generated unnecessary controversy out of a simple noise ordinance issue as a platform for advertising their multicultural tolerance—and to increase support close to an election year. The noise ordinance amendment gave the city new powers to regulate and even terminate a mode of religious expression that was constitutionally protected. It made the adhān highly vulnerable to the council’s discretion to determine its volume or even completely suppress it, a power over the adhān that exists nowhere else in the nation today, on any local, state, or federal level. Yet the call-to-prayer debate may have made life easier for Muslim residents in Hamtramck, if only by dint of providing Muslim Americans in Hamtramck a stage upon which to broadcast a sentiment that they shared in the stewardship of the city and the sense of belonging to it. In the twenty-first century, Muslims in North America and Europe are in the process of trying to reconcile abstract and cultural levels of citizenship within various struggles over visibility that often play out locally. The mosque has become a primary site for negotiation of rights and belonging: The mosque not only expresses the presence of a local Muslim community, it also represents the evolution of Islam from the private to the public space. Whereas, in the past, Muslims in Europe were isolated within invisible and private prayer rooms, the mosque openly, publicly and vis-

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ibly marks an Islamic presence. [ . . . ] Every project that concerns the construction of a mosque entails time-consuming processes in which leaders of the Muslim community must discuss and negotiate with local, city, and regional authorities. (Cesari 2005a, 1018)

As Cesari points out, the evolution of the mosque from “invisible” prayer space to a legible and city-regulated institution puts Islam under scrutiny, and often invites censure from the non-Muslim community. The elevated levels of public interest in and concern about mosques, and the readiness with which local communities raise these concerns with municipal authorities, have brought forth new political configurations in which the intricacies and details of mosque establishment and, by extension, the practice of Islam itself become a “subject for urban policy,” thereby generating more scrutiny and judgment by local political cultures than other religious communities do (Cesari 2005a, 1020). Within local configurations, the municipal arena “emerge[s] by default as the principal regulatory and administrative body for Islamic religious institutions” (1021). In other words, in the absence of national-level mechanisms for representing and regulating Muslim affairs, local citizens who debate the mosque at the municipal level currently have a very wide measure of control in determining the norms and forms that public expressions of Islam will take in North America and Europe (1021). The growing power of the municipality vis-à-vis Muslim visibility can result in contradictory effects, working to either suppress Muslim visibility or facilitate Muslim expression. By initiating public debates according to their own agendas, local Muslim groups can turn municipal spaces into forums for expression on their own terms. The mosque leaders who fought for the noise ordinance amendment were fully aware that they already had the constitutional right to issue the call to prayer. But there was more to the issue than the legalities and a technical claim for the unmediated ability to produce sound. The alIslah mosque leaders and their supporters were interested in their right to enter into a contract with the city as a religious minority: regulation as permission was the best possible outcome for the call to prayer. In other words, for Muslim leaders the issue was not merely a desire to produce the call to prayer—it was a desire to be seen and recognized as a unified religious minority community with a stake in the city.

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The mosque leaders chose to deal with this issue by strengthening their relationship with the municipality through the deployment of an interfaith framework, rather than making a claim that their abstract constitutional rights must be accepted without taking responsibility for sustained efforts of cultural translation (Rutherford 1990). Thus, it was not just the city who “used the Muslims” to enhance the reach of its power and a sense of its own largesse. Muslims were also “using the city” as a forum to express their struggle for political inclusion and as a foundation to build and develop social and cultural capital. So, for the Muslims leaders in the city, handing the loudspeaker box key to a Polish Catholic woman wearing a hijāb during an adhān ceremony of their own design was, curiously, an expression of mutual empowerment, control, and incorporation on their own terms.

Conclusion During the noise ordinance debates in Hamtramck, the call to prayer became a polysemic and highly charged signifier. For proponents, it represented an intimate call to worship and/or a diasporic sound reflecting the community’s strength. For opponents, it represented an annoyance, an imposition, an intrusion into urban rhythms that were imagined to be otherwise in sync with one another, and/or a challenge to the Christian and secular normativity of the nation. For Muslims and non-Muslim adhān proponents, it represented public recognition of Islam and/or an expression of American freedoms. Yet within a movement to quell the discord that had erupted over the call to prayer, the adhān also emerged as a symbol of interfaith unity. The object of contemplation and integration during the interfaith movement was a repetitive public sound, which added urgency, immediacy, and intimacy to the accompanying negotiations over space and set the stage for engaging intersubjectivity through the dynamics of listening. Interfaith cooperation played a significant role in negotiating Muslim claims to space in hostile post-9/11 contexts, but it remains to be seen how the use of interfaith logic will condition the advancement of Muslim visibility in the North America and Europe. As noted earlier, there are limitations to the interfaith frame for asserting the rights and claims of Muslims: overreliance on rights could

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hinder the development of a vocabulary with which Muslims articulate claims for space based on a legitimization of their religious similarities with and differences from the dominant mainstream. Yet in Hamtramck, these concerns were outweighed by the highly productive ways in which the interfaith frame was used to facilitate the preservation of the adhān through permission, which had a transformative effect upon the broader Hamtramck community in the way that Muslims themselves were experienced as citizens of the city. By contrast, in Marseille, after many years of bureaucratic struggle and navigating various forms of protest, Muslim leaders were able to successfully surmount enough discriminatory hurdles to lay the cornerstone for a large and imposing mosque in the center of the city (Erlanger 2009). French mosque leaders decided to indicate the call to prayer with a flashing light instead of demanding the right to issue an audible adhān. Because white and green lights were already in use for other official municipal functions, mosque leaders used a purple flashing light. Substituting a visual cue for a sound might lessen the sense of trespass that some Hamtramck residents purported to experience. It turned out to be a moot issue in the end, as the mosque initiative ultimately failed due to legal and financial complications (Carpentier 2017). In Hamtramck, the adhān’s message in Arabic inducts listeners— willing and unwilling alike—into linguistic and temporal modes of alterity within the mainstream urban sensorium. For the city’s Muslim residents, the adhān’s sound qualities and the schedule of its release maps Muslim diasporic space onto the municipal sensorium. Yet in the struggle to legitimate this new cartography, adhān supporters invested the call with a different set of meanings, transforming it from a highly specific Islamic call to prayer to a “call for dialogue,” hailing the entire city. It is novel polyphony for the adhān to call for interfaith, multiethnic dialogue. Following the call-to-prayer movement, its Arabic, Muslim, and Islamicate sound alters the city’s sensorium in a way that is frank, intimate, and, for longtime residents, unavoidable.

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One afternoon in July 2008, my Bangladeshi friend Mujeeb called to invite me to the Polonia restaurant. “A Christian group is coming tonight to help us with some issue we are having with City Hall,” he said. “This is really important to the Muslim community. I think you might want to be there.” A few hours later, I arrived at Polonia’s second-story hall for a meeting about the Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance (HHRO), a piece of legislation meant to protect city residents against discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation. The ordinance was controversial because it incorporated “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression” into its exhaustive list of protected classes, which also included race, ethnicity, age, disability, and many others. The presence of gender and sexual identity categories made it an instrument for extending certain protections to Hamtramck’s LGBTQ community on a municipal level. This was especially significant given the absence of any such county, state, or federal mechanisms for the recognition and protection of these protections for LGBTQ groups in Michigan. The meeting had not yet been called to order. I was introduced to two middle-aged white men dressed in suits and ties, Gary Glenn and Jay McNally, representatives from the American Family Association of Michigan (AFAM), a Christian group. About forty people assembled, the majority Bangladeshi business and community leaders, along with a few Yemeni men, including city councilman Dr. Abdul Algazali. Local Catholic priest Father Andrew Wesley was there, too, along with politician Robert Zwolak, who had instigated the opposition against the callto-prayer campaign back in 2004. Besides Zwolak’s wife, I was the only woman in the room. Following introductions, Glenn began his address by asking everyone’s forgiveness for Algazali for voting in favor of the ordinance, pre179

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suming his vote must have been a mistake: “We have a councilman here with us tonight who voted for this ordinance, but I don’t blame him for that, because these ordinances are always camouflaged, they are always packaged as something they are not.” Then Glenn argued that the HHRO ordinance held no benefits for Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslims as ethnic, racial, or religious minorities: Federal and state law already prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, sex, ethnic origin. So this ordinance has no effect whatsoever on all of those things. In fact, the only thing that it adds new to the law is to equate homosexual behavior and cross-dressing with the color of your skin, and to say they are legal and moral and social equivalents. And that those two are categories upon which it should be possible for any person to be able to quote unquote discriminate against you.

Moreover, Glenn suggested that when the rights of sexual and gender minorities are included together with other minority rights, they work at cross-purposes, making members of racial and religious minorities vulnerable to forms of discrimination enacted by, or on behalf of, newly empowered “homosexuals and cross-dressers.” Glenn enumerated cases in which ordinances like the HHRO had been used to “interfere” with the rights of people of faith to control their environments and institutions. His examples included cases such as one involving single-sex locker rooms and bathrooms in Lansing (Peters 2002; Silverman 2002); the Catholic Charities in Boston being “forced out of the adoption business” when they rejected same-sex couples (Filteau 2006); and the eviction of the Philadelphia Boy Scouts from their offices when they refused to hire “homosexual scoutmasters” (Urbina 2007). Glenn warned that similar things could happen in Hamtramck; even though the ordinance included religious organization exemptions, this claim would become central in the HHRO debates to come. Next, a Bangladeshi American community leader made an address: I just want to point out that most of the people in Hamtramck are religious people, whatever faith they have. Now, with this new law, where are my rights, as a religious person? And, the second thing is custom.

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Custom is always a source of the law. So why don’t we look at Hamtramck culture and history: Polish culture, Catholic culture, and now Muslim culture. I think logically, this is, I am sorry to say, this is wrong here. [ . . . ] They already have rights, I respect their rights. [ . . . ] And I don’t see any discrimination here. [ . . . ] But where are my rights in this new ordinance?

Rhetorically, this speaker linked Muslims and Polish Catholics in the city as like-minded demographics whose shared culture and values would be threatened or curtailed by the ordinance. Additionally, he claimed religion as central to Hamtramck’s civic life as a legacy from Polish Catholics. These points were echoed, elaborated, and vigorously contested during the months of heated debate that followed, and the group that met at Polonia later became known as Hamtramck Citizens Voting No (HCVN).

Ordinance Time The Ordinance to Reaffirm the Natural Rights of Hamtramck Residents, or Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance (HHRO), passed the city council in spring 2008 by a margin of six to one (Carreras 2008). Some residents saw the ordinance as a powerful statement of acceptance and legitimization for LGBTQ groups, in line with values that they described as progressive. Other residents, including self-identified conservative Muslims and Christians, launched an opposition campaign formulated around two beliefs: first, that the ordinance threatened the proper balance between church and state, and second, that it legitimated the public expression of immoral sexuality in the city.1 In interviews, some progressives reported feeling hurt and puzzled by Muslim opposition to the ordinance, since they had expected that Muslims would be allies in any discrimination struggle following the 2004 call-to-prayer controversy discussed earlier, when residents from a range of racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds fought to secure the ability of Muslims to issue prayer calls against those who claimed that this sign of Islam and Islamicate cultures did not belong in the city. HHRO supporters reasoned that the victimization, blame, and vulner-

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ability that Muslims faced during the call-to-prayer movement should make them eager supporters of anti-discrimination legislation. The HHRO debates created an identity rupture between city residents, sundering a range of personal, institutional, and community relationships (Perkins 2010). Chief among those disrupted were interfaith relationships solidified with the success of the call-to-prayer movement, framed in a liberal-secular-progressive mode of valuing plurality and difference. With the HHRO debates, some interfaith leaders united over the call to prayer were divided over gay rights. Accordingly, new lines were drawn, cementing an alliance between the city’s conservative Muslims and Catholics and a coalition among the city’s liberal, progressive religious, and secular humanist activists. The response on both sides of the debate to the urgency of the impending vote shifted the temporal sensibilities of some city residents into a mode of constructing and perceiving time that I refer to as “ordinance time.” During ordinance time, certain behavior norms are set aside in favor of interactions considered more politically expedient. As some residents orchestrated the pace and intensity of the campaign in ways that influenced the tenor of social interactions, the accelerating tempo of ordinance time became the dominant rhythm for some residents in the city, creating discord among people of diverse belief systems who had previously achieved a tentative harmony. My concept of ordinance time builds upon economic anthropologist Jane Guyer’s (2007) ideas about how temporal sensibilities that have become normative under neoliberalism emphasize schemas that afford heightened attention to punctuated time, or ways of apprehending the present and future anchored in timelines imposed by bureaucracies. Given the way ordinances are phrased on ballots, ordinance time may offer little room for ambiguity or alternative ways of engaging people with different opinions. Accordingly, people focused on the HHRO issue as presenting a yes-or-no proposition, resulting in a “for us or against us” mentality. In the earliest phases of campaigning, some residents afforded ample time for discussion and interaction across party lines; they conveyed an eagerness to learn more about opposing perspectives and showed concern for preserving relationships. But as November 4 neared, the rush to avert what both progressives and conservatives viewed as an impending moral crisis influenced some Hamtramck residents to view

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more nuanced or ambiguous perspectives as roadblocks. The resulting shift into ordinance time produced a simultaneous failure on both sides to recognize publicly the way that Muslims against the ordinance might have alternative understandings about same-sex desire not commensurate with Christian-right views.2 Both “ordinary” and “ordinance” come from the Latin term “ordĭnārĭus” connoting “usual, customary, regular.” The Latin root “ordo” indicates a row, a series, or a systematic arrangement (Lewis and Short 1879a; 1879b). For affect theorist Lauren Berlant, “the ordinary” signifies a feeling state tied up with the certainty of repetition that nevertheless is also constantly shifting (2011, 8–9). Aspects of the ordinary—such as how people treat others and deal with visible difference—are sometimes codified and made public in legislation, including city ordinances such as the HHRO. But they are also influenced by, and influence, realms that are considered private.3 In cities, the ordinary thus arises from what Lefebvre termed a “garland of rhythms”—various tempos of actions and interchanges that shape expectations about how everyday life and sequences of events should unfold (2004, 16; see also Stewart 2007, 1–2). Hamtramck’s remarkably diverse “ordinary” includes the expectation of encounters with the unfamiliar, including the call to prayer and new ways of dressing, walking through the streets, worshipping, eating, and celebrating like those practiced by the Yemeni and Bangladeshi communities described earlier. The unfamiliar is ordinary. Hamtramck residents use walking as a metaphor for their perception of the unfamiliar ordinary, employing the term “walkable” (as in “a walkable city”) to describe what they value most about Hamtramck: the slow pace of business as usual, and the ways in which everyday life offers entrées into the worlds of neighbors from distant origins. Ordinance time interrupts the rhythms and referents of the ordinary. During the period preceding the HHRO vote, some residents began to envision the value of their relationships in a teleological way, based on their views of the ordinance. Furthermore, both conservatives and progressives perceived the HHRO as a threat to their conception of the ordinary. Conservatives fought against the codification of LGBTQ identity as a respected political identity; progressives contested the perpetuation of homophobia that an HHRO repeal would express. As residents altered their treatment of each other during the debates, interchanges dur-

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ing ordinance time created rifts within tenuous networks of interfaith and other alliances established during the 2004 call-to-prayer debates. However, shifts in temporal sensibilities that accompany ordinance time do not necessarily carry a negative valence or rend social relations. During the call-to-prayer debates, heightened attention to dates and deadlines—the bureaucratization of time and its associated rush—were also described as speeding up interactional processes between some local Muslims and non-Muslims, but were viewed by many as strengthening interrelations. In contrast to the call-to-prayer ordinance, the HHRO debates more pointedly involved what Hamtramck residents referred to as a nationallevel culture war issue. The HHRO was similar to other human rights legislation ordinances then being debated across the US. The sense of enormity and immediacy that came with participation in national debates led some residents to look outside Hamtramck for cues and to adopt prepackaged modes of homophobic or Islamophobic rhetoric used by national media. This combination of ordinance time, the resonance with culture war issues, and the reliance on outsiders as primary interlocutors predisposed some residents to sacrifice local relationships for what was perceived as a larger struggle.4 Considering the pace and tenor of social relations in this tense period, the HHRO episode demonstrates processes of identification and disidentification between Muslims and non-Muslims in a politicized public space conflict, which shaped Muslim social, cultural, and political incorporation. This multifaceted production of alliances can be read through a Barthian lens as exercises in boundary formation, in which previously overlooked, devalued, or “content-less” forms of commonality and difference between Muslims and non-Muslims took on newly charged salience and meaning in the context of a divisive political struggle (Barth 1969). In contrast to the previous discussion, which focused on territorial and practice-based forms of space-making, here I take a phenomenological approach that emphasizes perceptions and experiences of practitioners. Ordinance time, as a boundless space-making practice free of specific sensory correlates, challenges our perceptions of how public space is organized as well as the meanings attributed to political practice and the formation of collective life. Such an approach allows the possi-

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bility for Muslim or Islamicate space to signify a range of meanings, up to and including the idea of a phenomenologically based seamlessness of Muslim space in Hamtramck. This approach challenges the inherently marginalizing framework in which ethnographic studies of how minority communities’ relationships to dominant space historically have characterized them as fragmented, marginalized, or interrupted.

Protecting Immigrants and Sexual Minorities Together The HHRO was part of a nationwide ideological contestation that had been developing for decades. At the time—as continues today—there were no federal anti-discrimination measures protecting LGBTQ individuals in housing, employment, and public accommodation, with the exception of legislation offering some protections to federal employees.5 Municipalities served as the test ground for national pro-gay and profamily groups in their struggle for influence in a fight that dates back to 1977 (Winick 2002). In Hamtramck, legislated, municipal-level recognition of sexual orientation predated the 2008 HHRO debates. In these earlier cases, as well, the move to create a protected class in Hamtramck for those marginalized by “sexual orientation” took place within the larger context of municipal initiatives concerning the status and rights of immigrants and racial or ethnic minorities. Hamtramck’s 2004 Ordinance Creating a Human Relations Commission established a twelve-member commission composed as equally as possible of members of Hamtramck’s diverse racial, religious, and ethnic groups, with the intent of protecting Hamtramck residents from “all forms of discrimination for reasons including nationality, religion, race, class [ . . . ] and sexual orientation.” Then-mayor Tom Jankowski explained that he drafted the ordinance after witnessing the divisiveness of the call-to-prayer debates. The commission was intended to dispel community tension by fostering preemptive communication among leaders (Jankowski 2004). In 2008, a second precedent for municipal recognition of “sexual orientation” similarly involved an ordinance to protect new immigrants. The Community Participation in Local Government and Local Law Enforcement Ordinance, also known as the Anti-bias in Policing Ordinance,6 banned discrimination in the provision of public services to

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residents while including “gender” and “sexual orientation” as protected identity categories.7 Notably, the main issue at stake in its passage was a measure restricting city employees and police from inquiring about people’s immigration status (Hulett 2008), an issue of significance for new immigrants due to national, ongoing post-9/11 trends concerning the deeply problematic blurring of boundaries between police and immigration monitoring services (Nguyen 2005). According to then–city councilman Scott Klein, the passage of this earlier community policing ordinance with its “sexual orientation” and immigrant protections encouraged him, later that same year, to design the HHRO with protections for sexual and gender minorities. The ordinance banned discrimination based on “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and “gender expression” in employment, housing, and public accommodation. Klein modeled the HHRO almost directly upon Ann Arbor’s Human Rights Ordinance, which had in turn taken Michigan’s Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Acts of 1976 as a model and expanded on it.8 Thus, these municipal-level ordinances effectively “reaffirmed” the protections already provided by the state-level human rights act, while adding the categories of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity/expression,” among others. Nationwide, Hamtramck’s ordinance was similar to legislation with protections for sexual minorities in 150 cities and counties in the US (NGLTF 2011),9 including sixteen other Michigan cities (UPI 2009). Hamtramck’s ordinance also resembled anti-discrimination legislation with transgender-inclusive measures found in a more select set of about 108 cities and counties (NGLTF 2008a; Transgender Law and Policy Group 2010). The passage of Hamtramck’s ordinance also indicated support for a state-level anti-discrimination initiative that would have aligned Michigan with the then twenty-two states offering protections in housing, employment, and/or public accommodation based on sexual orientation; thirteen, plus the District of Columbia, also included protections on the basis of gender identity expression (NGLTF 2009).

Between Church and State As compared to other municipal-level human rights ordinances that had passed in the US over the previous few decades, the ordinance that Klein

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crafted for Hamtramck gave the city powerful enforcement leverage in dispute resolution and arbitration, a further innovation: Hamtramck residents could appeal to the city manager for dispute resolution. The city manager was granted broad legislative, executive, and judicial powers for conflict resolution, including the ability to levy substantial fines and/or bring to court any individuals found to have committed injuries upon others under the ordinance.10 The city manager could call together plaintiff and defendant to enter into conciliation agreements, which—if not fulfilled—would constitute new, further punishable violations of the ordinance. The HHRO also afforded the city manager the means to select and convene hearing panels to help adjudicate cases. It was generally anticipated that these hearing panels would comprise members of the Human Relations Commission, although this was not specified in the ordinance text. Furthermore, the ordinance gave the city the power to “promulgate and publish” additional “rules, guidelines, and procedures for the conduct of its business.”11 For some HHRO supporters, who viewed local dispute resolution and peer intervention as inherently positive, these local means of dispute resolution were represented as compelling and powerful in their own right. In my interviews, supporters represented the hearing panels, in particular, as spaces for local discussion, dialogue, and debate that constituted a truly democratic exercise in community making.12 Those hopeful about advancing democracy did not take into account the fact that the city manager was solely responsible for selecting the members of the hearing panel, which could introduce an unchecked element of bias into the proceedings. Importantly, then, these powers were limited by exemptions for religious institutions: Notwithstanding anything contained in this Ordinance, the following practices shall not be violations of this Ordinance. 1) For a religious organization or institution to restrict any of its housing facilities or accommodations which are operated as a direct part of religious activities to persons of the denomination involved or to restrict employment opportunities for officers, religious instructors and clergy to persons of that denomination. It is also permissible for a religious organization or institution to restrict employment oppor-

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tunities, housing facilities, or accommodations that are operated as a direct part of religious activities to persons who are members of or who conform to the moral tenets of that religious institution or organization.13

Although some of the city’s progressive religious leaders praised the soundness of these exemptions, for ordinance opponents, the twicerepeated “direct part of religious activities” signaled that exemptions for religious organizations or institutions were not total and complete, but rather decided with degrees of arbitrariness and flexibility. In public discourse, opposition leaders devoted significant time to enumerating the ways in which similarly crafted ordinances across the country compromised religious institutional autonomy, in ways they claimed confounded the line between church and state. The church and state divide has been a perennial source of debate throughout US history, subject to contestation and negotiation and characterized by state or municipal intervention and regulation of religious institutions (Hamburger 2002). Yet the solution proposed by the HHRO for handling this relationship vis-à-vis the question of anti– LGBTQ discrimination was perceived as weighing heavily on the side of the state. Indeed, as with the call-to-prayer debates, the city again made a bid for power to act as judge and jury in determining damages and exacting compensation in issues regarding the management of religious institutions. Some residents who found fault with the ordinance on these grounds thus understood joining the fight against it as rallying to protect the autonomy of mosques and churches against an encroaching liberal secular municipality—in sum, as religious rights activism. The rhetoric used by conservative Christian groups in their fight against gay rights legislation has been well documented in scholarly analysis and journalistic reports (Buss and Herman 2003; Herman 1997); in this case, Muslim involvement and leadership brought a novel set of race, class, and religious dynamics to the ideological debate over civil rights issues. At the emerging HCVN Polonia meeting I attended, Glenn and others asserted that the ordinance could be used in Hamtramck to curtail freedoms of faith-based institutions and even to coerce religious organizations to offer services to clientele contrary to their ideologies, since the ordinance could be interpreted as marginalizing their educational,

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social, economic, and social service functions (Miller 2008). For example, the ordinance limited employment exceptions to the hiring of “officers, religious instructors and clergy,” effectively excluding or questioning the rights of religious institutions to control employment choices in other categories, such as church secretarial and janitorial staffs; teachers of academic subjects within Catholic schools; or staff within church-, mosque-, or otherwise religiously affiliated hospitals and charitable organizations. In the social imagination of some Hamtramck Catholics and Muslims, the functions of a church or mosque do not begin and end with the sermons within the church or mosque interior or with the religious instruction within the religious school—they extend into civic functions. In the Muslim community, questions about controlling decision-making structures at mosques and Islamic centers were especially sensitive. Some community members were involved with faith-based institutions that planned long, expansive growth trajectories. Mosque leaders whom I interviewed prior to the HHRO debates had spoken about ambitions to expand these centers into youth organizations, childcare, and other social services for the community. This issue of control over multiuse religious centers acquired further salience with George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, which made such institutions eligible to compete for national and state funding (Office of the Press Secretary 2008). For Hamtramck Catholics, the debate over the extent to which religious institutions should be allowed to conduct their civic and social projects unencumbered by the state or municipality particularly stood out, due in part to their local history, as detailed earlier, of creating “institutionally complete communities” around the hubs of churches (Radzialowski 1974). Despite these concerns voiced by Hamtramck’s Muslim and Catholic communities, a sense of trust and familiarity prevailed in pro-ordinance descriptions of how the city manager would deal with complaints brought through the HHRO and how the hearing panels would work to resolve discrimination allegations. One city official I interviewed dismissed the concerns, arguing that the ordinance kept the best interests of the city in mind: For me, this is a really simple matter. We can intellectualize and contextualize all we want. But in the end, what it comes down to for me, is respect

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for human dignity [ . . . ] and respect and protection of that dignity. And you know we can debate whether this particular remedy will work best in Hamtramck or not; it will probably work as well as any other solution. I can remember in the call to prayer, we had a pretty similar solution actually. Complaints go to the city manager, and the city manager decides how to deal with it. So, you know, to me, the picking apart of those details of how this is going to be enforced I think really misses the bigger point of the message that this ordinance sends.

This “pass first, question later” attitude echoed one frequently expressed in the call-to-prayer debates: few supporters of new legislation were concerned about limiting or carefully defining the city’s new forms of power and control because they trusted that the Solidarity-dominated municipal government would use the ordinance to the benefit of all.14

Muslim Perspectives Besides fears about the loss of religious institutional autonomy, Muslim HHRO opponents described other reasons for their stance. Rafeek Azim, a Bangladeshi community leader who had grown up near Hamtramck, described the Muslim opposition movement as a collective public moral expression tied to religious obligation: Our society is very conservative. [ . . . ] So the biggest reason for the opposition would be the challenge to our faith itself. If these issues [i.e., gay rights] are too much openly discussed or embraced [ . . . ] the community feels in danger of losing their values in the new country. [ . . . ] Islam forbids homosexuality altogether. [ . . . ] So if the city wants to establish something that goes against the religious teaching, then chances are that people who closely follow religion will be against it. [ . . . ] Now, that doesn’t mean that they are going to hate someone who is gay, it just means they are not going to be able to support that ordinance.

In Azim’s interpretation, the opposition movement resists discursive innovation, or the codification of an identity into legal language. This explanation echoes Katherine Pratt Ewing’s findings that “many Muslims are less troubled by sex and desire in all their possible forms

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than they are by the peculiar modern practice of naming our sexualities as the basis for secular public identities” (2011, 90). Similarly, Kecia Ali identifies the “two most salient principles” in normative Muslim ethics regarding nonmarital (i.e., transgressive) sexuality: “that one should not expose sinful behavior, whether one’s own or another’s, and that it is a greater offense to deny certain rules than to break them” (2006, 78). These findings resonate with Azim’s emphasis on minimizing verbal traces of same-sex sexuality in public discourse and life. At the same time, Azim connects the pressure to embrace homosexuality with pressures to assimilate in a way that would cause Muslims in America to lose some of their core values.15 Furthermore, some Hamtramck Muslims explained that they had a religious duty to protect public spaces against expressions of alternative sexuality or gender orientation that contradicted their understandings of the tenets of Islam. They perceived the ordinance as welcoming and accepting different forms of LGBTQ visibility, thus clashing with Muslim ethics and threatening to wipe out community efforts to maintain moral space in the city. Opposition to the ordinance was seen as way to affirm the kind of public culture that Muslims had helped establish in Hamtramck, allowing Muslim communities continue to flourish there, as another Bangladeshi Muslim interlocutor asserted: Islam is a code of conduct. There is a sharp and fine line between politics and personal life. But when something from politics comes and hits my personal life, and tries to squeeze me, at this time we do not think about where is the religious boundary and where is the political boundary. And Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, also said, when you see that there is something wrong going on in your society, you have to speak out, Allāh gave you the voice to say, “Don’t do it, please.” And if you can’t change things with your voice, then you have to leave that place. But we found out that we can say our voice, because the Constitution of America gives us the right to raise our voices in this. So we did that.

Within these narratives, Muslims connected the efforts against the ordinance to a sense of proprietorship and stewardship, Hamtramck as “our place,” a place that is special and irreplaceable for them:

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One reason is our culture is conservative. [ . . . ] And when this ordinance comes up, we think how am going to raise my kids here, how will I live here. As a new immigrant, I have to live here, I can’t go to [a wealthier suburb like] Bloomfield Hills, I have to stay here.16 This is our place, we have to be here, we have to live here, raise a family here in a nice way, we can’t just move away if things change.

One Bangladeshi businessman who had been living in the US since 1989 anticipated particular effects of the ordinance: If this would pass, then definitely those people would think, OK, this is our safe haven, and would start moving here. And they for example would buy the empty house next to me. And my daughter [ . . . ] she is only eight years old, she’s gonna ask me definitely, “Dad, what is this?” What is the answer I’m going to give her? On the first day, she is going to be confused. Second day, she will start following the surrounding. So when my kids will be raised up side by side with those behaviors, definitely they could be influenced by those wrong doings, and I will regret this.

Hamtramck Muslims often represented themselves as tolerant of difference and happy to live among, and blend in, with the great variety of cultural, racial, and religious groups in the city. Yet the inclusion and promotion of LGBTQ visibility signified by the ordinance was coded as going too far and as corrosive to other forms of difference. As one Bangladeshi businessman put it: “Hamtramck is a garden of many flowers. Why are they trying to get rights that will cause them to be dominant in this community?” In this way, some Hamtramck Muslims sought to portray LGBTQ individuals and the forms of visibility encouraged by the ordinance as forces potentially disruptive to normal city rhythms, much as opponents of the call to prayer represented its novel sounds as arrhythmic. Hamtramck Muslims remained largely unified in advancing a conservative interpretation of Islam’s view on homosexuality. The construction of an apparent conservative “Vote No” consensus among otherwise diverse Muslim groups was a complex phenomenon, but Muslims cited the fact that area mosques had publicly come out against the ordinance

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as significant. The pressure exerted on community members to conform was such that even the Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslim city council members who had initially voted in favor of the ordinance equivocated when confronted by opposition leaders, saying that their votes had been based on a misunderstanding rooted in the complexity of the ordinance language. These dynamics were evident during the Polonia meeting, in Glenn’s appeal to forgive Councilmember Algazali for his “mistaken” pro-ordinance vote. Indeed, few—if any—Hamtramck-based Muslims would go on record supporting the ordinance during the months of the campaign. In a city that then had an estimated 40 percent Muslim population, there was a curious absence of LGBTQ Hamtramck Muslim voices in the debates, although ordinance supporters made concentrated efforts to locate and bring them forth. Some pro-ordinance activists mentioned that a few young Muslims from Hamtramck had come out to them as gay and as privately supportive of the ordinance, but they could not be persuaded to take on any kind of public role in the debates. However, gay rights activists discovered several Muslim leaders in Dearborn, Detroit, and surrounding suburbs who publicly advanced a different interpretation of the relationship between religion and homosexuality, which they used to legitimate their support of the ordinance on religious grounds. By cultivating relationships with these self-identified progressive Muslim leaders, the pro-ordinance faction gained official endorsements for their campaign from Muslims working within several state-level Arab American associations, such as the Michigan branches of ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services) and NAYA (National Association for Yemeni Americans). One such Muslim pro-ordinance spokesman was a member of the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission and had once resided in Hamtramck, although he had been living and working in Dearborn for many years. Gay rights activists also found moral support from Muslims online, through internet community-based groups like GLAS and Al-Fatiha Foundation, and from Muslims and Arabs who were representatives of local LGBTQ organizations, such as Affirmations of Michigan.17 I discussed the absence of the queer Hamtramck Muslim voice with Jamal, one of the founders of al-Gamea, a LGBTQ association for Middle Eastern Americans in southeast Michigan. Jamal explained that in the

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region, and even more so in lower-income areas like Hamtramck, nonheteronormative Arabs and Muslims often face an even more restrictive environment regarding the public expression of sexual identity than they had in their countries of origin (Manalansan 2006; Minwalla et al. 2005). According to Jamal, the overwhelmingly dominant attitude of conservatism regarding LGBTQ concerns in southeast Michigan Arab and Muslim communities, and in Hamtramck in particular, had to do with demographic factors such as class, length of time in the US, and the fact that many Arabs and Muslims in the area came from “small villages” rather than cosmopolitan urban centers: Well, that’s why people get freaked out about coming out to their family. They get harassed, or kicked out of the house, or beaten up. [ . . . ] And over and over again it’s the same story. Either take him to the doctor because they think it’s a mental illness, or make him sign up in any army, they think they’re going to make him a man, or take them back to the country where they came from, and just drop them off there, saying, well, there’s no gays allowed there. Buts it’s like, you guys are crazy. There are more openly gay people living in Arab countries than there are here.

Although a strong advocate for LGBTQ youth in the community, Jamal said that he was not interested in mobilizing support for pro-LGBTQ civil rights measures like the HHRO. Instead, Jamal aimed to create social support networks for young, LGBTQ-identified Muslims and Arabs in the area that would maintain the privacy of their identities while meeting some basic needs. For Jamal, involvement in controversial legal struggles would subject his organization and its members to public scrutiny, at cross-purposes to their main goals. As their search for public support from LGBTQ-identified Hamtramck Muslims was frustrated, local ordinance proponents began to seek out and secure official endorsements from LGBTQ-friendly regional progressive Muslim leaders in more affluent areas within Dearborn, Detroit, and the surrounding suburbs. Salman Chowdhury, a powerful progressive regional community leader, represented his own position, while also choosing to speak on behalf of the leaders of his suburban mosque community:

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We are disappointed with our brothers at al-Islah. We think that they are misinformed. [ . . . ] Islamic law is a dynamic practice. It’s not static. Most people I know in Islamic leadership around here [regionally, not in Hamtramck itself] want to separate the two issues—our sharī‘a law and the United States Constitution. Islamic faith doesn’t encourage gay and lesbian relationships, this is not something that is sanctioned. On the other hand, the civil rights and human rights of people need to be respected, regardless. This is my take on it, it’s not what [the Hamtramck Muslim community] thinks. We would like them to think along these lines.

Here and in other interviews with regional progressive Muslim American leaders, a line was drawn between the Muslim immigrants of Hamtramck, who were coded as out of step on this issue, and the majority of area Muslims. Chowdhury also emphasized the need for Hamtramck Muslims to protect social capital gained during the callto-prayer movement to continue forming effective alliances with local progressive partners, including LGBTQ-identified political actors, who he assumed would value and support their needs as immigrants and minorities.18 He lamented how the 2008 campaign aligned Muslims and conservative Christians of Hamtramck with a stalwart anti-Solidarity group known as the “Old Guard”—which had opposed the call-to-prayer ordinance—and against the city’s dominant Solidarity party, authors of the HHRO, and supporters of Muslims’ right to issue the call to prayer.

Conservatism Hamtramck Muslims and Christians often described the AFAM as having “woken up” the city’s religious communities, having “sounded the alarm” for those who were “sleeping” when the ordinance passed. Religious opposition to the HHRO did not begin until the AFAM intervened several weeks after the ordinance was passed. It took only a few more weeks for the nascent Muslim and Christian anti-ordinance group in Hamtramck (which became HCVN) to gather the requisite number of signatures to get the ordinance on the ballot for popular referendum. Operating under the support and guidance of the AFAM and cochaired by a Catholic priest and a Bangladeshi community leader,

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HCVN began a vigorous campaign to sway popular opinion against the ordinance in time for the November referendum vote. This repeal campaign lent itself to the same type of harried, contentious, and extended political debate fomented by the call-to-prayer opposition four years earlier. Yet this time the debate enveloped what many considered a more confusing and troubling set of dynamics: the city’s self-identified pro-immigrant liberal, secular, and/or humanist factions felt divided from the immigrant groups whose interests they believed themselves to represent. Several conservative Christian groups are active in Michigan. Yet the AFAM, an independent subsidiary of the larger American Family Association (AFA), has risen to prominence as the preeminent conservative Christian voice in the state when it comes to efforts to reverse or ban LGBTQ-inclusive measures. The AFA was established in 1977 and had twelve state affiliates in 2008 (American Family Association 2008; 2018). Another conservative Christian organization that played a key role during the Hamtramck debates was the Ann Arbor–based Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), which came on board to work for the “Vote No” movement on a pro bono basis. The TMLC is a national public interest Catholic law firm that, along with its affiliate Ave Maria in Gainesville, Florida, was established in part by Tom Monaghan (Ave Maria University n.d.; Thomas More Law Center 2018a; 2018b). Monaghan is best known as the billionaire Domino’s Pizza magnate. There is a long history of cooperation between the TMLC and the AFA that reflects larger trends of growing cooperation between conservative Catholic and Christian groups over the past few decades (Kirkpatrick 2009). HCVN also fostered sociability and fellowship among the city’s Muslim and Catholic communities as well as external conservative Christian representatives. As with the call-to-prayer debates, sociability was generated by participation in meetings and other activities, which often entailed crossing boundaries into unfamiliar spaces and the sharing of food. For example, the Saint Ladislaus rectory across the street from alIslah was used for HCVN campaign activities, making this central and iconic Polish Catholic church more familiar and approachable to some Muslims. Catholic and Christian activists gathered in mosque meeting halls to help organize voter drives. During breaks, they sometimes sat

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together on the floor of the mosque and shared takeaway curry from the corner Bangladeshi café. In fact, the cooperative bond between Saint Ladislaus Church and al-Islah Mosque, which had lapsed after the departure of longtime pastor Reverend Stanley A. Ullman in 2004, was renewed when its new pastor, Father Wesley, took on a leadership role in HCVN. During the 2004 call-to-prayer debates, Reverend Ullman had become a familiar and beloved figure in Hamtramck’s Muslim communities for his outspoken role as an interfaith leader in support of Muslim visibility. Reverend Andrew Wesley replaced Ullman in 2006, but according to interviews with local Muslim and Catholic leaders, Father Wesley did not establish much of a relationship with al-Islah or Hamtramck’s larger Muslim community until his involvement with HCVN in 2008. In interviews, meetings, and public rallies, local Muslims and Catholics publicly and self-consciously crossed and extended boundary lines to encompass the other as that “certain type of person” who exhibited the “same standards of morality or excellence” by which their own communities were respectively judged (Barth 1969). Jeff Zalenski, a respected Polish Catholic elder who had lived in Hamtramck most of his life, described how learning from his Muslim colleagues in HCVN had encouraged him to understand signs of Muslim modesty, such as the veil and the segregation of men and women in public, as in line with traditional Polish Catholic values: Ever since this city of Hamtramck was established ninety years ago, the city has had its own moral code. [ . . . ] So the Muslim community, as they move in, there is no conflict, because their moral code is even higher than the one that the [Polish Catholic] people that lived here had. For instance, Muslim girls will not dress in a provocative manner. And the men, they will not even walk around holding or kissing the girls in public because their moral code doesn’t allow it. All that means is that their discipline is much more. And if you take that discipline away, then you are really wiping away some of the standards of the civilization.

Here, Zalenski figures the Muslim immigrants as exerting a positive influence on Hamtramck, with the capacity to restore its moral center and the standards of its Polish Catholic communities. In this narrative,

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signs of Muslim piety like veiling and gender segregation—which, in other contexts, are coded as signs of Muslim failure to assimilate—are now seen as expressing shared values that unite Muslims and Catholics. Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant members of HCVN also experienced cohesion through participation in a shared mode of “family values” rhetoric disseminated by the AFAM, which consisted of a specialized set of framing devices and vocabulary.19 One of the most important framing devices was the representation of Muslims and Christians as mutually vulnerable victims of an ordinance that would allow, as some spokespeople put it, “discrimination against people of faith.” HCVN emphasized a third frame: the ordinance presented a threat to public safety in that it would allow men to gain entry into women’s locker rooms or bathrooms, since the criteria for determining an individual’s gender was to be legally determined by that individual’s (“the actor’s”) perception alone.20 This “bathroom rhetoric” took on pronounced homophobic overtones by centering itself on an imagined figure of the bathroom lurker or “pervert” as an object of public loathing and disgust (Herman 1997; Schacter 1994), now legitimated by an ordinance allowing him free range in women’s private spaces. Following this argument, by passing an ordinance that “confused” the lines between binary sex and gender, the community opens the door to such imagined figures. The image that raised the greatest outcry among the pro-ordinance supporters as an expression of homophobia was a cartoon HCVN circulated of a bathroom lurker, which showed a muscle-bound man with big feet and hands and heavy stubble, squeezed into a pink dress and heels, coyly smiling with red lips. When I asked one Muslim leader what he thought about this cartoon produced by the AFAM to represent HCVN, he expressed ambivalence and embarrassment at the image’s crudeness but dismissed it as “politically expedient” communication— exemplifying tolerated social compromises during ordinance time. Other direct expressions of homophobia occurred within the campaign, several at a large Knights of Columbus rally just before the vote, which drew hundreds of attendees—mainly Muslim—from the local community and was videotaped and posted on YouTube. During the rally, a Bangladeshi speaker mocked Scott Klein, the city council member who introduced the ordinance and then came out as gay. The speaker said that, if the ordinance passed, Klein (a cisgender male) would buy a

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new dress to celebrate. An African American Muslim speaking against the ordinance proclaimed at an elevated volume and in an agitated register that within all the major religions, homosexuality was considered an “abomination,” repeating this term several times. These rhetorical performances led pro-ordinance supporters to discern homophobia at all levels of the anti-ordinance attack.

Negotiating Alliances As HCVN unified, HHRO supporters regarded the formation of these conservative Christian-Muslim alliances with a sinking feeling. During one “Vote No” rally in front of City Hall early in the movement, which I attended and videotaped, Councilwoman Catrina Stackpoole attempted to engage the Muslim (with a few Catholic and Protestant) demonstrators in dialogue. When this failed, she shook her finger at the Muslim leaders and said: Go ahead and have your little hate rally. [ . . . ] You better be careful who your allies are. Because they didn’t stand up for you during the call to prayer [issue]. I hope you know that. [ . . . ] We stood up for you during the call to prayer. I have been to Palestine. Human rights are for all humans! They are going after the gay folks now, and then they are going after you next.

The term “hate rally” raised cries of indignation from HCVN supporters, and Stackpoole apologized almost immediately. Yet in pronouncing it a “hate rally,” the councilwoman voiced what many ordinance supporters were thinking. The HCVN stirred up anger, betrayal, and confusion among pro-ordinance activists, especially because the Muslim majority’s position in the current movement seemed to contradict the shared tenets of their earlier activism in the call-to-prayer movement. Taking up Stackpoole’s challenge, a Bangladeshi demonstrator named Shakil Karim immediately responded: You supported our call to prayer, we appreciated that. And now you are demanding that we have to support this ordinance. I have to support whatever you demand, that is what you are right now asking me. [ . . . ]

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[What if] you see one girl raped by somebody. You save her, and bring her home, and let her wash, and let her sleep. Then you rape her. So one side is good, and one side is bad. We are appreciating the good side. But we are not going to be supporting the bad.

As Karim’s analogy spells out, Muslim ordinance opponents also felt betrayed by their former allies. As in the cartoon of the bathroom lurker, this lurid analogy is politically expedient but could be misconstrued by those it targets, conforming to the logics of ordinance time. Here, Karim expressed his belief that the pro-ordinance politicians were demanding that Muslims support a moral and ethical system that contradicted their religious orientation.21 In an interview after the rally, a Bangladeshi HCVN member named Sharif explored the anxieties raised by Stackpoole’s challenge: Then there was that comment the other day [ . . . ] that we came forward for your call to prayer, is a reference, that we came forward for you Bangladeshis. And I was concerned that this would come up. And I didn’t want to take a bellicose approach [ . . . ] you know, I wanted to be diplomatic, you practice and protest within your rights. But sometimes your rights [to speak out] need to be limited so that your greater rights won’t be endangered. So I am I trying to see, not only what are the consequences of getting into this [ . . . ] but how it will affect the future of not just homosexuals, but of Muslims, altogether. [ . . . ] We [the Muslim communities] need to get into mainstream politics, but we need to make sure before we fight for one thing that we are not jeopardizing everything. Because you don’t know what’s coming next. We don’t know who’s going to be elected or what kind of Patriot Act is going to be imposed. We will need these people. We will need the entire Hamtramck population to come to our support, as much as they need us to support them. So that’s the thing. It’s a small community. You don’t want to jeopardize your relationship with everyone.

Here, Sharif expresses discomfort over a “bellicose” dynamic that emerged from the dominant progressive party addressing a segment of the population as “you Bangladeshis,” thus, to his mind, orienting his community as racialized others. Sharif expressed his belief that there is

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something inherently more problematic and dangerous in the community being singled out by their ethnicity this way, rather than being seen as part of a racially mixed group of conservative religious actors. He articulated his anxiety about the resulting future status of Bangladeshis and Muslims in Hamtramck post-9/11, indicating that, given the tenuous status of Muslims in post-9/11 America, they might have to constrain the gambit and scope of their political stances. Furthermore, Sharif wished for more Catholic visibility during such rallies and further integration of Catholics and Muslims into a united front to legitimatize Muslim opposition and deracialize the issue: I had said [to the AFAM organizers], I can get people, however many you want, just give me a couple of days. That’s not the point. The point is that I don’t want to get too many of the Bangladeshi people there, and then make it look like it’s Bangladeshi verses white. And then, we’re talking about something quite different. [ . . . ] I mean I don’t know what kind of reaction would come from the people. [ . . . ] Because my concern is, what will it mean if everybody will come out from the mosque and none from the churches.

Like some other Muslim community leaders, Sharif saw the activism of the local conservative Catholic community as granting the Muslim movement legitimacy and providing a buffer against anti-immigrant vitriol that might otherwise have been directed against them if this was seen as “their issue” alone. But Sharif assessed the alliance between local Muslims and the outsider right-wing Christian organization in slightly different terms: I look at this as a strategic alliance, and maybe an awkward alliance. Of course, we will have differences. That’s completely expected. But at this point, it doesn’t matter. The unity is for one issue. And after this is done, we will differ on different matters. [ . . . ] So, I consider this more of a strategic alliance for us to learn some things, for us to get some help. Because I think that this is the first time the Bangladeshi community is involved fighting something which has to do with national identity, so to speak. So, the community alone, we can’t stand against it. Especially when we don’t have people who are good debaters in mainstream politics, who

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understand the rights, we don’t have any lawyers who are expert in these areas, so all these things. We are just not properly equipped to handle these situations. That’s why I called this a strategic alliance.

Sharif describes what the AFAM offers Bangladeshis: to help them acquire skill sets appropriate to the American public political arena. Some right-wing Christian leaders, in turn, represented the alliance with Muslims as mutually beneficial, with the power to mediate stigma that conservative Christians face. TMLC attorney Matt Duke explained: Because for us at the law center, for Catholics and Christians, we have to have likeminded people involved in these coalitions. Because the more people you have involved in them, the less the argument that we are just closed minded, bigoted people. The last acceptable bigotry in this country is the bigotry against Christianity.

For Duke, just as the conservative Christian groups were represented as having the capacity to quell fears about Muslim “radical” or “unAmerican” potential, so do Muslims have the capacity to improve conservative Christians’ reputations by attesting that they are not bigots, but inclusive of racial and religious minorities. The mutual friendliness and interest between Muslim and conservative Christian leaders, and the way conservative Christian leaders publicly supported them and identified with them as “family guys,” may be considered part of a trend in which evangelical leaders are reaching out to support select Muslim interests (Esposito 2009; Vu 2009). Popular mega-church preacher Rick Warren publicly advocated for such Christian-Muslim alliances and expressed a personal wish to form close working relationships with Muslim groups (Esposito 2009). In fact, Warren had been the keynote speaker at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual meeting in July 2009 (Duin 2009). Simultaneously, right-wing Christian groups are often portrayed as harboring anti-Muslim attitudes. Some leaders are known for figuring Islam as an “Eastern” religion fundamentally opposed to “Western” culture and society.22 This is borne out in the attitudes and actions of these same evangelical Christian groups. For example, an AFAM spokesperson who was one of the earliest and most high-profile denouncers of the

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Park51 project in New York phrased his opposition in highly nativist and Islamophobic terms (Fischer 2010).23 The contradictory nature of the relationship between conservative Christians and Muslims in Hamtramck is indicative of tendencies nationwide. Furthermore, neither conservative Christian nor Muslim groups represent a unified voice.

Progressivism and Its Discontents By the time the “Vote No” petition to repeal was officially submitted to City Hall, Councilman Klein had already organized an action group to defend the ordinance. This collective, which later came to be called Hamtramck United Against Discrimination (HUAD), grew to around forty members, mainly consisting of Solidarity party members, young local LGBTQ-identified people, faith leaders, community leaders, and various supporters. Other HUAD members included representatives and board members from state branches of national LGBTQ groups— such as Ferndale Michigan Equality, the Detroit Triangle Foundation, and the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce—and regional LGBTQ groups, such as Affirmations and the Ruth Ellis Foundation. HUAD members I interviewed located their support for the HHRO within personal, political, religious, cultural, and/or ideological commitments. Chief among these was a concern for protecting Hamtramck’s LGBTQ communities, as well as sending a symbolic message to the state and nation about these issues. Yet the concerns of movement members extended beyond a focus on LGBTQ rights and visibility to encompass minority rights more broadly. In fact, it was precisely this recognition and advancing of an organic connection between gay and immigrant rights that was continually cited as the most compelling and meaningful aspect of the movement for many of its supporters.24 One Christianidentified HUAD organizer described her motivation this way: I have been an advocate for many years for persons who express their sexuality differently in the church. [ . . . ] In this case, the ordinance that’s before us is being perceived as [ultimately] a gay rights ordinance. [ . . . ] But to me it’s timely in that you get to see more hate crimes, you are seeing more of a rise in ethnic intimidation, certainly more since September 11, you are seeing more, in the Detroit area, backlash against Muslims, so,

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as a person of faith, I really, no matter what the perceived origin of the ordinance might be, or how it came about in our community, I would put my name and my action behind it, because I believe it’s for all people, for all times, for the benefit of the community.

For ordinance supporters, the HHRO opened up avenues for communication, recognition, and alliance formation between Muslims and non-Muslims via a progressive framework. In some HUAD narratives, Hamtramck’s Muslims were figured as partial outsiders to the political process, whose status and position were still those of newcomers. Although some Muslims in the city had been instrumental in working to overturn the ordinance, some HUAD members believed that other Muslims still represented a potential, powerful base of supporters, who could be cultivated as important allies to reverse that trend, in a way that would be mutually beneficial for those concerned with both Muslim and LGBTQ rights. For example, HUAD member Justin Mueller suggests that Muslims in the city should turn their attention away from the potentially divisive issue of the ethnic or sexual identities of their neighbors and instead turn toward a shared municipal identity: The message [to Muslims] should be: we have to join with diverse groups, and support diversity. The key there is not that gay is great, or that Arabs should join the gays, it’s that Hamtramck is an open and diverse city where everyone should be valued and treasured, including Bangladeshis, the Arabs, and the gays, and the Muslims. We have to put it that way, and it will work. [ . . . ] The key is to get people to share the concept that diversity is a good thing, and that non-diversity is a bad thing. So that way, it looks like it’s in their own self-interest as Muslims. Because if they go after the gays, then they could come after the Muslims.

In Mueller’s vision, Hamtramck is already an “open and diverse city,” and newcomers should continue that tradition by ensuring that the city remains a safe place for everyone. Another HUAD member figured Hamtramck as the potential grounds for national progress: In its simplest form, [the LGBTQ-inclusive measure is] an expression of the positive direction that America is going in. Barack Obama is an exam-

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ple of that. [ . . . ] The push for progress. The push for human rights. The push against war and the push against poverty. And so the baby boomers are the majority. So as much as there’s a whole bunch of them that went on to have greedy suburban little lives, we really thought at the time that we were going to see the fruits of that push. And a lot of that dissipated for one reason or the other. It’s kind of exciting to see that it’s finally starting to have an impact. And so, nationally, I think that ordinances like this just show that there is progress forward on some of these more critical issues of human rights. That’s another example, that’s another nail in the coffin of discrimination.

The HHRO movement’s progressivism was often linked to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Narratives like this one reflect a strong belief in the symbolic power of legislation that would list on equal grounds the many forms of discrimination and put measures in place to resolve these problems (Brown 2006). Phrased in such terms, the HHRO debates were exciting and fulfilling for activists because they placed individuals squarely in the center of an unfolding national history of liberation and social justice involving human rights concerns of both Muslims and gays in America. As in the movement to support Muslims during the call-to-prayer debates, the passing of the ordinance offered a means to accomplish transformation. It was not just a time just to shore up resources and get out the vote. Rather it was a charged time of heightened importance to instruct, demonstrate, and teach through example so that city residents could learn to share this collective vision of community progress and change that would benefit them all (Berlant 2011; Guyer 2007). When this change failed to happen quickly enough, there was a sense that reaching the idealized ends by any means necessary was justified, including denigrating opponents—a characteristic stance of ordinance time. Another aspect of HUAD rhetoric centered upon the city’s reputation. Some ordinance advocates believed that by publishing the HHRO, Hamtramck would enhance its image as a welcoming city. In this respect, the HHRO was seen as a tool for diminishing lingering associations linking the city to racism and discrimination based on incidents such as the long-running Hamtramck housing discrimination case described earlier, and the 1999 voter harassment scandal that targeted city

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Muslims.25 In an interview, one city official and HUAD member described what was at stake in retaining the ordinance: This is how we’re known regionally at least, as a place that welcomes everyone, and we’re inclusive, and progressive, and yet kind of old school at the same time. And this reputation is very important to us. Economically, it’s very important to us. Socially, it’s important to us. Legislatively, it’s very important to us. I mean, this is the image of Hamtramck that we are trying to build. Inclusiveness and tolerance, and welcoming. And kind of, the America that we would all want. Both old and young, and different backgrounds, and different languages, and different religions. Kind of laissez-faire. As long as you keep your lawn clean. As long as you dig out your spot [from the snow] and don’t take somebody else’s you have a place here. And that’s what could be really harmed by this campaign, by losing this fight.

As with other narratives supporting the ordinance, Hamtramck is figured here as a model of diversity for the nation—provided it makes the correct choice about gay rights. This point resembles the hopes that callto-prayer supporters had for the city in 2004, when they thought that the outcome of the vote would send a message to the rest of the nation about the inclusion of Muslims in the public sphere. HUAD members also attempted to engage opposition members in one-on-one dialogue. They proposed lunches, coffees, and activities akin to those of Hamtramck’s Obama campaign, in which Muslims and nonMuslims were mutually engaged despite their differences. Furthermore, the Children of Abraham Unity Council, whose members had successfully worked to unite communities during the call-to-prayer debates, temporarily reconvened. Yet most HUAD and HCVN members I spoke to ultimately reported discouragement after dialogues and meetings that went nowhere. Supporters and opponents alike spoke with regret about strained and fractured relationships. Bill Meyer (whom we met earlier), then the chairperson of the Hamtramck Human Rights Commission, made other attempts at community reconciliation. He urged the two sides to dialogue and asked residents and councilors to consider amending the religious exemption section of the ordinance in consultation with religious leaders so that they could

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feel protected and support the ordinance. Due to city regulations, however, the ordinance would have to go to a referendum unchanged. In line with the sensibilities of ordinance time, any open critique of the ordinance, constructive or otherwise, was viewed as undermining ordinance support and thus treated as a betrayal. The mayor and ordinance supporters personally attacked Meyer for his work on the issue. Though Meyer tried to continue his attempts at organizing public meetings, workshops, and educational events about the HHRO, he was met with such resistance and suspicion that he ended up postponing these activities until after the November vote.26 As tensions mounted, HUAD members sought to understand the troubling alliances emerging in opposition to the ordinance and to account for some Muslims’ unexpected position. Some HUAD members reasoned that if local Muslims really understood other positions taken by the right-wing Christian group, they would not ally with them. Others believed that part of their mission as ordinance advocates was to help Muslims “connect the dots” about who their friends and enemies really were. As one councilmember asserted: I would say to the Islamic community: go to another part of the country, and see how welcome you are. You’ve got a community here that is willing to protect you. [ . . . ] All it’s gonna take is another terrorist attack that’s tied into Islamic people, and you are only a minute away from a concentration camp in the middle of Arizona or New Mexico. If you don’t think that could happen, you don’t know American history. [ . . . ] This country is completely capable of doing bad things. And the very people that they have allied with around this issue, the American Family Association and Thomas More Law Center, will be at the forefront of loading them up into boxcars. You know, they will be saying: “Load ’em up. This is a Christian country.” And they are not getting all that. There is a disconnect.

Within this line of reasoning, some HUAD supporters portrayed the Muslims as victims of false consciousness and as uncomprehending puppets of the AFAM. This assumption was spelled out graphically on the HUAD website, in which three local Muslim leaders were literally depicted as the puppets of three of the main conservative Christian leaders, with three vertical lines drawn like puppet strings between the two

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sets of images. This is an example of how the HUAD worked within ordinance time sensibilities. It’s hard to say if Hamtramck progressives would have created such an insulting caricature of their neighbors had it not been for this particular impeding vote. As the movement continued, I noticed a new tendency among selfdescribed community activists to make generalizations about the Muslim community based on a bitterness and hostility that I had not heard previously. In interviews, some pro-ordinance activists questioned the basis and viability of Muslim citizenship: What you’ve got going on now in Hamtramck is that you have all these people who haven’t even been here a generation yet, they are the ones who are stirring up the hatred in this town. [ . . . ] And I question how many people who are in that coalition are actually full citizens. [ . . . ] I mean, how many really know the English language? How many are really familiar with American customs? [ . . . ] I think they have been given a lot of misinformation. I don’t even think they understand what constitutionally makes a person a different sexual orientation. They don’t even understand what gender identification is. I mean, their mind is filtering from their country of origin. They don’t understand what it is to be an American.

Interestingly, HUAD portrayals of Muslim Americans—as gullible people with minimal language skills—echo comments commonly heard from xenophobic Christian-right culture warriors.27 Other proordinance activists played upon the status of Muslim groups as recent immigrants to erect boundary lines between “us” and “them.” In these narratives, Hamtramck was coded as “our city,” with a specific culture of progressivism and multiculturalism, under siege from perceived Muslim intolerance. For example, at one city council meeting, a veteran gay rights activist from a nearby town angrily told the Muslims present that, as newcomers to the city, they should not be trying to take away the rights of people who had been there longer. The rhetoric took on a warning tone, as in the following open letter written by a HUAD leader: The Bangladeshi community [ . . . ] does not have [ . . . ] critical social institutions in place, the inevitable result of which is a culture of political

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and religious polarization that leads to extremist voices going unchecked. [ . . . ] Bangladeshis must [ . . . ] do the tough work that every immigrant community has done in America: build respected civil society organizations from the ground up that assist immigrants in their journey to become full American citizens, and partner with other communities to help smooth the road. [ . . . ] And if the Bangladeshi community continues to allow voices of extremism to flourish, I guarantee you this: you will continue to be publicly called out, and embarrassed, until you learn to reject and root out the anti-American element in your community, and work instead to build the civil society infrastructure your community so desperately need[s].

Indeed, there was a tendency to equate Muslim rejection of the ordinance with other forms of oppression believed to be at work within the community. For example, the “tyrannical” Muslim “anti-gay” stance was linked with the “deplorable treatment of their women,” and critics pointed to women “forced” to veil and stay out of certain aspects of public life as evidence of this oppression, using familiar assertions of Islamophobic gender logics such as those analyzed earlier (Abu-Lughod 2002; Ahmed 2011; Cesari 2005; Fernando 2014), but then extending from the “treatment of their women” to the “treatment of their gays.” One young HUAD leader explained: Christian society went through the Reformation. We went through the Enlightenment. Islamic society still has to do that. [ . . . ] But also, like balancing that with the fact of regional conflicts, and poverty, and all the different factors that come into play. [ . . . ] And then like applying [ . . . ] what’s going on in Iran, like Saudi Arabia, and other countries, that execute gay people, like Indonesia, like Bangladesh, where it’s kind of like [ . . . ] I haven’t heard of any executions over there [ . . . ] and it’s important not to be paternalistic about development issues [ . . . ] but it’s almost like they have more on their plate then even thinking at this point about gay people. I don’t think the answer is pinning the blame on them, like blow them all up, that’s not the answer. It’s about building the democracies, getting them out of poverty [ . . . ] and once you start, you know, getting out of poverty, what results is more respect for women’s rights and gender and everything. [ . . . ] [T]here are so many correlations and connections

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between educational level, and poverty, and infant mortality. [ . . . ] You know, and with that education comes a less fundamentalist, more secular worldview.

Third world feminist scholars have traced the trope of “liberat[ing] of women from tyrannical gender systems” through the colonial and imperial justifications for intrusions into Muslim nations (e.g., Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991). This rhetoric emerged again around the US incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 (Abu-Lughod 2002; Ahmed 2011). A subsequent wave of scholarship has suggested that rhetoric about “the way they treat their gays” is a similar strategy for promoting the idea of “Western” superiority that has emerged as part of the “war on terror.” This phenomenon, termed “homonationalism,” is defined as the systematic deployment of liberal secular “Western” constructions of sexuality to discipline and pathologize conservative Muslim gender and sexual ethics (see also Duggan 2003; Puar 2007; Afzal 2015). Homonationalist ideology selectively celebrates some kinds of homosexual identities, such as those associated with whiteness and consumerism, as a strategy of further disciplining and racializing other modes of queerness. For some members of LGBTQ communities, an acceptance of the homonationalist embrace also entails adoption of other elements of US patriotism, including racism, xenophobia, and homophobia toward unassimilated queer subjects (Puar 2007). Although scholars have begun to analyze the use of universalizing constructions of homonormativity as a mode of dominance in order to wield influence on Muslim societies, there has been less discussion of how these modes operate on the domestic level as a mode for disciplining Muslims.28 Some Hamtramck pro-ordinance narratives linked Muslim acceptance of gay rights at home and abroad to universalist developmental discourses that assumed a direct correlation between material advancement and social progress along liberal secular lines. Like the young HUAD organizer I interviewed, quoted above, other community members reasoned that American Muslims against the ordinance were influenced by foreign ideologies and systems of justice that condoned the murder or execution of gays, since homosexuality is punishable by death in some Muslim countries. As one interfaith activist consulting in Hamtramck during the repeal movement explained:

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For Muslims, homosexuality is evil. [ . . . ] You know for the Bangladeshis, especially, the al-Qaeda or Taliban presentation of the evil Western world and the promiscuous hedonistic ways. You know this permissive teaching about not just gays and lesbians, a lot of folks can get there, but it’s the transgender and cross dressing, that’s just being put in their face. [ . . . ] So these people were raised on that, and in some Muslim countries you could be killed for being a homosexual. And so here they are in a place where the law is saying something totally different than maybe in a sharī‘a law culture, so they are like, oh man, it’s their jihad, they are doing a holy war to be opposed to this.

Another familiar thread in Islamophobic rhetoric is the equation of immigrant Muslims with the presumed “repressive,” “backward,” and “tyrannical” politics of their countries of origin (Cesari 2005). Indeed, as documented above, in interviews some Muslims did link their opposition to the ordinance to the norms for public behavior and the public/private divide in their cultures of origin. Yet their terms in those instances bore no relationship to external representations of Muslims that linked opposition to the ordinance to allegiance to political regimes that advocate physically harming, murdering, or executing LGBTQ individuals. In fact, local Muslims frequently depicted their opposition as a form of loyalty to the US Constitution, which they believed provided sufficient protections for all. Nevertheless, operating under the assumption that Muslim opposition did stem from foreign, extremist attitudes regarding the punishment of gays, reports and rumors began to spread that HCVN Muslim leaders had publicly condoned violence against gays or had threatened violence against specific individuals. In local editorials, rumors about one high-profile Muslim leader in particular caused his reputation to suffer. As young pro-gay activists speculated that they might have been attacked by an angry mob at one of the “Vote No” rallies, they ululated to underscore the point. Other community members described the rallies as having “whipped up” Muslims into a “frenzy” of hatred, after which “anything could have happened.”

Election Day On Election Day 2008, there was little talk of Obama versus McCain in Hamtramck, since residents were already assured of an Obama victory in

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their city. The city’s Polish Catholic majority and other residents had voted Democratic in every presidential election since incorporation in 1922, and most recent immigrants would overwhelmingly vote Democratic.29 Attention focused on the HHRO issue, and polling stations were flooded with campaigners from both sides of the debate, waving placards, shouting slogans, and trying to gain last-minute votes. The HHRO was repealed by a margin of 600 votes, out of a total 5,788 (Sercombe 2008a). One of the most remarked upon things about Hamtramck’s 2008 elections was the unprecedented showing of Muslims, both women and men, at the polls. Muslim residents who discussed it with me usually attributed the high Muslim turnout first to the HHRO and secondarily to Obama. Most of the city was elated over the Obama victory, but HHRO supporters’ experience was conflicted. Their ambivalence was shared with gay rights supporters across the nation because of the striking nationwide rollback of LGBTQ rights through several important referenda, including the high-profile passage of Proposition 8 in California, repealing state legislation on gay marriage that was not yet a year old.30 Similarly, in Florida and Arizona, voters went Democratic in the presidential vote, but supported amendments to define marriage as between a man and a woman. In Arkansas, voters supported legislation that restricted adoption to married—thus, under the legal strictures of the time, heterosexual—couples. In national media coverage, the Hamtramck vote was mentioned alongside these state-level contests as another example of a demoralizing nationwide trend against LGBTQ gains, in which “the 2008 election was a success for nearly every segment of the Democratic coalition, with one stark exception: gay rights activists” (Richardson 2008; see also NGLTF 2008b). Analysts working on the racial demographics of the election found that in California, “black voters came out to the polls in record numbers to support Mr. Obama, and then turned around and voted in favor of traditional marriage by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent” (Richardson 2008). In the words of one Washington Post account, “The same voters who turned out strongest for Obama also drove a stake through the heart of same-sex marriage” (Vick and Surdin 2008). A 53 percent majority of Latinos in California also voted to support Proposition 8 while supporting Obama, and together with black voters “overcame the

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bare majority of white Californians who voted to let the court ruling stand” (Vick and Surdin 2008). Hamtramck’s African American community was not especially vocal during the HHRO campaign. The debate was primarily associated with Bangladeshi and Yemeni American Muslims. And like the HHRO vote in Hamtramck, the vote against gay marriage on the part of racial minorities was “surprising and disappointing” to gay rights supporters across the country, who had hoped that minority citizens would “empathize with their struggle” (Vick and Surdin 2008). There was a tendency in both the HHRO and Prop 8 cases for ethnic and racial minority leaders at the highest echelons to announce their support for gay rights, counter to the majority of their constituents. For example, in spring 2009, several months after the majority of African Americans in California voted in support of Proposition 8, both NAACP Chairman Julian Bond and President Ben Jealous came out publicly in favor of its repeal (Serwer 2009). In a letter to the California Legislature, Bond wrote: “Proposition 8 subverts [ . . . ] basic and necessary safeguards, unjustly putting all Americans, particularly vulnerable minorities, at a risk of discrimination by a majority show of hands” (Serwer 2009). Like the pro-ordinance Muslim leaders living in the suburbs around Hamtramck, these black community and religious leaders extended their support to LGBTQ measures as an issue involving overt injustice or discrimination, though they knew this would put them at odds with their constituencies. The division in the community, with an elite leadership that is more sympathetic to LGBTQ concerns than is its more socially conservative majority, is similar to the one in the Hamtramck area, where elite Arab and South Asian community leaders of affluent nearby suburbs spoke in favor of LGBTQ reforms while the majority of the community opposed it.

Local Fallout Immediately following the vote, Chairperson Bill Meyer of the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission (HHRC) nominated Gregory Manore to be the city’s first openly gay human relations commissioner so “we could have a representative from the LGBT community”

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(Hamtramck Star 2009). Appointing a member based on sexual identity set a precedent for the commission.31 Manore was a young HUAD leader who attended the monthly HHRC meetings as part of his activism to champion, and educate others about, the HHRO. In confirming Manore, the city implicitly affirmed and legitimated sexual orientation as a category of identity as much in need of representation and protection as any racial, ethnic, or class minority—a victory for municipal recognition of LGBTQ residents, though one seen by some as small compared to what passage of the HHRO would have meant. Some LGBTQ activists chose to see the HHRO repeal as the first step in a process of coming out for the city’s nearly invisible LGBTQ population, rather than a total failure. Councilman Klein didn’t come out to his constituents until he scripted, and then moved to pass, the ordinance. Some HUAD activists reasoned that their desired large-scale legal and social changes could not happen overnight; they required sustained work, devotion to the cause, and individuals who would find creative means of expression to develop positive associations with the LGBTQ presence in the city. In this vein, some HUAD members reasoned that the failed ordinance battle and the changes it brought to Hamtramck’s political culture might serve as the foundation for new kinds of political projects and increased LGBTQ visibility. HUAD members began thinking expansively about future projects, such as identifying business owners and community stakeholders who were openly gay in order to form coalitions or associations with nonLGBTQ individuals based on common interests. Other HUAD members were inspired to join city commissions or become further involved in Hamtramck politics to advance the interests of LGBTQ residents. Some conservative Muslims in the city also expressed a desire to engage in community work to increase education about their views on homosexuality, and to make sure that their opposition to the ordinance was not thought of as motivated by hate or a desire to commit violence or harm, but rather as an effort to protect the city as a moral community. Another significant change was fomented by the HHRO debates: Mayor Majewski’s abrupt removal of Human Relations Commission chairperson Bill Meyer, who—reelected by fellow commissioners each year—had held that post since 2004. In the Hamtramck Review, Ma-

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jewski explained that her decision to remove Meyer was based, among other reasons, on his “acting unilaterally, from outside the bounds of the commission’s mandate and procedure” (Sercombe 2009). But—as indicated in that same article, in his public comments made in City Hall, and on online forums—Meyer and his supporters believed that he was dismissed because he had openly and persistently challenged the mayor and the powerful Solidarity collective that had supported the ordinance (Hamtramck Star 2009). Meyer’s hasty dismissal also reflected the privileging of bureaucracy over relationships, another characteristic of ordinance time. Majewski replaced Meyer with a Yemeni American man named Ibrahim Aljahim (Norris 2009),32 the head and founder of an up-andcoming Arab American NGO. Aljahim had remained publicly neutral on the HHRO, which meant that the increased visibility of both LGBTQ and Muslim issues during the ordinance debates was reflected in the recomposition of the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission. For the first time, a member, Manore, was selected based on sexual orientation. Secondly, the HHRC chairperson position was transferred from Meyer—a white, nonreligious community leader—to Aljahim, a Muslim who had remained publicly uninvolved in the ordinance debates.

Conclusion The HHRO debates provide an example of a municipal-level impasse in which two opposing sides became locked into polarizing positions. Each side was stymied in dialogue, especially in the harried context of ordinance time. In this constellation of factors, the Muslim majority missed the opportunity to express their conservative perspective in a way that challenged the right-wing Christian framework. Some Muslim leaders described their uncritical adoption of the AFAM framework and rhetoric as “politically expedient.” But Muslim leaders never publicly accounted for what had been marginalized, and the Muslim majority did not publicly respond until after the election to the distress this decision caused among longtime trusted allies. Similarly, as some Hamtramck progressives voiced their concerns in an Islamophobic register, the conflict played out in terms familiar to the rhetoric of post-9/11 America. One kind of stereotyping was returned for

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another, reinforcing the belief that conservative religious groups could not coexist peacefully with LGBTQ communities. A root cause of these issues was the temporal framework of ordinance time. The ordinance vote was enshrined as a quintessentially democratic and therefore salutary exercise in community building. Yet because of the yes-or-no positioning of the ordinance and the imposition of a specific deadline, it led to distortions in the way the two sides portrayed each other. A sense of great urgency was foisted upon the slower, heterogeneously experienced sense of everyday time. As it was, the harried concern for the immediate over what Guyer would term the “near future” led to a breach on both sides, in which anything was acceptable to support their respective campaigns. It led to a disjuncture in the way immigrant incorporation was normally imagined—as a slow process involving many levels of experience, including repeated exposures via visits to restaurants and festivals, the formation of friendships, and the everyday negotiation of public space in this city, which had a reputation as a haven for religious and other kinds of minorities. The outcome of the vote—which on paper focused exclusively on LGBTQ identity—came to represent people’s hopes and fears about how Hamtramck would manage minority incorporation more broadly. The progressive desire to reform the Muslim position thus felt particularly urgent, and not only because the Muslim vote represented the biggest roadblock to passing the ordinance: the anti-ordinance attitude was seen as working against a unified, progressive city in which individuals defined by minority status join together in shared difference. The refusal to recognize shared difference was represented as hindering Hamtramck’s idealized progressivism. The hectic pace of the referendum campaign led to an all-or-nothing attitude, where HUAD members, operating under a liberal secular framework, labeled residents as either “for us or against us.” This stance led to impatience, anger, and a belief that if their Muslim neighbors would only listen to reason and understand their shared interests in time for the vote they could be quickly won over. The certainty that Muslims would eventually change their views on LGBTQ identity expression frustrated some, who viewed anti-ordinance Muslims as “slow” in coming around rather than holding a different standpoint. In their anxiety to see this specific ordinance passed, ordinance supporters worked from

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a theory of social change in which transformations in the consciousness of a community may be tied to a bureaucratic timeline and accomplished through one-sided pedagogy. Ordinance supporters also worked from an implicit set of beliefs about alliance formation that failed to take moral nuances into account. After the 2008 election, repairing relations became a talking point in public and private venues, such as a Peace Pole rededication ceremony in front of City Hall and a roundtable discussion organized by the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission. These reconciliation efforts did not result in any consensus, although members of both sides expressed a desire for it. In contrast to the call-to-prayer issue, during the HHRO debates, Hamtramck Muslims held a position clearly distinct from the liberal, secular, multiculturalist vision that the Solidarity party claimed included everyone. The conflict in values resulted in a sense of betrayal on both sides. In my interviews after the 2008 election, many who had been most vocally divisive in the debates asserted their personal motivation to “build bridges” between opponents and to prevent further stigmatization of Muslims and LGBTQ individuals through dialogue and mutual education. In these interviews, “the city” and municipal citizenship frequently emerged as key categories of alternative boundary formation, and the municipality was figured as a mediating institution between Muslims and non-Muslims. The city was conceived of as an “imagined community,” a collective sometimes valued, sometimes stigmatized, but always noted for its high Muslim population.

Conclusion Urban Religion and Secular Constraints

This book has demonstrated the inadequacies of using an unexamined liberal secular framework to grapple with Muslim American integration into mainstream US society. As the dominant mode of organizing political and social relations in the United States and parts of Europe, liberal secularism casts itself as an unbiased, universal standard for determining what is—and is not—included in public life. Liberal secularism, though we sometimes refer to it in different terms, establishes the values, standards, and norms that undergird mainstream systems for judging whether certain aspects of religious or cultural expression belong in the public or private sphere—systems that sometimes go so far as to conclude that certain practices or expressions should be outlawed as incompatible with American ideals of freedom and democracy. As anthropologist Talal Asad has proposed, because of the ways in which the tenets of liberal secularism are taken for granted as the unmarked mainstream in some European nations and in North America, it behooves scholars who were raised in its traditions to study liberal secularism from its margins, or “shadows,” in order to gain a nuanced understanding of the forms of life and reasoning that this tradition excludes (2003, 16). The preceding discussions have taken a closer look at the operations of inclusion and exclusion with regard to Muslim Americans in one small city, providing contextualized accounts of moments in Hamtramck’s municipal history when the city’s Muslim residents contested prevailing understandings of freedom, agency, and power. More specifically, this book has examined Muslim American ideas about the public and private—and their incorporation in city life—seeking to understand how these ideas have served to break down dominant public/ private binaries and challenge liberal secular assumptions, particularly those so engrained in the dominant culture that they form the embodied 219

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substrate of common sense judgment or “visceral modes of appraisal” (Connolly 1999, 27). With these points in mind, this book has proceeded from the margins, from the perspectives of religious-minority social actors and their neighbors who have, at times, experienced liberal secular imperatives as constraining and opted to resist. In so doing, it illustrates how liberal secularism can function as a cultural system that may seem arbitrary or constraining to some people. A primary finding of this book is that the incorporation of Muslims into Hamtramck depended heavily on the characters and inclinations of the non-Muslims around them and the specific personalities, histories, and investments of their interlocutors. Much of the volume has been devoted to analyzing these interactions. Yet the larger context in which these negotiations take place—that is, the sum of the demographic, cultural, economic, and historical features of Hamtramck—represents an equally important factor for determining their quality and outcome (Lamphere 1992). The material presented here demonstrates the different ways in which people’s perceptions about the city—its smallness, its distinctiveness, the uniqueness of its minority-majority history— affected their interactions with one another, making them believe in the possibility and importance of remaining connected even after an experience of alienation. This concern reflects the larger urban anthropological goal of shifting away from studies that treat cities merely as a context for understanding social processes and toward studies that focus on social processes as the means for developing theory about cities and urban forms of contemporary life (Brettell 2003; Rollwagen 1975). The preceding chapters explored situations in which Muslim Americans in Hamtramck, in their everyday lives or through their involvement in political movements, questioned or resisted the identity- and rightsbased liberal secular norms and politics that enshrine the individual over the family or community and looked, instead, to alternative frameworks. Two instances in the book illuminate those frameworks in especially notable ways: first, in the moral reasoning employed by some Muslim American women in positioning their strategies for dress and gender separation as contributing to communal morality, rather than understanding these modes of comportment in purely individualist terms. Second, in how those frameworks buttressed discussions of the debate over the Human Rights Ordinance, facilitating the efforts by some Muslim

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Americans in Hamtramck to promote community coherence by rejecting the public recognition of LBGTQ difference, rather than by adopting the generalized value of ensuring human rights for all identities.

Space-Making as a Communicative Strategy In Hamtramck, negotiations between Muslims and non-Muslims over public and political space have allowed non-Muslim residents of the city to collectively work out, on a direct and tangible level, a set of anxieties about Muslim minorities that are preoccupying the rest of the nation. As during the Human Rights Ordinance debate, and other negotiations, residents asked: What is the meaning of Muslim difference? Does the public expression of these differences contradict American values? Are these differences assimilable? If the expression of these differences were given free range, would they be containable, or would they somehow interfere with non-Muslims’ ability to carry out their lives as usual? Are these differences life affirming or pathological? Are they ultimately “other” or do they share common ground with Judeo-Christian American forms, and if so, to what end? Are they, like Judeo-Christian forms, flexible enough to be compatible with secular modernity? Or, if left unchecked, will these differences drag us backward into an uncanny confrontation with an abandoned and stifling past? (van der Veer 2006). To understand the meanings that Hamtramck residents attributed to the myriad differences expressed by Muslim Americans in public city spaces, we have advanced the argument that attention to spatial dimensions of social relations, termed here as “space-making processes,” significantly augments an understanding of minority inclusion beyond what would be captured via attention to exclusively verbal kinds of communication. Although shorthanded as “spatial,” these processes may be more accurately described as “spatio-temporal.” Throughout this book, I have demonstrated that decisions about when and how to locate oneself in space are always already subjected to awareness of temporality, and most specifically, to the timed rhythms and patterns that shape people’s understanding of space. By observing how Muslims and non-Muslims in Hamtramck create and cross spatial boundaries and how they coconstruct temporal orders through the rhythm of their interactions,

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I have offered new vistas for understanding processes for community making and for the understanding of self and other that might otherwise have been left implicit. As described earlier, the book’s analysis adopted three overlapping approaches to space-making: a territory-based approach, a practicebased approach, and a phenomenological approach. As territory-based and practice-based expressions, the civic purdah processes we have considered produce some of the most unambiguous results with regard to social relations in the Hamtramck. I argue that the consistency, collectivity, and adaptability with which the Yemeni and Bangladeshi women of Hamtramck practice forms of modest dress and gender separation strategies has resulted in Muslim women’s feelings of increased comfort and security in the city, and perceptions that they have become familiar and recognizable to outsiders. The discussion of the call-to-prayer debates also took a practice-based approach to explore the broadcasting of Islamic sound as an expressive form affecting the spatio-temporal order of the city as a whole. This alteration of the urban sensorium is, in some ways, more complicated than the examples of civic purdah because it represents an instance of space-making in Hamtramck that involves what Muslim residents perceive as both a loss and a gain. Muslim Americans and their interfaith advocates in Hamtramck ceded power to the municipality in a broader sense to ensure a sanctioned alteration of the city soundscape. Yet the soundscape was altered in a meaningful way, audibly reflecting the inclusion of Muslim Americans. Here, the analysis highlighted the power of sound, which is unavoidable and flows across the borders and boundaries that might otherwise keep different bodies out. In contrast to the discussions that preceded it, the analysis of the Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance centered most squarely on a phenomenological approach to space-making. Here, we consider the concept of “ordinance time,” which calls attention to space-making strategies of inhabitation and perception. Among these strategies is the ability to discern wholesome features of public space from harmful ones, such as those that were accelerated in the lead-up to a public referendum on the ordinance, which was designed to protect the human rights of LGBTQ residents. I demonstrated how the acceleration of peoples’ internal clocks and calendars—the distinguishing phenomenon of “or-

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dinance time”—led to a missed opportunity to present Muslim American perspectives as distinct from the right-wing Christian ones. That is, the expediencies associated with ordinance time brought about shifts in the way that people in Hamtramck habitually encounter and represent each other, so that, during ordinance time, ways of speaking and modes of boundary crossing were altered. Thus, the sociopolitical climate in Hamtramck changed, leading to a regimentation in processes of boundary formation and maintenance that theretofore had been experienced as more free-flowing. The expediencies of ordinance time also, at least temporarily, led Hamtramck political actors to look outside the city for solutions, as participants on each side of the debate formed strong alliances with branches of nationally based organizations, including selfidentified politically progressive and politically conservative ones. These outside alliances exacerbated the breach in social relations, encouraging city residents to take up preexisting tropes that dehumanized those who disagreed with them, in ways that ultimately encouraged both homophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric.

Sex, Gender, and Liberal Secularism In Hamtramck, as in cities across North America and Europe, issues related to sex and gender constitute key points of tension animating discourses about Muslim American difference and belonging, resulting in vitriolic debates over issues of veiling in the workplace and other public spaces and facilities (Bowen 2008; Fernando 2014; Scott 2007). Across Europe, the fear and antipathy related to Muslim women’s modest dress has resulted in discriminatory legal policies that regulate or ban the hijāb and niqāb in public locations (Open Society Justice Initiative 2018). Although the US does not regulate forms of dress associated with Muslim modesty, some forms of mainstream discourse have turned Muslim women’s veiling into a symbol of all that is wrong with Islam at home and abroad. For some of its detractors, the veil symbolizes a backward Muslim insistence on the importance of biological sex difference as a clear guide for the social roles of women and men. Critics assert that the veil indicates an adherence to Muslim schemas of biological determinism that contradict liberal sexual ideals for organizing the social world; these

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liberal ideals purport to decouple sex, which is believed to be biologically based, from gender, which is thought to be socially determined. In such a view, then, women’s ability to dress in sexually provocative ways is understood as a signal of women’s freedom to control their bodies and sexualities, while modest dress is read as an admission of women’s defeat, as a belief that their bodies belong to and are controlled by a patriarchal system of signification. Insofar as veiling (but not the miniskirt) is thought to reflect a belief in biological determinism or women’s submission, veiling is also frequently represented as a constraint to individual freedom or a disturbance to the public order. However, as discussed regarding civic purdah practices, discomfort with gender norms—and their associated styles of dress—goes both ways for women, as seen, for example, in the way some young Muslim women in Hamtramck avoided their high school prom because of the kinds of gender mixing and provocative dress that would be encouraged there. For some Muslims in North America and Europe, the national norms of expressing gender and regulating the organization of sexuality may also be experienced as a disturbing imposition and as a form of what anthropologists Katherine Pratt Ewing (2011) and Jeanette Jouili (2015) analyze as “secular constraints” limiting their ability to enact key aspects of their selfhood in public life. Ideologies about gender complementarity that prescribe specific, sexdetermined roles for men and women influence not only women’s modest dress, but also the way some religious communities view same-sex desires and LGBTQ visibility. As with other religious factions, such as evangelical Christians and conservative Jews, some Muslim Americans hesitate to support legislation that recognizes LGBTQ identities and rights. Although many conservative religious actors share this perspective, Islamophobes seize upon instances of Muslim conservatism toward LGBTQ recognition as another way to dehumanize Muslims. In our discussion of the debate over the Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance, we considered the strain of bigotry that purports to “refuse to tolerate intolerance” (Žižek 2008). A number of ethnographers have turned their attention to such connections between homophobia, homonationalism, and Islamophobia in their analysis of the ways that Muslim minorities are symbolically cast out of secular societies based on their views toward homosexuality (Butler 2008; Fernando 2009; Ewing 2011; Perkins 2019).

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As this debate demonstrates, along with discomfort over veiling, disputes over sex role differentiation can be framed (particularly among nonMuslims) as indignation over distorted views about “how they treat their women” or “how they treat their gays.” As our analysis shows, breakdowns in cross-cultural communication concerning these issues can happen because of an inability—or a refusal—to approach these points of consternation through a framework other than liberal secularism.

Islamophobia and the Limits of Pluralism Levels of discrimination and hate crimes against Muslim Americans have been on the rise since September 11, 2001, and discriminatory rhetoric and policies against Muslims Americans have taken on newly virulent forms since Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and election (Beydoun 2018; CAIR 2018). Muslim Americans currently live in a culture of surveillance and profiling. In this climate, government officials and private citizens alike anxiously track signs and symbols associated with Muslim religious or cultural identity, linking them (consciously or unconsciously) with terrorist threats (Bayoumi 2012). Manifestations of Islamophobia among US citizens have included death threats, fatal violence, property destruction, harassment, and refusal of jobs and services (Kishi 2017; Pew Research Center 2017b). Meanwhile, official government policy has promoted wrongful arrests, detentions, and deportations of individuals often based on nothing more than the assumption that a given person is Muslim. Trump’s travel ban, introduced in January 2017, has codified rejection of, suspicion toward, and the denial of the possibility of citizenship for individuals from Muslim-majority nations, ending hopes of family reunification for many Muslim American citizens (Beydoun 2017; Beydoun and Ayoub 2017). Meanwhile, executive-level policy and rhetoric since 2001 has promoted surveillance of mosques, charitable organizations, neighborhoods, and youth groups (Iyer 2015). Muslim Americans working in the military and public offices—including newly elected Muslim American congressional representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—have faced rampant discrimination and harassment by colleagues or superiors, sometimes curtailing their ability to serve and endangering their lives (Curtis 2016; Hayes 2019).

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Islamophobia in the United States today calls into question enduring beliefs about American pluralism that many hold dear, such as the idea that American society offers people of all religious faiths and backgrounds equal recognition and protection under the law. Indeed, since the founding of the US, the status of religious, racial, and other minorities tells a different story. In fact, American immigrants and minorities often are, and have been, stigmatized, and their rights to assert religious and cultural aspects of their identity have been compromised or frankly denied. During slavery, Christians made the expression of African indigenous religions and Islam punishable offenses, and then cruelly segregated African Americans from their chosen churches both during and after slavery. Jews and Catholics faced harsh forms of exclusion from, and harassment in, many different forums of public and political life over the course of their integration into American society, and these forms of bigotry persist. Since the 1965 immigration reforms, the increasing numbers of religious minorities arriving in the US from places other than Europe have faced discrimination overt and subtle as they have sought to root various non-Judeo-Christian religious practices in United States soil. Americans harbor strong beliefs about the importance of religion— albeit only certain kinds of religion—to public morality and civic virtue (Bellah 1967; Schultz 2011). In this context, America’s powerful identification with certain Judeo-Christian styles of religiosity has far-reaching implications for Muslim Americans, leaving them in a double bind. In the American public square, denying the importance of religion to one’s value system can be construed as even worse than identifying with a stigmatized religion. Yet, in the age of Trump’s America, voices as high up as those from the executive office regularly construe Islam as antithetical to American values. Historically, religious minority actors, such as Catholic and Jews, have sometimes gained acceptance by explaining their religious values in terms that Protestant America could understand. But for most of American history, these religious minorities originated from Western or Eastern Europe, and their quest for recognition and acceptance as religious minorities was bolstered by their claim to a white identity. America’s flexible racial structure allowed these groups to “work toward whiteness,” but the flexibility afforded to certain European groups in earning white skin privilege may shut out other groups of non-European descent (Roediger 2005).

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Hamtramck’s Interfaith Landscape One unexpected finding of this book is the way that the assertion of Muslim religious and cultural identity in the public and political life of Hamtramck tended to set the grounds for, and call forth the emergence of, new and reinvigorated Catholic and Protestant spatial interpretations in the city. In response to Muslim space-making processes, Catholics and Protestants in Hamtramck rehearsed a wide range of Christian identities, assertions, and claims that both competed with, and were complementary to, Muslim claims. Most specifically, Muslim assertions of religiosity in Hamtramck’s public space caused Polish Catholics to question and test the boundaries and meanings of their status as the historically dominant ethnoreligious community that had lent Hamtramck its character, colored its public image, and animated its politics since the city’s founding. We also saw evidence for how some African Americans in the city responded to Muslim American claims to representation as religious minorities by raising points of connection to, or parallels with, African American Christian experiences of religiosity in the city—and especially the community’s sense of marginalization. Proponents of the Muslim American call to prayer were particularly canny political actors because they recognized the importance of appealing to an interfaith sensibility in their initial written request to the city, well in advance of the contentious debates. This sensibility is reflected in the opening language of the request to City Hall, which presciently legitimized the call to prayer by comparing it to church bells—an incisive appeal for respect and recognition among the faith communities of Hamtramck. Thus, from the outset, the Muslim leaders in question chose to represent themselves as Abrahamic religious actors living in a monotheistic Judeo-Christian society reliant upon the grace, good will, and recognition of other “people of the book” rather than as abstract citizens living in a secular democracy. The interfaith call to prayer campaign was largely successful, I would argue, because it offered the city a way to relate to, identify with, and make sense of Muslim difference in a Catholic idiom filtered through an interfaith sensibility. It was perceived by some as a victory not only for Muslims but for all religious actors in the city because, in this moment, city space was reinterpreted as religious space, in which the pos-

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sibilities for fellowship and coalition were articulated largely through the rubric of celebrating faith and respect for others’ right to worship as they would, rather than through a liberal secular framing of respect for others’ rights to make an unmarked sound in a neutral soundscape. With the success of the call-to-prayer campaign, an inclusivist version of the Polish Catholic sense of centrality and control over space was reinstated and put forth as a regulatory mechanism in the city, at the same time that Muslim space was being celebrated and reinterpreted. Yet some Muslims and non-Muslims critiqued the gains made with the passage of the noise ordinance amendment as only a partial victory, or even a pyrrhic one. Critics wanted to know why the legislation had to necessitate that Muslims sacrifice some of their autonomy over sound in exchange for permission to exercise a right that was already constitutionally guaranteed. By the same token, the rhetoric and imagery produced by the campaign overemphasized what anthropologist Andrew Shryock terms a “politics of sameness” between Muslim and Catholics, a strategic decision that similarly employs a liberal secular framework to articulate the interfaith movement in the city through the hegemonic— and constraining—imaginaries of municipal and national belonging. Shryock describes the unanticipated and “sometimes bizarre” result of these kinds of projects as a refashioning of Muslim identity into a homogeneous stereotype of the Muslim: a “figure identified with the [dominant society’s conception of] Self, with whom legitimate conflict is not possible” (2010, 9). A reliance on the politics of sameness as a strategy of inclusion may thus unwittingly be used to rearticulate the good Muslim/ bad Muslim binary (Mamdani 2004). One of the dangers of stressing the similarities between the two religions is that this paradigm may be used to discipline Muslim Americans who fail to embrace it and also marginalize forms of Muslim expressive culture that fall outside of it. Four years later, Hamtramck political actors, many of whom were among the most active during the call-to-prayer campaign, fomented a communication breakdown during the debates over the Human Rights Ordinance. Political players who had been allies during the call-toprayer debate fell on opposite sides of the fence. Most surprisingly to the city’s mainstream political actors, many Muslims teamed up with conservative Christians to oppose the Human Rights Ordinance on the grounds that it encouraged immoral public expressions. During this

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second campaign, city residents regularly referenced the earlier call-toprayer campaign, which served as kind of palimpsest upon which ideas and expectations about the new campaign were inscribed. Against this backdrop, some of the city’s influential leaders represented the Muslim contestation of the human rights legislation as, first and foremost, a betrayal of the liberal humanist progressive ethics the city leaders assumed Muslims had been promoting in the past, rather than as the expression of a different kind of movement on its own terms. In such a formulation, the dominant liberal progressive representation of Muslim conservative voices in the city was one in which Muslims were merely a bad copy of the Christian right. This representation ignored the possibility that the conservative position could hold a different set of meanings for Muslims. The Muslim anti–LGBTQ rights campaign was seen as part and parcel of a larger, complex, and internecine way of being conservative in the US, one that—understood through a liberal secular framework—was automatically linked with white privilege, racism, and xenophobia. In this construction, Muslims are represented, at best, as naïve political actors and, at worst, as indiscriminate hatemongers. In this formulation, then, there was neither room for debate nor for an articulation of these issues according to the logics of an alternative ethics.

Inadequacies of the “Tri-Faith” Model The difficulties that Muslim Americans face in legitimating themselves as interfaith actors, even in movements that do not concern conservatism and human rights, was demonstrated on the national stage in 2011, in the case of the Park51 or Cordoba House Project in New York. The Cordoba House was a proposed Islamic center near where the World Trade Center once stood. The project was developed by Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent Muslim American and interfaith proponent. Rauf and his supporters made a persistent effort to explain Park51 in interfaith terms and to connect it to an aim of “promoting multiculturalism, and the tolerance and pluralism [Rauf] found common to both American and Islamic history”; in doing so, Rauf and his supporters deliberately “expanded the narrative of a US ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ into a tri-fold ‘Abrahamic’ one” (Hicks 2012, 413) inclusive of Islam.

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Rauf ’s proposal incited an outpouring of rage on the local and national levels. Right-wing groups dubbed the project the “Ground Zero mosque” or “Victory Mosque,” implicitly asserting that since men who identified as Muslim had destroyed the towers, all Muslims were complicit in the act. In this view, Rauf ’s decision to build his center near the World Trade Center was a gesture of supremacy or triumph over the United States. Such sentiments were expressed in large protests outside the site. One placard read: “A Mosque at Ground Zero spits on the grave of 9/11 victims” (Kinnard 2011). Negative press about Park51 escalated, and the project was never completed. During 2010, press coverage of the Park51 controversy led to a sharp rise in mosque vandalism across the United States and in hateful and discriminatory speech against Muslims (Hicks 2012, 411). Hicks’s work provides a helpful yet sobering counterperspective for those who assume that the Muslim path to acceptance in mainstream America could follow that of Catholics and Jews, if only Muslims are willing to make the same kinds of efforts at adaptation. Rauf worked to create an Islamic center that could be incorporated into a Jewish-ChristianMuslim tri-faith American landscape and failed. Instead, his efforts instigated a verbally violent rejection, with detractors denying the very validity of his movement and painting his efforts to include Islam in the Abrahamic tradition as based on distortion and lies. According to Hicks: [These developments] demonstrate that the narratives of tolerance and religious liberty, ones premised on supposedly inherent differences, offer particular kinds of inclusion that do not necessarily create harmonious coexistence. Rather, these discourses often work both to create and discipline diversity in various ways, setting the boundaries of what can be tolerated and how. (2012, 414)

The debate over the Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance reveals a similar point: as non-European-descended figures who have long been termed “others” in the Orientalist imagination, Muslims are subject to a distinct set of standards, tests, and exclusions in America. That is not to say that the interfaith model for inclusion cannot be helpful or useful in some ways; it is rather to say that this model must be expanded to account for power, race, and colonial history if it is to be effective as a sustainable social justice tool.

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Racial categorization is flexible in that groups can gain or lose their white status over time depending on a range of factors (Roediger 2005). Yet racial flexibility has its limits. What can count as white in America has stretched in many different directions, but it is not infinitely flexible, since any dominant group must have its “other” (Volpp 2002). The interfaith campaigns that rose to prominence in the 1950s—and still provide the dominant model for interfaith work today—centered squarely on protecting and defending European-based immigrant groups targeted due to their religious identity. Historically, white-skin privilege has been perennially withheld from African Americans, regardless of their class status. It is unclear to what extent Muslim Americans and other nonEuropean-descended groups in the United States will have the option to work their way toward whiteness or to find acceptance under pluralism. While scholars are studying how ethnicity, race, national origin, and non-Judeo-Christian heritage affect the way that individuals in such minority racial and/or religious groups find belonging, one thing is certain: perceptions about race play a strong role for Muslim Americans and other non-European-descended religious minority groups who have skin hues marked as foreign by the dominant society—colors they can’t “peel off,” as Muslim American activist Khalid Turaani pointed out during the OneHamtramck event described in the introduction.

A Municipal Model of Change This book’s critique of liberal secularism—and its attendant ideologies of pluralism and multiculturalism—proceeds by way of stories about how Muslim Americans and their non-Muslim neighbors negotiated belonging and exclusion across lines of difference in one small city. In these stories, we have seen how the tenets of the dominant society, encoded into municipal policy, institutional functioning, or everyday standards of behavior, can sometimes appear to Hamtramck residents as unfair and discriminatory—as impositions that impede their ability to express themselves, conduct their business, and raise their children according to their desires. Because Muslim Americans constitute a group that is ambivalently included in the American mainstream—and thus often subjected to a harsh disciplinary regime—stories about Muslim Americans represent stories from the margins. This book has offered a portrait

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of how Muslim Americans and their neighbors build a society together in Hamtramck through rehearsing, debating, and testing the liberal secular, interfaith, and multicultural ethics dominant on a national scale. Through this, we gain an understanding of how people from both dominant and minority societies utilize these systems in ways that may at times live up to their ideals, yet fall short of them at other times. In the dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims, the city of Hamtramck itself always appears as an interlocutor, as a third term, as a factor and a force binding its residents together. Many of the people who appear in this book are heavily, and self-consciously, invested in Hamtramck itself as a shared social and spatial project. They are aware that Hamtramck is unlike any other city in the United States by virtue of its remarkable concentration of Muslims—and other singular features of its extraordinary history. Many people in Hamtramck profess an intimacy and shared investment in the city that precludes—or at least makes very difficult—the option of listening to someone once and then turning away. As long as they remain politically and socially engaged, residents of Hamtramck will encounter the same individuals again and again, in ever more varied and complex meetings, and thus find it difficult to sustain the fantasy that a human being’s worth and potential can be boiled down to the way they dress, the way they worship, or their political position on a particular policy, regardless of how urgent and socially significant that policy may be. In sum, then, by engaging with processes of social and political engagement on a micro-scale, we can better understand how individuals situated at the margins come to articulate the contradictions inherent in dominant ideologies—and how their less marginalized neighbors may respond to these minority actors in a way that creates a more inclusive society. By the same token, we may also grasp how systems that purport to endorse universal values may nonetheless exclude some of their members, thus perpetuating regimes of discrimination that strongly deviate from the very ideals they seek to uphold. Ultimately, familiarity between people, and everyday encounters with difference, create the conditions for finding solutions. In understanding how residents of one small city have meaningfully expanded the local mainstream through trial and error, dialogue, and commitment, we may discover pathways for learning about and negotiating difference on the national scale.

Acknowledgments

I relied on the support of many people while carrying out this work. In the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Kamran Asdar Ali, Anne Cvetkovich, John Hartigan, Kathleen Stewart, and Pauline Turner Strong offered me an intellectual and ethical framework for launching this project; their collective guidance is a mainstay for my scholarship. At Western Michigan University, colleagues and friends who provided sustenance include: Hafiz Nauman Akbar, Linda Borish, Scott Bade, Lori Diehl, Jeremey Blair, Stephen Covell, Edward Eckle, Susan Freeman, Matt Fries, Katherine Joslin, Mitch Kachun, Carla Korestsky, Thomas Kostrzewa, Irma Lopez, Vincent de Lyon-Callo, Michelle Metro-Roland, Ann Miles, Natalio Ohanna, James Palmitessa, Anna Popovka, Susan Pozo, Diane Riggs, John Saillant, Cybelle Shattuck, Nathan L. M. Tabor, Cindy Visscher, Kevin Wanner, Kala Wilette, Brian Wilson, and Kristina Wirtz. I was lucky to have Kalamazoo College colleagues and friends nearby, like Carol Anderson, Christina Carol, Jeffrey Haus, Mira Mohisini, and Deia Sportel. Friends in the town of Kalamazoo encouraged me as well: Sevda Arslan, Charlie Ann Bouverette, Suzanne HuffmanChamberlin, Anna Gutman, Rachel Haus, Cynthia Hoss, Ben Jones, Julie Klick, Jody Michaels, Lisa Gail Pratt, Rachael Pulice, Theresa Rutgers, Barbara J. Shell, Bobbie Joe Shell, Patrick Vannorstrand, and Helen Yee. From near and far, other colleagues and friends lighted the way. My mentor Samer Mahdi Ali (University of Michigan) has shown me kindness and generosity beyond measure and has served as my role model over many years. I am also grateful to Michigan State University colleagues and friends Mohammad Khalil, Mara Leichtman, and Jill Manske; Tim Daniels (Hofstra University); Souad Eddouada (University of Kenitra); Jeanette Jouili (University of Pittsburgh); Martijn Koster (Radbound University); Anouk de Koning (Leiden University); Sally Howell (UM Dearborn); Karla Mallette (UM); Karen Libman 233

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(Grand Valley State University); and Meryem Zaman (City University of New York). At WMU Libraries, Jason Glatz created the maps for the book with élan, while Edward Eckle and LuMarie Guth offered expert demographic support. Julia Mays from the Office of Research Compliance offered helpful guidance. Over several key years, Lisa Gail Pratt, a doctoral student at WMU, provided precise and unstinting assistance with research, transcription, data entry, and more; the book greatly benefits from her formidable skills. Other research assistants at WMU who made significant contributions to the manuscript include: Charlie Ann Bouverette, Mariam Jakubowski, Anthony Langely, Rachael Jane Pulice, Joel Sanford, and Tyler Alexander Wilson. In Hamtramck, I depended on the help, support, and kind understanding of city residents who guided my research. I do not include most of their names here to maintain their confidentiality, but I hope I will have the chance to express my gratitude to them in other ways. Hamtramck city clerk August Gitschlag provided a great deal of archival help in recent years; at earlier stages of the project I relied on the assistance of former Hamtramck city clerks Ed Norris and Marie Kendzierski. Afrah Almasmari showed me heartfelt warmth and encouragement over many years, cheering me on to the very end. Bill and Twyla Meyer became my Hamtramck family. They opened their home to me on many occasions and have done a great deal to facilitate my work. Alice Kopecky and Patrick McMahon’s warmth and generosity has also made my work in Hamtramck possible. While I lived in Hamtramck with my husband, Nathan, during 2007–9, our neighbors Phil and Cathy Tomaszewski and their son Adam extended love and care to us, while friends such as Hillary Blough, Nadine Gizak, and Steve Cherry taught us about city history while helping us figure out the best ways to have fun in Hamtramck and Detroit. Jennifer Solheim and Hilary Levinson, freelance editors, each lent their considerable talents to make the manuscript come alive. Jennifer Hammer, senior editor at NYU Press, provided steady guidance throughout the publication process, offering me patience and kindness during every stage of the project. At NYU Press, Veronica Knutson and Amy Klopfenstein also eased the path to publication. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers organized via NYU Press who imported carefully

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considered advice to significantly improve the manuscript at various stages of its development. Funding for the initial research stage of this project was provided by the Wenner-Gren Association for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation. A grant from the Philanthropic Education Organization supported the writing stage. While at WMU, my research and writing were made possible by funding from the Department of Comparative Religion, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office for the Vice President of Research, and the Gender and Women’s Studies Department. I would like to especially thank Women’s Caucus members Susan Freeman (Gender and Women’s Studies), Mariana Levin (Mathematics), Anna Popovka (Communications), and Susan Pozo (Global and International Studies), as each helped organize forums allowing me to share my work on campus. My family provided a great deal of support to me during the time I prepared this project. My mother-in-law, Jeanette Tabor, furnished me with a beautiful place to write in her Big Bear, California, home during an early stage of the manuscript development. Jeanette has been a kind, engaging, and stimulating person to dialogue with throughout the research and writing process. My father-in-law, Douglas Tabor, has offered his generous support in many ways and was a delightful guest in Hamtramck. When my brother-in-law, Blaine Tabor, came to visit us in Hamtramck, he photographed city architecture, creating compelling images that have enlivened many of my conference presentations. My parents, Norman and Sonya Perkins, together gave me the confidence to embark on this project. I have inherited from them the love of learning, respect for difference, and curiosity about people that drives my scholarship. From childhood, they instilled in me the strengths and qualities necessary to persevere even during setbacks. They have provided me with generous support and understanding during every stage of my education and professional development. I certainly could not have completed this book without them. Finally, many thanks are due to my husband, Nathan L. M. Tabor. He was there with me from the start of this project when we were both graduate students at University of Texas. Nathan accompanied me in Hamtramck while I conducted the bulk of the research for this book,

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and then took me to India with him, where I wrote much of it. Now, as my colleague at Western Michigan University, Nathan continues to challenge me to work creatively and critically, with bravery, humor, and spontaneity, as he does in his own scholarship. Nathan’s significant intellectual contribution buttresses the entire manuscript. I can’t wait for our next scholarly adventures together.

Notes

Introduction

1 These tensions include discrimination and hate crimes against Muslim Americans since September 11, 2001, which have taken on new dimensions since Donald Trump deployed “political Islamophobia” in his 2016 presidential campaign (Beydoun 2018, 190–94). 2 Yet Muslim American women are emerging as political leaders both in the Detroit metro area and nationally. For example, Detroit’s Rashida Tlaib is one of the first Muslim American women to serve in the US House of Representatives. 3 Turaani was pushing for what sociologist Mucahit Bilici terms an “interfaith” or “civil religion” representational strategy, while the candidates quoted here remained centered in a secular, “liberal pluralist” model of incorporation (2012, 161–66). 4 Hamtramck’s population also includes significant numbers of Muslims from Bosnia, who have been coming to the city mainly since the early 1990s as refugees. Hamtramck also has a small number of Muslim residents who have come from places such as Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, and—especially in recent years—West African nations such as Senegal and Liberia (US Census Bureau 2017). 5 Some scholars use the term “place-making” interchangeably with “space-making,” while for others these carry distinct shades of meaning (Feld and Basso 1996; Low 2017; Massey 1994; Smith 1987). 6 “Racialization” describes the process in which fluid categories of difference become “fixed species of otherness” and the process through which “any diacritic of social personhood—including class, ethnicity, generation, kinship/affinity, and positions within fields of power—comes to be essentialized, naturalized, and/ or biologized” (Silverstein 2005, 364). On the racialization of Arab and Muslim identities and their relationship to contemporary Islamophobia, see Aidi (2014), Beydoun (2016, 2010a, b), Jamal and Naber (2008), Maira (2006; 2009), Rana (2011), Singh (2016), and Volpp (2002). On “racialization from below” (Aidi 2014, 162–64), in which groups stigmatized across race, class, and religion develop forms of identification and solidarity, see Bakalian and Bozorgmehr (2009), Iyer (2015), Love (2017), and Maira (2016). 7 For other ethnographic works on Muslim-minority identity, women, and spatial boundaries, see Duemmler, Moret, and Dahinden (2010) and Korteweg and Yurdakul (2009). For Muslim minorities and the LGBTQ question, see Beydoun (2018, 179–80), Bracke (2012), Fernando (2014), Naber (2012, 83–91), Perkins (2010; 2016; 2019a; 2019b), and van der Veer (2006). 237

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8 For some foundational studies, see Handlin (1969), Herberg (1994), and Moore (1987). For recent theoretical works that include an analysis of transnational and diasporic aspects of immigrant religiosity, see Basch (1994), Levitt (2007), and Vertovec (2010). 9 I conducted over one hundred formal interviews for this study. 10 In a culture of surveillance and profiling, government officials and private citizens alike link signs and symbols that they associate with Muslim religious or cultural identity to terrorist threats. Some of these signs and symbols are phenotypical and shared by others besides Muslim Americans. The targeted group can thus be described as Muslim Americans and those that look like them, a racialized formation including Arabs, others from the Middle East, South Asians, and Sikhs (Volpp 2002, 1584). 11 Other works approaching relationships among Muslims and non-Muslim in this tradition include Korteweg and Yurdakul (2009), Kuppinger (2015), NikielskaSekula (2016a; 2016b), and Zolberg and Woon (1999). 12 As Barth asserts: “The critical focus of investigation from this point on becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses. The boundaries to which we must give our attention are of course social boundaries” (1969, 15). 13 The term “Islamicate” was first introduced by historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson to refer to a set of various and sometimes conflicting kinds of beliefs, customs, and practices that were developed by a range of cultures and societies over time in which Islam played a notable role (2000, 57–58). For Sehlikoglu, “The term allows researchers to locate the values associated with Islam with local fractions within its historical and geographical limitations, without necessarily essentializing those values at the center of the lives of those who are living in that context” (2015, 236). 14 For various explorations of the idea of “cultural” or “traditional” Muslims, see Aitchison, Hopkins, and Kwan (2016) and Jouili (2015, 35). For an analysis of the culture concept as related to Muslims in Europe, see Jouili (2019). 15 Martin (2010) discusses the various ways that scholars, activists, and the general population have used the term “secular Muslim” and the wide range of meanings this term may convey. 16 Since all the Muslim Americans I met in Hamtramck publicly identified first and foremost as Sunni, the politics of sectarian relationships did not play a large role in this study. 17 For full-length urban ethnographic monographs that place a focus on Muslims in one or two North American cities, see Abdullah (2010), Afzal (2015), BernsMcGown (1999), Corbett (2016), D’Alisera (2004), Howell (2014), Kane (2011), Karim (2009), Schmidt (2004), Stoller (2002), and Walbridge (1997). For European urban ethnographic scholarship, see Bowen (2009), Ewing (2008), Fernando (2014), Inge (2016), Jouili (2015), Kuppinger (2015), Liberatore (2017), Mandel (2008), Özyürek (2014), Rogozen-Soltar (2017), and Werbner (2002).

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18 Compare to the rationale offered by political scientist Jocelyn Cesari for the salience of “Muslim” as a category of analysis in her work on immigration in European cities (2005a, 1016). 19 In a lively Facebook discussion, a group of African American Muslim women affiliated with a Detroit mosque several miles from Hamtramck discussed the possibility of gathering for lunch at the Yemen Café. One had heard about the restaurant from a friend and referenced the restaurant’s halal fare and accommodation of gender separation as novel, attractive features of this potential meeting place. 20 For interviews discussed in this book, I use actual names for public figures like Turaani with the speakers’ permissions. In other cases, pseudonyms are used to protect individual privacy, in line with accepted standards of ethnographic practice. 21 Turaani’s sentiment echoes discussions among other Detroit-area Muslim American leaders, who, as documented by sociologist Mucahit Bilici (2012), assert that Muslim Americans require a certain level of “cultural literacy” to understand the need to represent and market the relationship between Islam and other religions in a certain way for mainstream acceptance (157). 22 These trends of publicly embracing religion according to a specific formula are described—and critiqued—in recent scholarship: Bilici (2012), Corbett (2016), and Hicks [Corbett] (2012). 23 Nativism is the idea that certain established inhabitants are more entitled to the nation than are newcomers. Cultural monism is the belief that America’s most secure way forward lies in solidifying its dominant, white Protestant identity rather than incorporating the cultures, faiths, and traditions of newcomers. 24 Klassen and Bender associate pluralism with religion and define it as “a commitment to recognize and understand others across perceived or claimed lines of religious difference” (2010, 2). 25 At midcentury, conceptions of American pluralism were usually limited in scope to imaging relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. It was not until after the civil rights era and the Immigration Act of 1965, overturning quotas based on national origin, that conceptions of pluralism came to include religions other than the Judeo-Christian ones, as the demographic profile of immigrants changed profoundly (Hirschman, Kasinitz, and Dewind 1999). 26 Will Herberg, a Jewish theologian cum sociologist, did the most to popularize tri-faith America via his landmark 1955 publication, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1994). Herberg challenged the idea that American assimilation takes place in a single melting pot. Instead he proposed the “triple melting pot” theory, claiming that new immigrants assimilate to the United States while retaining some version of their original identities as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. Herberg’s ideas were widely influential, but his unified theory of religious minority in America is deeply flawed in that it only marginally mentioned any issues having to do with race and African Americans (Schultz 2006, 8), and barely touches upon the dynamics of inclusion for religious groups besides Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Popular Muslim American spokespeople

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such as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf use Herberg’s ideas as the basis for imagining Muslim incorporation in America (Corbett 2016, 18–23). Historical Muslim figures such as Ismail al-Faruqi tapped into similar language to authorize their ideas about Muslim American inclusion (Grewal 2014, 139–45). Between 1956 and 1960, Kennedy and his team engaged in a vigorous and successful public relations campaign to educate the voting public on Catholicism and to demonstrate that, as a Catholic, Kennedy harbored the same basic values as did most Protestant Americans (Oliphant and Wilkie 2017). Cultural citizenship accounts for the complex social and cultural processes that comprise the experience of national belonging for immigrants and minorities (Flores and Benmayor 1997; Miller 2001; Ong 1996; Rosaldo 1994; Siu 2001). The concept of cultural citizenship captures the process of “becoming American” that develops outside of the abstract, supposedly universal set of legal and judicial rights, traditionally assumed to define the experience of citizenship in the United States. Per Lefebvre, rhythm is the juncture point between space and time: “Everywhere there is an interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is a rhythm” (2004, 15). Literary scholar M. M. Bakhtin defines “chronotope” as the way time and space are configured in literature (1982, 84–85), and this term has been adapted by urban anthropologists in phenomenological studies of cities (Laguerre 2004). Lefebvre demonstrates how the schemas that people use to develop a sense of how things should be organized in space are shaped by how they understand and perceive the sequencing of events within time, especially as explored in his work on rhythm. “Time and space [ . . . ] exert a reciprocal action: they measure themselves against one another” (2004, 15). For examples of territory-based approaches to scholarship on Muslims in North America and Europe, see work on mosques (Allievi 2009; Cesari 2005), schools (Howell 2010; Lindkvist 2008; Schmidt 2004), and ethnic enclaves (Abraham 1983; Aswad 1974; Haddad, Yazbeck, and Smith 1994). See studies of parades and street festivals that “take over” city spaces (Abdullah 2010; Kane 2011), of pan-ethnic and cross-sectarian Muslim solidarity in New York (Slymovics 1996), and of a Sufi order’s annual procession through Manchester (Werbner 2002). See also Ashley (1999), Orsi (1999b), and Sciorra (1999). This includes studies of how taxi drivers mark spaces inside their cabs as Muslim with objects and sounds (D’Alisera 2004; Smith and Bender 2004). For a study of non-Muslim, automobile-oriented, mobile-spatial practice linked theoretically with these studies, see Chappell (2013). This also includes the way Muslim women decorate and operate halal food carts (D’Alisera 2004), and how West African male street vendors establish and move their markets (Stoller 2002). See Smith and Bender’s (2004) study of New York City business accommodation of taxi drivers’ prayer schedules. See studies of how Pakistani and West African Muslims make places in the radio airwaves of cities such as Houston (Afzal 2015) and New York (Kane 2011), and of

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how the call to prayer marks place in London (Eade 1996), Hamtramck (Perkins 2015; Weiner 2014), and Holland (Arab 2017). “Modern phenomenology, in contrast to positivist notions of knowledge, stresses the primacy of the perceptive subject and thus the subjectivity of knowledge about the world” (Whittemore 2014, 303). See Stoller (2002, 125–26) and Jouili (2015, 161–75). See Sarroub (2005). I use “Muslim world” in anthropologist Zareena Grewal’s sense to signify the “aspirational moral geograph[ies]” of some US Muslims, including the US within a global network of places in which the ummah—or worldwide community of believers—finds a foothold (2014, 6).

Chapter 1. The Making of a Muslim American City

1 A significant population of Bosnian American Muslims settled in Hamtramck as refugees during and after the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. As of 2003, Hamtramck was second only to Chicago as the city with the highest number of Bosnians in the United States (Cetinich 2003, 62). The impact of Bosnian Americans in Hamtramck is outside the scope of the present study, which is why a detailed presentation of their history is not included here. For more on Bosnian integration into cities across the United States, see Lucken (2010), Husiman and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2005), Mosseleson (2006), and Franz (2005). 2 Due to the unreliability of Wayne County maps before 1840, the pre-annexation borders of Hamtramck Township are difficult to determine. According to historical geographer Robert Maday, in 1827, before significant annexations, the township composed “nearly a third of present-day Detroit, the cities of Hamtramck and Highland Park, and all those areas retaining the name “Grosse Point” and also included a portion of the land that is today Belle Isle” (1977, 48–49). 3 See Hill (2017). 4 The only monograph I could find on the history of African Americans in Hamtramck is a detailed 2007 BA honors thesis written by Jonathan Alexander Zajac, then a student at the University of Michigan. The topic of African American– Polish relations in Hamtramck and Detroit is also treated in articles by Thaddeus Radzialowski (1974; 1982) and Radzialowski and Binkowski (1978). Greg Kowalski provides anecdotal accounts of prominent African Americans in Hamtramck’s history (2005). In his 1977 MA thesis on the history of Hamtramck Township, Robert Maday mentions a 1969 MA thesis and an unpublished paper by Wayne State University student Robert Dowe, still available at the Hamtramck Public Library, that provides the information about African Americans in Hamtramck (1977, 121–22). More information about African Americans in Hamtramck can be gleaned from sections of books devoted mainly to Polish Americans in Detroit (Serafino 1983; Wood 1955); period local newspaper accounts, including ones in the Hamtramck Citizen and Detroit Free Press; legal records such as Garrett v. City of Hamtramck, 335 F. Supp. 16 (E.D. Mich. 1971); an oral history collection

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recorded in 1973 (Lewandowski 1998a); and the Life Histories of Hamtramck website (“Life Histories of Hamtramck-Home”). See also Roediger (2005). These dates mark the founding of the parishes, rather than when the respective main church edifices were erected or completed. In Hamtramck, this included Our Lady Queen of Apostles in 1917, Saint Ladislaus in 1920, and Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church in 1922 (Kowalski 2005, 41). See preceding footnote on the nature of these dates. As Zajac notes, both Hamtramck and Detroit were about 4 percent black in 1921, but “in the same period (from 1940 to 2000) when Detroit went from 9.2% to 82% Black, Hamtramck only went from 6.7% to 15% Black” (2007, 2). According to historian William Winkel, Detroit experienced a “great exodus” of its white populations beginning in 1950 and continuing for decades. In 1950, whites composed 80 percent of Detroit’s population. By 1970, whites were at 55 percent and African Americans were at 44 percent (2017, 268–69). Today, African Americans make up about 80 percent of Detroit’s population. According to the Michigan State Census of 1904, there were 24 “Negro” residents among the 1,559 members of the village’s total population (Maday 1977, 95). As mentioned by Zajac, in square miles, Detroit is sixty-eight times larger than Hamtramck (2007, 13). Garrett v. City of Hamtramck, 335 F. Supp. 16 (E.D. Mich. 1971). In contrast to the wealth of material available about Detroit’s neighborhood segregation, I was not able to locate detailed studies of how redlining, marketing, and social factors contributed to this situation in Hamtramck. Finding and analyzing these records and others pertaining to African American history in Hamtramck would indeed be a worthwhile project (Zajac 2007, 94). Garrett v. City of Hamtramck, 335 F. Supp. 16 (E.D. Mich. 1971). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Detroit News (2017), “Housing Discrimination in Hamtramck” (n.d), Lawrence (2015), and Zajac (2007). Over the course of decades, William Hood (1943–2012) worked, through his organizational leadership and his own physical labor, to help provide justice and restitution for Hamtramck’s displaced African American community. On April 12, 2012, Hood was posthumously honored with a special tribute from State Senator Bert Johnson, which today hangs on the wall of his daughter Gi Hale’s home in Detroit. See Detroit News (2017), “Housing Discrimination in Hamtramck,” (n.d.), and Lawrence (2015). The website offers a rich collection of oral history accounts carried out in the summer of 2016 with eighteen Hamtramck Residents over the age of fifty. See Dillard (2009).

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23 Hamtramck City Clerk August Gitschlag confirmed: “The city of Hamtramck passed a resolution to name a portion of Caniff Street in honor of Pastor Jordan and the formal street sign unveiling ceremony was held on April 28, 2013” (personal communication, April 8, 2019). 24 The African American Muslim sects that developed during the Great Migration differ markedly from the Sunni Islam practiced by African American Muslims in the plantation South. See Diouf (2013) and Gomez (2008). 25 For detailed analyses of the social, spiritual, and political meanings of Islam for African Americans during this period, see Curtis (2002), Dannin (2002), Jackson (2005), McCloud (1995), and Turner (2003). For accounts focusing on women, see Chan-Malik (2018) and Gibson and Karim (2016). 26 Based on conversations with local activists. 27 The HBO documentary The Education of Mohammad Hussein offers some glimpses into Al-Ikhlas Academy (Ewing and Gracy 2013). For more on the history of the University of Islam and Clara Muhammad schools, see Gibson and Karim (2016), Marshall (1976), and Rashid and Muhammad (1992). 28 Bangladesh came into existence in 1971 following the War of Independence that led to the separation of East Pakistan into Bangladesh and West Pakistan into current-day Pakistan. Pakistan came into existence in 1947, following the imperial partition of British India. 29 Historian Sally Howell’s 2014 study Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the American Past is an essential guide to understanding how racial, ethnic, and sectarian dynamics animated the institution building of Muslim Americans in Detroit, Dearborn, and Highland Park from the turn of the twentieth century until today. 30 According to Howell, the period press estimated the Muslim population in metro Detroit in the 1920s between 7,000 and 16,000 (2014, 34). 31 The Highland Park mosque, which operated from 1921 to 1922, was notable for its founders’ interracial and intersectarian inclusiveness, as they strove to represent Shī‘ī, Sunni, and Ahmadiyya Muslim Americans from all areas of the world (Howell 2014, 48). 32 Named after the seventh-century historical figure Mu‘ādh ibn Jabal, who was sent by the Prophet Muhammad to teach Islam to the people of Yemen. 33 I did not encounter any Muslims in Hamtramck who openly identify as Shī‘ī , although Shī‘ī Muslims constitute significant minorities in both Yemen and Bangladesh. Most Yemeni Muslims with Zaidī (Shī‘ī) backgrounds who came to the area settled in Dearborn. None of Hamtramck’s many mosques identify as having a Shī‘ī orientation. 34 The Detroit Arab American Study estimates that 43 percent of Yemenis Americans in the area work in trade jobs, compared to a range of 7 to 17 percent for other Arabs and Chaldeans (Baker 2003, 11). These trade jobs are generally lower earning than most other employment categories included in the study. Only 3 percent of Yemeni Americans in the area are business owners, while among immigrants, business owners tend to report the highest level of income (Baker

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2003, 13). At an average of five persons per household, Yemeni household size far exceeds that of the national average of 2.7. According to an American Community Survey Brief based on 2006–2010 census data, while the share of owner-occupied houses in the US is 66.6 percent, for Yemenis, it is only 36.7 percent (Asi and Beaulieu 2013, 4). Further, while median household income for all households in the US in 2010 was $51,914, for Yemenis it was $34,667 (Asi and Beaulieu 2013, 5). Several studies include an analysis comparing the Hamtramck/Detroit Yemeni community and that of Dearborn (Abraham 1978, 4–5; Abraham 1983, 113–15; Nasser 2012). Studies focusing on, or including detailed attention to, Yemenis in Detroit metro areas more generally include those by Abraham, Abraham, and Aswad (1983), Al-Ahmary (1998), Alwujude (2000), Aswad (1974; 1991; 1994), Cozad (1987), Howell (2014), and Sarroub (2005). In his 1978 dissertation about Yemenis in the Detroit/Hamtramck area, anthropologist Nabeel Abraham reported that about 90 percent of Yemenis in the area were men (17). The US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2011–2015 estimates the number of Yemenis (both native born and foreign born) in Michigan at 13,754, with most (12,947) living in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn Michigan Metropolitan area. This breaks down to 1,551 in Hamtramck; 1,082 in Detroit; and 9,135 in Dearborn, with no information available for Dearborn Heights, which indicates the absence of a significant population in that area (US Census Bureau 2015a). While the 2011–2015 ACS numbers include both foreign- and native-born Yemenis, the ACS 5-Year Estimate for 2013–2017 puts the number of foreign-born Yemenis in Michigan at 14,862, in Hamtramck at 3,149, in Detroit at 2,900, in Dearborn City at 6,136, and in Dearborn Heights at 183 (US Census Bureau 2017). In reference to discrepancies of this nature, the Arab American Institute notes: “The [US] Census Bureau identifies only a portion of the Arab population through a question on ‘ancestry’ on the census long form, causing an undercount by a factor of about 3” (Arab American Institute n.d.). Under the leadership of then–city councilman Saad Almasmari, in 2019 a group of community activists formed the Yemen Town Project, whose goals include creating a park and monument in the area near the Yemen mural, developing the neighborhood, and gaining municipal and state-level designation for the area. On the west side of Joseph Campau, the enclave streets include the ten blocks from Denton to Geimer; on the east side of Joseph Campau, this includes the eight streets from Council Street to Lehmann Street. Prior to 1980, this was the site of the Dodge Main assembly plant and the nowleveled Pole Town. The Rule of Law Clinic at Yale Law School’s 2018 report, Window Dressing the Muslim Ban: Reports of Waivers and Mass Denials from Yemeni American Families Stuck in Limbo, provides a detailed summary of the various iterations of Trump’s travel ban issued between January and December 2017 and its disastrous effects on Yemenis and Yemeni Americans.

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42 “From 1990 to 2000, the Bangladeshi population was the fastest growing Asian American subgroup in the United States (471%)” (“The Bangladeshi Community” n.d.). The US Bangladeshi population has continued to grow at a rapid rate, expanding from about 57,000 in 2000 to about 188,000 in 2015, which is about a 230 percent increase (Pew Research Center 2017a). However, these official census counts show a lower number, based on the fact that Bangladeshis often identify as “Asian Indian” on the census form. According to Pew’s Analysis of American Community Survey Data from 2015, the Detroit metro area houses 10,000 Bangladeshis, the third largest concentration after New York and Washington, DC (Pew Research Center 2017a). 43 In 2012, local demographic specialist Thaddeus Radzialowski estimated the number of Bangladeshis in Hamtramck alone at 4,500. He attributed the lower indications on the 2010 census to the fact that “[t]hey (the Bangladeshis) prefer to classify themselves as ‘Asian-Indian,’ typically, on the census.” With that in mind, the Asian population (mainly Bangladeshi) totaled 21.5 percent of Hamtramck’s population of 22,423 in 2010 (Madeleine 2012). In her 2015 dissertation on Bangladeshis in metropolitan Hamtramck, anthropologist Sunanda Samaddar estimated that that the population of Bangladeshis on the Detroit side of the metropolitan Hamtramck border outnumbers those living in Hamtramck proper by 2:1 (4). The US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2011–2015 estimates the number of Bangladeshis in Michigan at 10,407, which community leaders describe as a vast undercount. The official numbers break down to 2,651 in Hamtramck and 3,473 in Detroit (US Census Bureau 2015b). While the 2011–2015 ACS numbers include both foreign- and native-born Bangladeshis, the 2013–2017 ACS 5-Year Estimate for 2013–2017 puts the number of only foreign-born Bangladeshis in Michigan at 14,720, in Hamtramck at 3,840, and in Detroit at 3,951 (US Census Bureau 2017). 44 Bangladesh Avenue was often compared favorably in its size and vibrancy to Mujeeb ar-Rahman Way in Chicago. 45 On April 23, 2019, the City of Hamtramck passed an official “Resolution Establishing Banglatown of Hamtramck,” which declared its geographic boundaries as located on Conant between Carpenter and Holbrook in Hamtramck (Hamtramck, Mich. Municipal Res. 2019–28). This came four years after Detroit political leaders recognized and defined Detroit Banglatown as an earmarked for targeted municipal planning and growth (“Campau-Davison-Banglatown” n.d.; Warikoo 2015). 46 Studies of Bangladeshi immigrants with a focus on Bangladeshis in Detroit and metropolitan Hamtramck include those by Samaddar (2015) and Kibria (2011). Howell (2014) contains local oral history data on Bangladeshi Americans. Other studies on Bangladeshi Americans include those by Bald (2013), Baluja (2003), and Alam (2013; 2014). 47 The Pew Research Center estimates that the population of Bangladesh is 90.4 percent Muslim and 8.4 percent Hindu. (Pew Research Center 2015, 237). The percentage of Bangladeshis in Hamtramck who are Muslim is significantly higher than the national average, due to family-centric immigration patterns.

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Chapter 2. Gender, Space, and Muslim American Women

1 To understand the associations of this term, some Muslim women in Hamtramck pointed me toward the 1939 work of Islamic modernist reformer Abu’l-A‘la Maududi, Purdah and the Status of Women. For more on Maududi and his influence on women in today’s Bangladesh, see Huq (2008). 2 See Mahmood (2004). 3 See Dahlgren (2010, 9–16). 4 See Karim (2009). 5 In 2011, international development specialist Masooda Bano and historian Hilary Kalmbach compiled an edited volume on women’s mosque participation, leadership, and authority across the globe. Related studies include ones centered in the US (Rouse 2004), Canada (Qureshi 1996), Europe (Jouili and Amir-Moazami 2006), Bangladesh (Huq and Rashid 2008), and Yemen (Meneley 2007). Included in this body of research are studies detailing movements to increase the visibility of female worship and the authority of Muslim women religious leaders (Eddouada 2009; Jaschok 2012; Rausch 2012). Some studies attend to women’s efforts to create mixedgender prayer spaces and to lead prayers for congregations including both women and men (Hammer 2012). Commenting on the state of the field, Hilary Kalmbach observes that “the main focus of scholarship on women’s religious participation to date has been on those seeking to overturn restrictions on the social and religious activities of women, to the detriment of detailed examination of women active in other, often more conservative environments” (2011, 12). Muslim groups in Hamtramck may reflect this kind of conservative environment. 6 Thanks to Dr. Meryem Zaman, anthropologist at the CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, for her help in my understanding the historical and cultural connotations of the purdah concept in the South Asian context. 7 The fact that the ESL instructor Ismeta, a Bosnian woman from a Muslim background, perpetuated these stereotypes suggest other ways in which Muslims sometimes apply these stereotypes to other Muslims, and helps destabilize unintended binaries between Muslim and non-Muslim that may arise from this study. The way that Bosnian Muslim women in Hamtramck perceive of and practice civic purdah goes beyond the confines of the present study. 8 See anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod’s discussion of how Muslim women use certain forms of dress in public spaces as a way to symbolically claim a set of ethics and protections linked to domestic spaces (2013, 36). 9 For expanded discussions of cultural citizenship, see Ong (1996), Perkins (2015), and Rosaldo (1994). 10 Feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2012) discusses contradictions inherent in the way that European politicians’ fears about the burqa as signaling a loss of individuality and freedom fuel proposals of burqa bans that indeed inhibit the freedom of Muslim women to express their individual choices. 11 See Massey (1994, 154).

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12 For studies on changing ideologies of women’s role in public, private, and political life in Yemen, see Dahlgren (2010; 2016) and Meneley (1996; 2007); for Bangladesh, see Alam (2018), Huq (2008), Huq (2011), Huq and Rashid (2008), and Gardner (1994). 13 For walking as space-making practice, see philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984). Jouili invokes de Certeau’s notions of walking tactics and strategies in her study of Muslim women in France and Germany (2015, 161–63, 173). 14 See sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee’s 2003 work theorizing how minority communities widen the mainstream society through the repetition of nonnormative practices. 15 Citing political scientist Nancy Fraser, Ghannam writes “Currently [ . . . ] public is used to mean ‘state related,’ ‘accessible to everyone,’ ‘of concern to everyone,’ and ‘pertaining to the common good or shared interest.’ Private usually refers to private property or to ‘intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life’” (Fraser 1992, 128, cited in 2002, 91). Ghannam points out that the way public and private have been divided, defined, and differentially valued has been continually in flux. Citing philosopher Seyla Benhabib, Ghannam notes that these divisions have been “part of a discourse of domination that legitimizes women’s oppression and exploitation in the private realm” (Benhabib 1992, 93, cited in 2002, 91). 16 See Ghannam (2002). 17 See Wadud (2006) and Mir-Hosseni (2015). 18 See Fernando (2014). 19 In public spaces, most Yemeni women in Hamtramck wore the long, loose, black ‘abāyah, referred to as a bālto by the Yemenis I knew. Most wore hijāb; the majority also had the niqāb (face veil), referred to as the lithāmah or lithām by Yemenis. 20 As noted earlier, the overall number of mosques in Hamtramck has expanded to at least sixteen. 21 The sārī is a flowing garment draped around the body that constitutes traditional South Asian women’s dress. The shalvār qamīz is a loose three-piece outfit consisting of a long, tuniclike top (qamīz or kurtā), pants (shalvār), and scarf (dupattā) that is also popular among South Asian women. 22 Muslim women referred to their teachers, and sometimes one another, as “sister” in the mosque context. This honorific conveyed respect, especially when used for teachers, and a sense of relationality as co-religionists. 23 See Göle (2013). 24 For anthropologist Hanna Papanek (1982), the burqa for some women in Pakistan signifies “portable seclusion,” a device that allows women to enter mixed spaces while signaling their adherence to the principles of gender division and invoking their rights to protection. In dialogue with Papanek’s writing, anthropologist Leila Abu Lughod envisions burqas as “mobile homes” that women use to convey their “belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women” (2013, 36).

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25 See Hall (2003, 50). In contrast with Hall’s definition of proxemics, my treatment relies upon Hamtramck Muslim women’s conscious and explicit deliberation over how they decide to use space. 26 In her discussion of multiple critique, Karim draws on the work of literary scholar and Middle East specialist mariam cooke, who was the first to bring this term into usage (2009, 93). Karim and cooke each acknowledge the basis of these ideas as resting on the foundation of black feminist thought, particularly sociologist Deborah K. King’s concept of “multiple oppressions” (King 1988). As cited in Karim (2009, 93), cooke defines multiple critique as an “oppositional stance,” allowing a woman to “remain in the community out of which she is speaking, even when she criticizes its problems” (cooke 2001, 113, 109). Karim understands the women that she engages as performing multiple critique when they “criticize gender discrimination in their faith communities, but [ . . . ] also criticize Western feminism when it attacks and stereotypes Islam as inherently oppressive” (93). 27 For ethnographic analysis of how Muslim women in piety movements engage in internal critiques of “cultural” Islam, see Jouili (2019) and Huq and Rashid (2008). 28 For more on “unmapping the Muslim world,” see Grewal (2014).

Chapter 3. Yemeni Women, Civic Purdah, and Private/Public Divides

1 Some pious Muslim women mixed freely only with male relations who are categorized Islamically as mahram, or unmarriageable to them, such as father, brothers, and some other close family relations, as outlined in religious texts (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2001, 304). A second and related meaning of “mahram” is a close kin who serves as a protector or guardian to a woman, for example, when she travels outside her usual circuits (Jouili 2015, 104). 2 See Aswad (1994). 3 Charter schools are public schools that operate with structural and curricular independence from the state. As described by Basford, Hick, and Bigelow, charter schools typically are small, created around a particular educational purpose (i.e., technology, medical careers, classroom curriculum), and often cater to the specific interests of a community (2007, 4). 4 Sitārah refers to a physical curtain, while “purdah” often refers to a metaphorical curtain. 5 See Mazumdar (2001). 6 For writing on ideological constructions of the Muslim home, see Campo (1991), Henkel (2007), McCloud (1996), and Qureshi (1996). 7 Ghannan cites Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to define privacy as “‘the quality or state of being apart from company or observation,’ ‘freedom from unauthorized intrusion,’ ‘a place of seclusion,’ and ‘secrecy’” (2002, 92). 8 See Mawdudi’s 1939 publication (1990). 9 For studies of how women enact the ummah ideal across class and ethnic lines as an Islamic feminist practice, see Karim (2009), Grewal (2009), and Naber (2005).

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10 In some black Muslim traditions, the term “revert” is preferred over “convert,” to indicate a person who was not born into, but rather chose, Islam (Khabeer 2016, 245). 11 For more discussions of how the urban culture of the street is gendered by Muslims over a range of different contexts, see Aswad (1994), Abu Lughod (2002), Koning (2009), and Ewing (2008). 12 The idea of guarding one’s visibility more from “people you know” echoes Abu Lughod’s findings about the Beni Mellal in Egypt, for whom face veiling was a subtle in-group communication device within the village, but which was not used the same way when villagers visited Cairo and walked its streets (1986). 13 Al-Haramain, literally “two sanctuaries,” refers to the two holy cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina, both located in today’s Saudi Arabia. 14 For discussions of the meaning and history of al-ziyy al-Islami, or modern Islamic dress associated with revival or reform Islam, see Ahmed (1992; 2011), El Guindi (1999), and Tarlo (2010). 15 For further reading on the face veil in Yemen, see Dahlgren (2010; 2016) and Meneley (1996; 2007). 16 For Yemenis in Hamtramck, these marriages take place either during extended trips back to Yemen or in the United States if the spouse is another Yemeni American. It is very unusual for Yemeni women in Hamtramck to marry non-Yemenis, although Yemeni men sometimes marry outside of the ethnic or religious group. 17 “Arranged marriage” is a broad term encompassing a wide range of ways in which young people work together with their families to make marriage decisions. At the core of arranged marriage practices are two ideals: first, alongside family guidance and intervention, the consent of both female and male parties is required for the marriage to be considered contractually valid; second, the Islamic ideal of marriage as a contract between two families rather than an affair between two individuals (Abu-Laban 1991; Ba-Yunus 1991; Kibria 2009; 2011; Qureshi 1991a; 1991b; Waugh, Abu-Laban, and Qureshi 1983). 18 Studies of Muslim Americans in the public schools conducted since 2001 report that some Muslim students feel a sense of alienation or scapegoating in the school context due to prejudices and associations based on perceptions of their religious differences (Basford, Hick, and Bigelow 2007; Bayoumi 2008; Joseph et al. 2008; Schmidt 2004). 19 For related explorations of modesty amongst French and German Muslim women, see Jouili (2015, 83–90). 20 For a description of Yemeni boys’ relationships to their sisters at a nearby Dearborn public school, see Sarroub (2005). 21 In 2009, these schools included Frontier Academy, Bridge Academy, and Oakland International Academy. The board members for each school are appointed, rather than elected as in the public school, and the board membership in each case reflected the student demographics. In 2009, the board of each school had a large majority of Muslim members. Teachers and staff are diverse, yet with significantly higher representations of Yemeni, Bangladeshi, and other Muslims as compared

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with the public school. In addition, as of 2009, the principals of the two schools were Arab and South Asian Muslims, respectively, who each held doctoral degrees in education.

Chapter 4. Bangladeshi Women and Gender Boundaries

1 I never felt comfortable asking any of the Yemeni women I met if they would accept a wage in exchange for helping me with my research because of the way I met them though friendships and family ties. I met Kolsuma at a workplace and was able to make this financial arrangement with her before further ties developed. 2 The shalvār qamīz was a very popular form of dress for Bangladeshis in Hamtramck, particularly among girls, young adults, and working women, although some Bangladeshi women believed that the sārī was more appropriate than the shalvār for married, adult women. 3 The term “Londoni” in Bangladesh signifies advancement and high social status (Gardner 1992; 2008). In contrast, “Londoni” in Hamtramck/Detroit signifies “backwardness,” since London Bangladeshis, on the whole, are considered by Detroit-area Bangladeshis to be more working class compared to their more professionalized and educated US counterparts. 4 A lungī is a piece of cloth worn by men that is wrapped around the body, usually from waist to mid-calf. 5 As mentioned earlier, the popularity of this interpretation can be linked to the significant influence of nineteenth-century Islamic reformer Abduʾl Aʿla Mawdudi on Bangladeshis in Hamtramck. 6 See Jeanette Jouili’s (2015) ethnography, especially chapter 2, for a similar discussion of how younger generations of Muslims in France and Germany believe they must take on the responsibility for teaching their parents correct Islamic practice. 7 See Naeem (2009). 8 On racial/ethnic inclusivity and the ummah ideal for younger generations of Muslim Americans, see Grewal (2014), Maira (2016), Naber (2012), and Naeem (2009); for Europe, see Jouili (2015), Liberatore (2016; 2017), and Özyürek (2014). 9 Literary scholar Moustafa Bayoumi’s ethnographic short story “Yasmin” (2008, 81–114) offers a comparable account. 10 Three years after this interview took place, a New York Times article reported on the development of a long-awaited girls-only prom sponsored by Hamtramck High School itself (Brown 2012), a tradition that has lasted until today. 11 Sylhet city’s old name was Jalalabad, after the fourteenth-century mystic and scholar Jalal al-Din bin Muhammad, popularly known as Shah Jalal.

Chapter 5. Prayer Calls and the Right to the City

1 I have retained the names of figures that spoke out publicly in these debates, but changed addresses associated with personal residences. I have used pseudonyms for people who discussed their ideas with me privately.

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2 Minutes recorded as Public Hearing Regarding a Proposed Ordinance to Amend Ordinance 434 (Noise Ordinance) (2004). 3 Bangladeshis in Hamtramck, along with many other South Asian Muslims, pronounce the word azān. I use the Modern Standard Arabic “adhān” throughout because this is how the word appeared in written communication among and between various Muslim, non-Muslim, and interfaith actors in their exchanges about the call to prayer. 4 Conversation about the municipal regulation of the adhān had been ongoing at least since August 16, 2003, when al-Islah president Abdul Motlib first wrote to the city’s legal assistant to inquire about the possibility of municipal regulation (Motlib 2003a). On February 3, 2004, a resolution asking the city’s legal department to amend the noise ordinance was first initiated (Hamtramck City Council Minutes, Febuary 3, 2004). Adhān regulation did not become a public issue until after a draft copy of the ordinance to amend the call to prayer was circulated in City Hall (Hamtramck City Council Minutes, April 27, 2004). These debates lasted until the ordinance referendum on July 20, 2004. 5 The term “impasse” in Lauren Berlant’s work captures the heightened and intensified feeling state of Hamtramck residents who, within these debates, were seeking to work out “what seems to be possible and blocked in personal/collective life” while participating in an uncertain political present (2011, 3). 6 For Roger Sanjek, “public ritual events,” mark special occasions or purposes, occur in central locations, and break the flow of ordinary events with formal behavior including invocations, speeches, processions, and the sharing of food (Sanjek 1998, 8). See also Richards and Kuper (1971, 4). 7 I use an ethnohistorical method to reconstruct the 2004 debates and their importance (Dannin 2002, 17). I interviewed individuals who were involved four and five years later, and these interviews guided my study of video footage, print and digital media, and City Hall records pertaining to the call to prayer. 8 See Low (2017, 100). 9 Anthropologist Paul Stoller’s ethnography detailing the everyday experiences of West African traders in New York City (2002) and anthropologist Michel S. Laguerre’s analysis of the spatialization of religious identity among multiethnic communities in New York (2004) are examples of works that emphasize sensory aspects of Muslim or Islamicate expressions in the city. 10 This hearkens to Lefebrve’s central idea in Rhythmanalysis: the intersections between the biological rhythms of individual bodies and social rhythms of collective urban life (2004, 81). 11 See Laguerre (2004, 58). 12 See also Hamtramck City Council minutes of April 13, 2004; Public Hearing Regarding a Proposed Ordinance to Amend Ordinance 434 (Noise Ordinance) (2004). 13 Pronounced mu’azzin in Bangla and other South Asian languages.

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14 In 2010, Envy Me moved to a new location on Hamtramck’s main street, Joseph Campau, after al-Islah mosque’s property owners terminated the lease to incorporate the space into a mosque expansion project. 15 One corner store was nicknamed “Loud and Tall” for its high ceilings and music blaring from speakers onto the street. 16 Following Lefebvre’s theory, this would especially be the case concerning repetitious sounds. See his analysis of “public rhythms” and “dominating-dominated rhythms” (2004, 18). 17 See Sundaram (2009, 9). 18 The first documentation of the call to prayer in the US that I have been able to locate is a description of a controversy involving the Dix Avenue mosque in Dearborn in the early 1980s (Abraham, Abraham, and Aswad 1983, 172). 19 By contrast, according to Allievi, the Netherlands is the only European country that has granted the adhān official recognition on a national level, as the result of a 1987 vote for a law allowing it, although municipal restrictions still apply (Allievi 2009, 49–50; Rath et al. 2001). It is also regulated via municipal legislation in Germany, the UK (Eade 1996), Austria, and Norway (Allievi 2009, 49–50). 20 For Lefebvre, “The right to the city [ . . . ] would affirm on one hand, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos” (1996, 34). 21 See also Hamtramck City Council minutes of April 20, 2004. 22 As noted by then–city councilman Scott Klein: “While currently, the call to prayer is heard in many cities across the US, such as Newark, New York City, Dearborn, Los Angeles and Detroit [ . . . ] none of those cities regulate the call to prayer, [ . . . ] the call to prayer in those cases happened organically, [ . . . ] people started doing the call to prayer and governments around the country chose to look the other way. [ . . . ] Now, our friends from the mosque could have started broadcasting it [ . . . ] and there would have been very little that we could have done about it. Instead, they came and said that they wanted to be good neighbors and get approval from the council to regulate this so they would not be offensive to other members of the community. I applaud them for coming to ask for regulation. There are very few people who come to the government on any level and say ‘regulate me,’ but the mosques in this town did and I think they deserve commending for that fact” (“Hamtramck City Council Meeting” 2004a; Hamtramck City Council Minutes, April 20, 2004). 23 Pamela Klassen and Courtney Bender critique the supposed neutrality of the organizing principle behind pluralism, demonstrating that “the language of religious pluralism always embeds a normative goal: It is not merely descriptive of varieties but indicative of the proper relations that should take place between them” (2010, 9). 24 As noted earlier, from 2004 to 2009, Bill Meyer served as chairperson of the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission, and in 2009 he founded OneHamtramck, which remains active as of 2019.

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25 Yet this is not always the case. Religious studies scholar Isaac Weiner (2014) sets his own analysis of the call-to-prayer debates in Hamtramck within a wider discussion of the ways that church bells and other religious sounds have also been subject to heated debate in various times and places throughout American history. 26 Hamtramck, Michigan, Municipal Code, 434 (July 14, 1989). 27 Hamtramck, Michigan, Municipal Code, 503 (April 27, 2004). 28 In the subsequent election cycle, Majewski became mayor of Hamtramck, an office that she has held without interruption since 2005. She was elected for her fourth term in 2017. 29 A statement prepared on behalf of the ACLU explains: “In an effort to accommodate members of the Muslim faith, Hamtramck has allowed a practice that would not have been possible under the original noise ordinance. [ . . . ] Hamtramck must first make the original ordinance constitutional. Then, to accommodate the needs of Muslims, Christians and members of other faiths, the city can create what are called ‘reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.’ These restrictions need to equally apply to other nonreligious but protected speech” (Moss 2004). 30 From 2000 to 2005, and for several subsequent periods, Hamtramck’s municipal powers were overseen by a state-appointed emergency manager who had ultimate authority over all decisions relating to finance, infrastructure, and governance. See Harper (2014). 31 Hamtramck City Council minutes of January 6 and January 13, 2004. 32 Hamtramck City Council minutes of May 6, 2004. 33 As described later, Zwolak subsequently became a staunch supporter and close ally of several Bangladeshi and Yemeni politicians and has been an active participant in a range of Muslim-led political campaigns, especially those with antiSolidarity platforms. 34 Hamtramck City Council minutes of July 20, 2004. 35 Hamtramck City Council minutes of April 20, 2004. 36 Other speakers during the public hearings and in newspaper interviews also cited inflated numbers of mosques in Hamtramck; one counted seven (French 2004). In spring 2004, there were only three mosques in Hamtramck: a Bangladeshi mosque and a Bosnian mosque on Caniff Street and a Yemeni mosque on Joseph Campau. However, there were four additional mosques just over the Detroit border in proximity to three different sides of the city, including three Bangladeshi mosques and a Yemeni mosque. The proximity of the Detroit-based mosques may have caused these speakers’ confusion, or the numbers may have been exaggerated for rhetorical effect. 37 See also Hamtramck City Council minutes of April 20, 2004. 38 The city of Hamtramck hosts and subsidizes the celebration of the nation’s only Paczki Day, the Polish Mardi Gras anticipation of Lent. 39 Pope Park is a small, concrete public park built around a monument to Pope John Paul II on the main street in the center of the city. The Pope statue is one of Hamtramck’s most cherished landmarks. Commissioned in 1978 on the occasion of the

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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Polish Pope’s election to the papacy, the ten-foot-tall bronze statue situated on an eighteen-foot-tall base depicts the Pope with his hands raised in blessing. Besides celebrating the Pope’s election, the statue and park also commemorate Karol Wojtyła’s visit to Hamtramck in 1969 when he was cardinal of Krakow (Barnstead 2014). The three African American speakers quoted here—William Hood, Yvonne Myrick, and Beverly Woods—were heavily involved in activist work to advocate for and plan the restitution. Additionally, Hood was one of only three African Americans to serve on the city council in Hamtramck’s history (Sercombe 2015). Myrick and Woods are founding members of Concerned Women of Hamtramck, a decades-old community group dedicated to improving opportunities for African American women and girls in Hamtramck. See earlier discussion for more details of Hamtramck’s racist urban renewal history. See also Public Hearing Regarding a Proposed Ordinance to Amend Ordinance 434 (Noise Ordinance) (2004). See Weiner (2014). Radzialowski sometimes spelled his name as Radzilowski. See Begg (2019) for this activist’s own account of his involvement in mediating the adhān debates and his other local faith-based and interfaith work. Hamtramck City Council minutes of July 20, 2004. See Perkins (2015) for more on Hamtramck Interfaith Partners and its evolution into the Children of Abraham Unity Council. From L’arrogance du présent: Regards sur une décennie, 1965–1975 (2009, 233).

Chapter 6. LGBTQ Rights, Moral Boundaries, and Municipal Temporality

1 The terms “progressive” and “conservative” mirror Hamtramck residents’ use of these terms during the HHRO debates. 2 See Fernando (2014) for a related analysis of this aporia. For more on how perceptions about Islam and homosexuality fuel Orientalist stereotypes, see Bracke (2012), Butler (2008), Ewing (2011), Mourchid (2010), and Puar (2007). 3 For discussion of municipal codes and the production of appropriate behavior in the regulation of West African Muslim traders in Manhattan, see Stoller (2002, 101–3). 4 According to the Hamtramck Review, both sides received approximately equal external funding from outside organizations (Sercombe 2010). 5 The 1998 federal-level protections against discrimination based on “sexual orientation” within the federal civilian workforce cover a very small percentage of working Americans (Exec. Order No. 13087, Fed. Reg. 30,097 [May 28, 1998]). 6 Hamtramck, Michigan, Ordinance 2008–1 (January 22, 2008). 7 Hamtramck, Michigan, Ordinance 2008–1, § 2 (January 22, 2008). 8 Michigan Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. act 453, M.C.L.A. 37.2101 (1976).

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9 Not all cities offer protection in all three categories. The number of counties and cities with LGBTQ protection ordinances is in constant flux, and organizations that keep such statistics tally them differently (cf. NGLTF 2008a; 2011; Robinson 2009). 10 Hamtramck, Michigan, Ordinance 2008–9 art. 1, § VII (repealed November 4, 2008). 11 Hamtramck, Michigan, Ordinance 2008–9 art. 1, cl. c § VIII (repealed November 4, 2008). 12 See Brookfield (1990, 89–90), Essert (1948), and Lindeman (1945). 13 Hamtramck, Michigan, Ordinance 2008–9 art. 1, § VII (repealed November 4, 2008). 14 As noted earlier, Hamtramck’s Solidarity party, or Solidarity slate, is an informal group of politicians who self-identify as progressive and multiculturalist. 15 For similar accounts offered by French Muslims, see Fernando (2014, 227). For interpretations of how Islamic theologians understand homosexuality see Dossani (1997) and Jamal (2001). For work on how Muslim LGBTQ rights-based movements place their activism in dialogue with theologians, see Al-Fatiha Foundation (2002), Ali (2006), Afzal (2015), Jahangir, Abdullatif, and Kugle (2016), Kugle (2010), Merabet (2004, 2015), Minwalla et al. (2005), Mourchid (2010), and Yip (2005; 2008). 16 An affluent suburb about twenty miles from Hamtramck. 17 On support networks for LGBTQ Muslims in North American and Europe, see Afzal (2015, 146), Massad (2002, 373), Yip (2008, 100), and the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (www.muslimalliance.org). 18 See Kecia Ali (2006, 68). 19 See Harding (1991; 2000). 20 Hamtramck, Michigan, Ordinance 2008–9 § I (repealed November 4, 2008). 21 See Fernando (2014, 231). 22 See, e.g., Esposito (2009). 23 Also in New York, the TMLC fought against the founding of an Arabic-language charter school, the Khalil Gibran Academy (MilitantIslamMonitor.org 2007). See also Haberman (2011). 24 See Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo (2010). 25 In 2000, a federal court ruled that the city clerk and other Hamtramck city officials were found guilty of committing voter discrimination offenses in the 1999 elections, specifically against the city’s Yemeni and Bangladeshi American voters (Sercombe 2008b). See also Consent Decree, The United States of America v. City of Hamtramck, MI (No. 00–73541, E.D. Mich., August 7, 2000), amended January 28, 2004. 26 As described earlier, these attempts were part of a longer history of Meyer’s efforts to open dialogue between different groups in the city, which continues in his current work as OneHamtramck director. 27 Further analysis of how AFAM members in Hamtramck portrayed Muslims as both allies and opponents in a culture war will appear in my future work.

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28 Exceptions in anthropological work include studies on the Netherlands (Bracke 2012; van der Veer 2006), France (Fernando 2014), and the US (Afzal 2015; Perkins 2019a; 2019b). 29 The Gallup Center for Muslim Studies estimates that US Muslims favored Obama at levels nearly matching those of African Americans, noting 93 percent voted for Obama (Vitello 2008). 30 More than $35 million per side was raised in Proposition 8 campaigns, making it the “second most expensive race of 2008, second only to the presidency” (Kim 2008). 31 The Ordinance Creating a Human Relations Commission does not mention minority status based on sexual orientation or gender expression as a factor for inclusion of representatives (Hamtramck, Michigan, Municipal Code, 348 arts. a § 2 [October 1, 2004]). Rather, the ordinance “created and established a commission [ . . . ] consisting of twelve members” who, “as nearly as possible, shall be representative of the various racial, religious, national, cultural, labor, business, and ethnic groups of the city” (Hamtramck, Michigan, Municipal Code, 348 arts. e § 2 [October 1, 2004]). 32 Under normal circumstances, a chairperson would be elected to a commission. However, the Hamtramck Charter empowers the mayor to remove any member of a board or commission “without assigning cause” and subsequently to fill any vacancy (Hamtramck City Charter. arts. h-i, § 5–01 [2005]). The letter removing Meyer from his position (Majewski 2009) cited no cause.

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Index

abolition, 32–33 Abraham, Nabeel, 244n36 abstract space, 21 Abu-Bakr Al-Siddique Islamic Center, 54 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 132, 249n12 ACCESS. See Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union adab (etiquette), 64 adhān (call to prayer), 92; African American activists, 166–69; belonging and, 150–52; ceremony of, 171–72; Christian sounds and, 163–66; First Amendment and, 153–57; Hamtramck debates on, 147, 149–50; introduction to, 25–26; LGBTQ rights and, 179–90, 195–99, 205–6; mu’adhdhin, 150, 171; opposition to, 159–63; in Pope Park, 169–71; public hearing on, 146–47; request and referendum on, 157–59; rights and permissions, 173–78; urban sensorium and, 26, 148, 174, 178, 222 ‘ādil al qarīya (headman), 81 agency, 69 AFA. See American Family Association AFAM. See American Family Association of Michigan Affirmations of Michigan, 193, 203 African American, 12; adhān debates and, 166–69, 254n40; Christians, 3, 9; community leaders, 166–69; Hamtramck history of, 32–34; LGBTQ rights and, 199, 213

African American Muslims, 139–40, 149, 199, 239n19; civic engagement and, 7–8, 40; in Detroit, 44–47. See also Hood, William After Pluralism (Klassen & Bender), 12–13, 19 ahl al-kitāb (people of the book), 171 Ahmadiyya movement, 44–46, 243n31 Ahmed, Jaleelah, 55, 82, 114 Ahmed, Shahab, 59, 157–58 Aiyash, Jihan, 55 Albanians, 38–39, 104, 108 Al-Fatiha Foundation, 193 Al-Faruqi, Ismail, 239-240n26 al-Gamea, 193–94 Algazali, Dr. Abdul, 55, 179–80, 193 Algazali mosque, 97 Al-Haramain International Foods, 97, 249n13 Ali, Kecia, 191 Ali, Noble Drew, 44 Ali, Sheikh Ali Suleiman, 47 Al-Ikhlas Training Academy (ATA), 46–47, 112, 243n27 al-Islah mosque: adhān debate, 151, 155, 158, 170–73, 176; expansion of, 252n14; LGBTQ rights and, 195–97; president of, 251n4 Aljahim, Ibrahim, 215 al-Jam‘īat al-Yamanīah (Yemeni Association), 49–50, 72 Alladin Sweets and Café, 170 All Girls’ Prom, 141–42, 145 Almasmari, Saad, 5, 55, 244n38

283

284

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Index

Bangladeshi café, 196–97 Bangladeshi community: al-Falah mosque, 47, 94, 127–29, 250n5; associations of, 122; LGBTQ rights and, 179–81, 190–95, 199–209; mosques, 53, 59, 91, 127–30, 253n36; MUNA, 129–30; socioecomonic diversity, 56–59 Bangladeshi Student Association (BSA), 118, 141, 145 Bangladeshi Take Over (BTO), 135, 143 Bangladeshi women: All Girls’ Prom, 141–42, 145; clothing and, 130–35; extracurricular activities and, 140–45; halaqah groups, 118, 127–30; Hamtramck High School and, 135–38; mosques and, 127–30; public gatherings and, 124–27; social conservatism and, 121–24; student socialization and, 140–45; work and, 119–21; youth leaders and, 138–40 Bangla Mural Project Committee, 29–30 Banglatown, 3, 51, 57, 243n26 Bano, Masooda, 246n5 BAPAC. See Bangladeshi American Political Action Committee Barnett, Laura, 153–54 Barth, Fredrick, 12, 184, 197, 238n12 beards, 126–27 Begg, Victor, 170-71,254n45 Bender, Courtney, 12–13, 19 Baishākhi Melā (New Year), 118 Bengali Para, 123–24 bait allāh (house of God), 92 Beni Mellal, Egypt, 132, 249n12 bait al-maut (house of death), 90 Berlant, Lauren, 148, 183, 251n5 Bakhtin, M. M., 249n29 bālto (dress), 70–71, 88, 97–99, 103, 247n19 bhūt (ghosts), 99 Bilici, Mucahit, 237n3, 239n21 BAM. See Bangladeshi Association of Binkowski, Donald, 38, 241n4 Michigan Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 39, 192 Bangladesh Avenue, 30, 57, 245n45 Bond, Julian, 213 Bangladesh: Coming to America mural, Bosnian Americans, 50, 108, 136–38, 29–30, 54, 143 237n4, 241n1,; mosques, 53, 71; refuBangladeshi American Political Action gees, 39, 104 Committee (BAPAC), 58, 122 Bosnia and Herzegovina Association Hall, Bangladeshi Association of Michigan 172 (BAM), 58, 143 Alsomiri, Mohammed, 55 al-ziyy al-Islāmī (Islamic dress), 99, 249n14 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 165, 253n29 American Community Survey Brief, 244n34, 244n37 American Family Association (AFA), 196, 207 American Family Association of Michigan (AFAM), 179, 195–98, 201–3, 207, 255n27 American pluralism, 9, 17–19, 239n25 ‘and al-‘arab (place of Arabs), 54, 103–5 Angerer, Kathy, 2 Ann Arbor, Michigan, 186 Anti-bias in Policing Ordinance, 185–86 anti-discrimination legislation, 181–82, 185–86. See also LGBTQ rights anti-Semitism, 18 Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), 193 Arabic language, 92–93, 112, 114, 161, 171 Asad, Talal, 219 Assimilation, 67, 75, 78, 101, 124, 247n14 ATA. See Al-Ikhlas Training Academy auditory experience, 148 azān. See adhān

Index

Boundary making and crossing, 12–13, 147, 184, 196-197, 208, 223; boundaryas-membrane, 13 Boyle, Kevin, 36 Bridge Academy, 249n21 BSA. See Bangladeshi Student Association BTO. See Bangladeshi Take Over Burk, Vera, 43 burqa, 28, 246n10; privacy and, 247n24 Bush, George W., 189 Buttry, Sharon, 172 Cadillac Plant, 38, 54 California, 212–13 calling, to God (da‘wā), 69–70, 100 call to prayer. See adhān Canada, 33, 246n5 Canton, Michigan, 142 Catholic identity, 7, 16–19, 239n26, 240n27; church bells, 149–51, 155–56, 160–64, 253n25. See also Polish Catholic Census Bureau, US, 59, 244n37, 245n43 de Certeau, Michel, 8, 247n13 Ceseri, Jocelyn, 176, 239n18 charter schools, 82, 106, 112–16, 145, 248n3, 255n23 Chicago, Illinois, 44, 241n1, 245n44 childcare, 82, 86, 107, 189 Children of Abraham Unity Council, 206, 254n47 Christian Bible, 168 Christian identity, 3, 9; adhān debate and, 159–61; Judeo-Christian tradition, 17–18, 28, 164–65, 221–31; secularizing sounds and, 163–66 Christian-Muslim alliance, 199–203 Christmas music, 166 Christmas tree lighting, 1–2 chronotope, 240n29 church bells, 149–51, 155–56, 160–64, 253n25 churidar (leggings), 125

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285

citizenship: cultural, 19–20, 65, 145, 173, 240n28; denial of, 225; municipal, 19–20, 116–17, 217; urban space and, 19–22; Yemeni women and, 82–83 City Hall, 3, 122 civic duty, 16 civic purdah: assimilation and, 67, 75, 78; charter schools, 112–14; clothing and, 98–105; halaqah groups and, 91–95; at Hamtramck High School, 74–78, 108–12, 135–38; interiors and, 84–86; introduction to, 64–66; mosques and, 91–95; public/private divide and, 66–70; school withdrawal and, 105–7; sociability and, 86–91; stores and, 95–97; styles of, 79–84; women’s mosques, 70–74 civic servitude, 16 Civil War, US, 33 closed community, 89 clothing: al-ziyy al-Islāmī, 99, 249n14; bālto, 70–71, 88, 97–99, 103, 247n19; of Bangladeshi women, 130–35; burqa, 246n10, 247n24; churidar, 125; civic purdah and, 98–105; dupattā, 132, 247n21; fustān, 88; gilabīyah, 88; jeans, 123–24; lehenga, 125; lithāmah, 70, 98–103, 116, 247n19; lungī, 123, 250n4; niqāb, 73, 223, 247n19; sārī, 125, 132–33, 247n21; shalvār qamīz, 71, 120, 123, 132–34, 247n21, 250n2; stigma and, 102–5; of Yemeni women, 88, 98–105; zanah, 88 Cold War, 17–18 community leaders, 9, 138–40, 166–69 Community Participation in Local Government and Local Law Enforcement Ordinance, 185–86 concentration camp, 207 conservatism: Bangladeshi women and, 121–24; HHRO and, 195–99; LGBTQ rights and, 195–99 Constitution, of US, 56, 153–56, 174–77, 191, 195, 211. See also First Amendment

286

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Index

convert. See revert Corbett [Hicks], Rosemary, 229–30, 239– 40n26, 239n22 Cordoba House. See Park51 Corinthians Baptist Church, 44 crime, 104, 203, 225, 237n1 cross-dressing, 180 cultural citizenship, 19-20, 65, 145, 173, 240n28; introduction to, 19–22 cultural monism, 16–18, 239n23 curtain (sitārah), 84–85, 248n4 Curtis, Edward E., 44 Dahlgren, Susan, 68–69 Dannin, Robert, 45, 231n7 dating culture, 75, 77, 111–12, 135–38 da‘wā (calling to God), 69–70, 100 Dearborn, Michigan: adhān in, 252n18; gender boundaries in, 82, 89, 97–98, 114, 142; immigration to, 48–49, 53; LGBTQ rights in, 193–94; Yemeni dress and, 102–4 deportation, 225 detention, 225 Detroit, Michigan: African American Muslims in, 44–47; history of, 32–34; industrial boom of, 36–37; maps of, 50–52. See also Hamtramck Detroit Arab American Study, 244n34 Detroit Free Press, 153, 241n4 Detroit News, 108 Detroit Triangle Foundation, 203 Dhaka, Bangladesh, 121–22, 133 diversity lottery, 57 Dodge Main assembly plant, 36, 49, 167, 244n40 Domino’s Pizza, 196 Downtown Developmental Authority, 59, 143 dress. See clothing driver’s license, 81, 83, 101, 107, 120 dupattā (scarf), 132, 247n21

Eastern European immigration, 36, 38–39, 47, 165, 226 education: Bangladeshi girls and, 135–38; charter schools and, 112–16, 145, 248n3, 255n23; elementary school, 81, 105–6, 114; extracurricular activities, 140–45; Horizons program and, 74–75, 105, 108; Islamic studies and, 93–94; middle school, 74, 105–6; recent changes, 114–17; school withdrawal and, 105–7; student associations, 118, 139, 141, 145 The Education of Mohammad Hussein documentary, 243n27 Egypt, 48, 86, 88, 132, 249n12 El-Amin, Abdullah, 47 El-Amin, Zarinah. See Naeem, Zarinah El-Amin elementary school, 81, 105–6, 114 Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Acts, 186 embodied practice, 72–75, 80, 96, 116. See also civic purdah English as Second Language (ESL): classes, 62–63, 74, 79, 101, 111, 116; Ford English school, 17; students of, 74, 89, 95, 108, 118–19 Enlightenment principles, 10 Envy Me hair salon, 151, 252n14 ESL. See English as Second Language Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Barth), 12 ethnic therapy, 45 etiquette (adab), 64 Europe: gender norms in, 67–68; immigration from, 36, 38–39, 47, 165, 226; Judeo-Christian tradition, 17–18, 28, 164–65, 221–31 Ewing, Katherine Pratt, 190–91, 224 Facebook, 141, 239n19 face veil: lithāmah, 70, 98–103, 116, 247n19; niqāb, 73, 223, 247n19; proper etiquette of, 130–31 Fard, W. D., 4, 46 Fatima Mosque, 59

Index

federal travel ban. See travel ban feminist scholarship, 68–69, 210, 246n10, 248n26 Fernando, Mayanthi, 8, 14–15, 254n2 Ferndale Michigan Equality, 203 festivals: melās, 58, 124; music broadcast and, 155–56; parades and, 23, 240n32; Polish events, 39; Polish street, 31–32, 151 First Amendment rights, 153–57 Ford, Henry, 16–17, 36 Ford English school, 17 France, 32, 247n15; Muslims in, 70, 100, 178; veil debate and, 9 free speech, 153–54 Friday fish dinners, 60, 166 Friday prayer, 91, 128–29, 139 Frontier Academy, 113–14, 249n21 Fugitive Slave Act, 33 funeral, 50, 130, 151 fustān (Yemeni gown), 88 Gainesville, Florida, 196 gender separation, 4; adab, 64; Bangladeshi women and, 118–24; civic purdah and, 62–66; mosques and, 127–30; public gatherings and, 124–27; Yemen Café and, 21–22; Yemeni women and, 64–70. See also civic purdah; mixedgender Germany, 247n15; immigration and, 34–39; municipal regulation in, 252n19; Muslim women in, 69–70, 83–84, 100, 250n6 Ghannam, Farha, 86, 247n15 ghannī (songs), 88 ghosts (bhūt), 99 GI Bill, 38 gilabīyah (gown), 88 Glenn, Gary, 179–80, 188–89, 193 GM Detroit Hamtramck Assembly Plant. See Cadillac Plant gossip, 97, 106, 123, 126

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287

gown, 88. See also clothing graduation ceremony, 17, 70, 88, 110–11, 141–42 Great Migration, 34, 44–45, 243n24 green card, 82 Grewal, Zareena, 241n39 Ground Zero mosque, 229–30 Guyer, Jane, 182, 216 halal food, 3, 112–14, 170, 239n19, 240n33 halaqah group, 80, 104; Bangladeshi, 118, 127–30; civic purdah and, 91–95; of Nabeela, 93–94, 139–40; youth leaders and, 138–40 Hamtramck: adhān debates, 146–47; African American Muslims in, 44–47; Bangladeshis in, 56–59; city council, 156, 173–74, 214–15, 253n28; Community and Economic Development Department, 1–2; diversity and, 59–61; Downtown Developmental Authority of, 59, 143; French presence in, 32; German immigration and, 34–39; HCVN and, 181, 188, 195–200, 206, 211; history of, 31–34; HUAD and, 203–10, 214, 216; interfaith alliance, 227–29; Islamicate space and, 22–25; Muslim-minority countries and, 47–53; neighborhood map of, 51; noise ordinance, 153–57, 173–78; Ordinance no. 434, 155–56; Ordinance no. 503, 156–57; Polish immigration and, 34–39; religious institutions map of, 52; Township of, 31–32; urban renewal of, 39–44; white privilege in, 152, 226, 229, 231; after World War II, 39–44; Yemeni community of, 53–56 Hamtramck, Colonial John Francis, 31–32 Hamtramck Citizen newspaper, 108, 114, 241n4 Hamtramck Citizens Voting No (HCVN), 181, 188, 195–200, 206, 211

288

| Index

Hamtramck City Hall, 143; adhān and, 146, 150–53, 157–68, 172–73; Yemeni activists and, 56 Hamtramck High School: Bangladeshi girls, 135–38; civic purdah at, 74–78; recent changes and, 114–17; withdrawing from, 105–7; Yemeni young women and, 108–12 Hamtramck Human Relations Commission (HHRC), 187, 206, 213–15, 217; president of, 43–44 Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance (HHRO): alliances and, 199–203; conclusions on, 222–25, 230; conservatism and, 195–99; election day of, 211–13; HHRC and, 213–15, 217; introduction to, 179–81; LGBTQ rights and, 185–90; Muslim perspectives on, 190–95; ordinance time and, 181–85; progressivism and, 203–11 Hamtramck Interfaith Partners, 172, 254n47 Hamtramck Review, 214–15, 254n4 Hamtramck United Against Discrimination (HUAD), 203–10, 214, 216 hand shaking, 110–11 Hart-Celler Act, 49 HCVN. See Hamtramck Citizens Voting No headman (‘ādil al qarīya), 81 head scarf. See hijāb Henderson, Dr. James, 40 Henkel, Heiko, 24–25 Herberg, Will, 239n26 heritage festivals, 155 HHRC. See Hamtramck Human Relations Commission HHRO. See Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance Hicks, Rosemary. See Corbett [Hicks], Rosemary Highland Park, 16–17, 243n31 hijāb (head scarf), 73, 84, 98–103; adhān ceremony and, 172–73, 177; Bangla-

deshi women and, 120–25, 130-35; mural painting of, 54; Polish Catholic women in, 173–74, 177; Yemeni women and, 98–100, 103, 116 Hindu community, 58–59, 126, 245n46 Hirschkind, Charles, 148 Hispanic Americans, 12 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., 238n13 Holland, 241n35 Holmes-Eber, Paula, 86 Holocaust, 18 Holy Communion, 39 homonationalism, 210, 224 homophobia, 183–84, 198–99, 210, 224 homosexual behavior, 180, 191–93, 199– 200, 210–11 Hood, William, 40, 42, 168–69, 242n19, 254n40 Hope Center, 59 Horizons program, 74–75, 105, 108 house of death (bait al-maut), 90 house of God (bait allāh), 92 housing discrimination, 42–44, 205–6 Howell, Sally, 45, 48–49, 238n17, 240n31, 243n29–31 HUAD. See Hamtramck United Against Discrimination Human Relations Commission. See Hamtramck Human Relations Commission human sensorium, 148 Ibb province, Yemen, 54, 74, 106 ICNA. See Islamic Circle of North America iftār meal, 1–2 ihtirām al-nafs (respect for yourself), 98 Al-Ikhlas Training Academy (ATA), 46–47, 112, 243n27 imam, 47, 72, 99, 125, 128–29, 229 immigration: to Dearborn, 48–49, 53; Eastern European, 36, 38–39, 47, 165, 226; to Hamtramck, 34–39; reform, 25, 57, 226

Index

Immigration Act of 1965, 239n25 India, 44, 48, 126, 243n28 individual racism, 31 institutional racism, 30–31 intention (niyyah), 132–33 interfaith alliance: activists, 172, 210–11; call-to-prayer and, 26; of Hamtramck, 227–29; LGBTQ rights and, 186–90, 199–203; tri-faith America, 15–19, 229–30, 239n36 internet, 99, 168, 193 Iraq War, 27 Isin, Engin, 19 Islamicate, 13–14, 145, 238n13; HHRO and, 184–86, 190–99; introduction to, 22–25 Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), 47 Islamic dress (al-ziyy al-Islāmī), 99, 249n14 Islamic Society of North America, 202 Islamophobia, 4, 103, 117, 202–3, 208–11, 215, 224–26, 237n1, 237n6 Istanbul, 24 Jabal, Mu‘ādh ibn, 243n32 Jalalabad Society, 143, 250n11 al-Jam‘īat al-Yamanīah (Yemeni Association), 49–50, 72 Jankowski, Tom, 185 Jealous, Ben, 213 jeans, 123–24 Jerusalem, 168–69 Jesus, 163–66, 170–71 Jewish identity, 7, 16–19; Judeo-Christian tradition, 28, 164–65, 221–31 Jezewski, Peter C., 38 jihad, 211 John Paul II, Pope, 1–2, 18, 169, 253n39 Jordan, 237n4 Jordan, Reverend Joseph, 44; honorary street name, 243n23 Joseph Campau Avenue, 31–32, 49–50, 51–52, 54

| 289

Jouili, Jeanette, 8, 69–70, 83, 100, 224, 247n13, 249n19, 250n6 Judeo-Christian tradition, 17–18, 28, 164–65, 221–31 Kalmbach, Hilary, 246n5 Kane, Ousmane Oumar, 8 Karim, Jamillah, 8 Keith, Judge Damon, 41–43, 168 Kennedy, John F., 18–19, 240n27 Key Club, 142 Khalid, Tahira Hassanein, 47 Khalil Gibran Academy, 255n23 Khan, Masud, 146, 173–74 khutbah (sermon), 70–72, 139, 158 Kibria, Nazli, 57–58 Klassen, Pamela E., 12–13, 19 Klein, Scott, 186–87, 198–99, 203, 214, 252n22 Knights of Columbus rally, 198 Knott, Kim, 8 Kowalski, Greg, 35, 61, 241n4 Kuppinger, Petra, 8 Lansing, Michigan, 143, 180 Lebanon, 48, 88 Lech Walesa Drive, 30 lecture (muhādarah), 71–72 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 20–21, 147, 152, 183, 240n29–30, 251n10, 252n16, 252n20, 254 leggings (churidar), 125 lehenga (long dress), 125 LGBTQ rights: adhān and, 179–90, 195–99, 205–6; African American and, 199, 213; al-Islah mosque and, 195–97; Christian-Muslim alliance and, 199–203; conclusions on, 223–25; Election Day 2008, 211–13; HHRO and, 179–81, 185–90; homophobia and, 183–84, 198–99, 210, 224; introduction to, 9, 13, 26; local fallout, 213–17; Muslim identity and, 190–95; progressivism and, 203–11; space-making and, 184–87; Yemeni identity and, 179–80, 183, 213–15

290

| Index

liberal secularism, 9–11, 26–27, 219–20, 223–25 Liberia, 237n4 lithāmah (face veil), 70, 98–103, 116, 223, 247n19 living room (sālah), 86 Liwā Ibb, 54, 74, 106 locational practice, 70–74, 80, 95–96. See also civic purdah Londoni, 123, 250n3 Lost Found Nation of Islam, 44 love marriage, 137 Low, Setha, 23 lungī (cloth wrap), 123, 250n4 Maday, Robert, 241n2 Mahfuz, Abu Sayed, 72 Mahmood, Saba, 69–70 mahram (male relative), 95–96, 248n1 Maine Street restaurant, 122 Majewski, Karen, 156, 173–74, 214–15, 253n28 mālās (prayer beads), 126 male relative (mahram), 95–96, 248n1 males: in Bangladeshi community, 121–28, 132, 136–38; gender and space, 64, 68–69, 72–75; peer engagement, 77, 109, 111, 138; in Yemeni community, 84, 93–95, 106–12 Mamdani, Mahmood, 163 Manore, Gregory, 213–15 marriage, 76, 88, 105–7, 124–27, 137; arranged, 249n17; same-sex, 212–13; Yemeni culture and, 249n16 marriage contract (nikāh), 125 Marseille, France, 178 Marx, Karl, 21 Masjid Fatima. See Fatima Mosque Masjid Mu‘ath bin Jabel, See Mu‘ath bin Jabel mosque Masjidun Nur. See Nur Mosque Masjid Wali Muhammad. See Wali Muhammad mosque

Maududi, Abdu’l A‘la, 246n1, 248n8, 250n5 McCain, John, 211–12 McCormick, Solomon, 43 McNally, Jay, 179 melās (festivals), 58, 118, 124 Meyer, Bill, 5, 43–44, 60–61, 154–55, 252n24; LGBTQ rights and, 206–7, 213–15, 255n26 MFS. See Muslim Family Services Miah, Anam, 4–6 Miah, Saiida, 4, 59, 122, 143–44 middle school, 74, 105–6 Milner, Jean-Claude, 173 mixed-gender: interactions, 120, 127, 136, 140; prayer space, 64; schools, 80–84, 105; spaces, 74, 119–20. See also civic purdah mobile spatial fields, 23–24 Mohammad, Prophet, 161, 170–71, 191 Monaghan, Tom, 196 Moore, Barrington, 86 Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), 44–45 Morocco, 27 Mosallem, Youssef, 114 Moslem Mosque, 49 mosques: al-Falah, 47, 94, 127–29, 250n5; Algazali, 97; Bangladeshi, 53, 91, 127– 30, 253n36; civic purdah and, 70–74, 91–95; Friday prayer and, 91, 128–29, 139; Ground Zero, 229–30; Hamtramck, 162, 253n36; map of, 52; Mu‘ath bin Jabel, 47, 50, 55–56, 70–71, 97; Yemeni, 70–74, 90–95; youth leaders and, 138–40. See also al-Islah, Bosnian American, Fatima, Moslem, Muslim Center, Nur, Wali Muhammad Motlib, Abdul, 157, 251n4 MSTA. See Moorish Science Temple of America mu’adhdhin (one who calls prayer), 150, 171

Index

Mu‘ath bin Jabel mosque, 47, 50, 55–56, 70–71, 97 muhādarah (lecture), 71–72 Muhammad, Clara, 44, 46, 243n27;Clara Muhammad Schools, 46 Muhammad, Elijah, 3, 44, 46 Muhammad, Warith Deen, 44 Mujeeb ar-Rahman Way, 245n44 multiculturalism, 17–19, 208, 229–31. See also pluralism MUNA. See Muslim Ummah of North America municipal citizenship, 19–20, 116–17, 217 murals, 29–30, 54, 143 Muslim Center Mosque, 46–47 Muslim Family Services (MFS), 46–47 Muslim identity: Christian-Muslim alliance, 199–203; introduction to, 11–15; Islamicate space and, 22–25; LGBTQ rights and, 190–95; OneHamtramck and, 4–7; Ramadan and, 1–2, 91, 127; secular Muslim, 14–15, 238n15; in tri-faith America, 15–19. See also Bangladeshi community; civic purdah; Yemeni identity Muslim Student Association, 118, 139, 141, 145 Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), 129–30 Myrick, Yvonne, 168, 254n40 NAACP. See National Association for Advancement of Colored People Naeem, Zarinah El-Amin, 76, 250n7 Naji, Nabil, 114 National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 43, 213 National Association for Yemeni Americans (NAYA), 193 National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, 203 National Honor Society, 142 Nation of Islam (NOI), 3, 44–47 nativism, 16, 161, 202–3, 239n23

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291

nativity scenes, 165–66 NAYA. See National Association for Yemeni Americans negotiation ceremony, 126 Nelson, Mike, 43 Netherlands, 252n19 neutrality clause, of First Amendment, 154 New Year (Baishākhi Melā), 118 New York, 39, 56, 119, 163, 171, 203, 240n35 New York Times, 250n10 nikāh (marriage contract), 125 9/11. See September 11, 2001 niqāb (face veil). See lithāmah niyyah (intention), 132–33 NOI. See Nation of Islam noise ordinance: amendments to, 173–78; First Amendment and, 153–57; urban sensorium, 26, 148, 174, 178, 222. See also adhān North America, gender norms and, 67–68 Norway, 252n19 Nur Mosque, 59 Oakland International Academy, 249n21 Obama, Barack, 143, 204–6, 211–13, 256n29 Old Guard, 195 Old Islam in Detroit (Howell), 243n29 Omar, Ilhan, 225 OneHamtramck, 231; Bangladeshi women and, 143–44; forum, 18–19; introduction to, 4–7; Yemen Café event, 21–22; Bangladesh mural event, 29-30 Ordinance Creating a Human Relations Commission, 185, 256n31 Ordinance no. 434, 155–56 Ordinance no. 503, 156–57 ordinance time, 181–85, 222–23. See also Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance Ordinance to Reaffirm the Natural Rights of Hamtramck Residents. See Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance Orientalism, 9

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Orientalist stereotypes, 115, 152, 230, 254n2 Orsi, Robert, 8 Paczki Day, 166, 253n38 Pakistan, 57, 108, 126, 141, 237n4, 243n28 Palestine, 5, 48, 199 Papanek, Hanna, 247n24 Park51 project, 202–3, 229–30 Patrick, William T. Junior, 40 Patriot Act, 200 Peace Pole, 217 people of the book (ahl al-kitāb), 171 Pew Research Center, 245n46 phenomenological approach, 184–85, 222, 240n29; introduction to, 22–25. See also Hamtramck Human Rights Ordinance Philadelphia Boy Scouts, 180 phronesis, 83 physical contact, 91, 110–11, 136 piety, 81, 96–100, 111, 116–17. See also civic purdah Pious Practices and Secular Constraints (Jouili), 69–70 place-making. See space-making place of Arabs (‘and al-‘arab), 54, 103–5 pluralism, 10, 12–13, 17–19, 239n24; adhān debate, 154; 252n23, in America, 9, 17– 19, 239n25; inclusion in, 26–27; limits of, 225–26 Poland Street, 31–32 Polish Catholic, 3; adhān debate and, 146, 158–60, 166–77; Hamtramck founding and, 8–9; traditions of, 165–66; woman in hijāb, 173–74, 177; Zwolak as, 158–59, 179, 253n33 Polish Day Parade, 166 Polish identity: immigration tension and, 34–39; street festivals, 31–32, 151 political expedience. See ordinance time Politics of Piety (Mahmood), 69–70 politics of sameness, 228 Polonia restaurant, 170, 179, 181, 188, 193

polyrhythmia, 22, 147 Poole, Elijah. See Muhammad, Elijah Pope John Paul II, 1–2, 18, 169-170; statue, 169-170, 253n39 Pope Park, 253-254n39; adhān debates and,166,169–71 practice-based approach, 147, 184, 222; introduction to, 22–24. See also adhān prayer, 85, 91-94; call to. See adhān; Friday prayer, 70-73 prayer beads (mālās), 126 privacy, 86, 248n7. See also public space; civic purdah The Production of Space (Lefebvre), 20–21 progressivism: LGBTQ rights and, 203–11; Muslim identity and, 14, 193–95 Prom, All Girls’, 140–42, 145, 250n10 Prophet Mohammad, 161, 170–71, 191 Proposition 8, California, 212–13, 256n31 Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Herberg), 239n26 Protestant identity, 6–7, 10, 16–18, 239n23 proxemics, 73, 91, 248n25 public space: introduction to, 7–11; gender, private divide and, 66–70, 94, 247n15. See also civic purdah; privacy; space-making purdah. See civic purdah. qat farming, 54 Queens, New York, 39, 56, 163 Qur’an: community and, 129–30, 138; male space and, 128; marriage ceremony and, 125; study group, 60, 72; Yemeni study of, 88, 90, 92 racialization, 2, 31, 237n6 racism, 30–31, 45, 205–6, 210, 229 radio programs, 24, 240n35 Radzialowski [Radzilowski], Thaddeus, 36–38, 169, 171, 241n4, 245n43, 254n44 Rahman, Nusrat, 29–30 Ramadan, 1–2, 91, 127

Index

Randazzo’s market, 102–3 Rauf, Imam Faisal Abdul, 229–30, 239n26 representational burden, 70, 76, 100 The Republic Unsettled (Fernando), 14–15 residency card, 82 respect for yourself (ihtirām al-nafs), 98 revert, 249n10 Reviving Islamic Spirit convention, 139 Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre), 21, 251n10 rhythmanalysts, 147 The Right to the City (Lefebvre), 152 Roman Catholic Diocese, 37 Rule of Law Clinic, 245n41 Ruth Ellis Foundation, 203 sabāyā (Yemeni bread), 87, 89–90 Sahih International, 138 Saint Albertus Parish, 35 Saint Florian Parish, 30, 36,164 Saint Josephat Parish, 36 Saint Joseph Parish, 35 Saint Ladislaus Church, 196–97 sālah (living room), 86 same-sex marriage, 212–13 Sarah Sims Garrett Memorial Park, 42 sārī (dress), 125, 132–33, 247n21 Saudi Arabia, 209, 249n13 scarf (dupattā), 132, 247n21 Schultz, Kevin M., 16–18 secularism, 14–15; adhān debate and, 15166; American value of, 18, 65, 219– 20; forces of, 164–65; liberalism and, 9–11, 26–27, 219–20, 223–25; sounds and, 163–66 secular Muslim. See Muslim identity segregation, 61, 242n13; African Americans and, 39–44; by gender, 197–98. See also civic purdah Sehlikoglu, Sertaç, 13–14 Senegal, 237n4 September 11, 2001, 177, 210; adhān debate and, 161–62; Ground Zero mosque and, 229–30; hate crimes and, 203–4,

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237n1; Islamophobia and, 225–26; Muslim identity and, 27 sermons (khutbahs), 70–72, 139, 158 sexual minorities. See LGBTQ rights shaking hands, 110–11 shalvār qamīz (outfit), 71, 120, 123, 132–34, 247n21, 250n2 shaqqah (apartment), 87 sharī‘a-based law, 18, 27 Sheikh, Hassan, 1–2 Shī‘ī Muslim, 243n31, 243n33 Shryock, Andrew, 228 sifrah (tablecloth), 85 Sikhs, 12, 238n10 sitārah (curtain), 84–85, 248n4 slavery, 31–33, 226 social conservatism. See conservatism social services, 3–4, 8, 89, 189, 193; agency, 31, 53, 118, 166; MFS, 46–47 Solidarity party, 158, 175, 195, 203, 217, 255n14 songs (ghannī), 88 sound: belonging and, 150–52; phobias, 151; secularism and, 163–66; utilitarian, 164. See also adhān soundmarks, 149 South Asia, 47–50, 64, 119, 126, 213, 238n10 space-making: adhān debate and, 147; as communicative strategy, 221–23; in France and Germany, 247n15; introduction to, 8–9, 22–25; LGBTQ rights and, 184–87; urban religion and, 219–21. See also civic purdah Stackpoole, Catrina, 199–200 stereotypes, Orientalist, 115, 152, 230, 254n2 stigma: dress and, 102–5; Islamophobia, 103, 117, 202, 224–26, 237n1, 237n6; racial, 9, 33, 37, 49; women and, 81–83, 124, 136. See also adhān Strawberry Festival, 39 Strawberry Festival Boulevard, 30 structural racism, 30–31

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Index

student associations, 118, 139, 141, 145 Student Council, 142–43 Student Youth Council, 142–43 Sunni Muslim, 45–46, 50, 238n16, 243n24 sūrahs (verses), 92 surveillance, sense of, 83, 112, 225, 238n10 Sweetest Heart of Mary Parish, 36 Swint, Reverend Darla, 43 Sylhet, Bangladesh, 29, 50, 57–59, 121, 133, 250n11 Sylhet Farms, 59 tablecloth (sifrah), 85 Tajlia: clothing and, 130–32; dating and, 135–37; education and, 94, 129; school activities and, 140, 142; wedding celebration of, 126–27, 144 Taliban, 211 taxi drivers, 58, 240n33–34 Ten Commandments, 165 territory-based approach, 222, 240n31; introduction to, 22–23. See also Muslim identity; Yemeni identity terrorist threats, 207, 225, 238n10 Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), 196, 202, 207, 255n23 Thom McAn shoe store, 167 Thompson, Walter, 40 Tlaib, Rashida, 225, 237n2 TMLC. See Thomas More Law Center Tolliver, Ordine, 40 touching, 91, 110–11, 136 travel ban, 55–56, 83, 104, 245n41 Triangle of Hope, 55 tri-faith America, 229–30, 239n36; Muslim identity in, 15–19. See also interfaith alliance Tri-Faith America (Schultz), 16–18 Trump, Donald, 2, 225–26, 237n1; travel ban, 55–56, 83, 104, 245n41 Tunisia, 86 Turaani, Khalid, 5–6, 15–16, 231 Turner, Richard Brent, 45

Ukrainians, 38–39 Ullman, Reverend Stanley A., 197 ummah ideal, 64, 93, 131, 138, 241n39, 248n9 University of Islam, 46, 243n27 urban religion, 219–21. See also Muslim identity urban renewal, 41–42, 61, 166, 264n41 urban sensorium, 26, 148, 174, 178, 222; belonging and, 150–52 urban space, 19–22. See also space-making us-them dynamics, 20, 80–81 utilitarian sounds, 164 veil: French debate of, 9; lithāmah, 70, 98–103, 116, 247n19; niqaabi, 101; niqāb, 73, 223, 247n19; proper etiquette of, 130–31. See also clothing Veteran’s Memorial Park, 79 Victory Day (Bangladeshi independence), 118 voter harassment, 205–6, 255n25 Wali Muhammad Mosque, 46 walkable city, 11, 183 Walters, Titus, 40, 43 Warren, Rick, 202 Washington Post, 212 Wayne County, 1, 31, 241n2 Wayne State University, 93–94, 139, 241n4 weddings, 39, 118, 125–27, 144 Wesley, Father Andrew, 179, 197 White House, 2 white identity, 227 white privilege, 152, 226, 229, 231 Winkel, William, 242n9 women: civic purdah and, 86–91; dating culture and, 75, 77, 111–12, 135–38; halaqah groups and, 91–95, 127–30; Hamtramck High School and, 74–78, 108–12; student socialization and, 140–45; work and, 119–21; youth leaders and, 138–40. See also Bangladeshi women; Yemeni women

Index

women’s-only space, 62, 71, 79, 116 Woods, Arthur Evans, 41 Woods, Beatrice, 167–68, 254n40 Woods, Beverly, 254n40 World Trade Center, 229–30 World War II, 17–18, 38–39 xenophobia, 210, 229 Yale Law School, 56, 245n41 Yemen Café, 4, 95, 239n19; gender separation and, 21–22 Yemeni Association. See al-Jam‘īat alYamanīah Yemeni bread (sabāyā), 87, 89–90 Yemeni identity: citizenship and, 82–83; in Hamtramck, 30–31, 39, 46–50, 53–60; interiors space and, 84–86; LGBTQ rights and, 179–80, 183, 213–15; Muslims, 1, 3, 7, 14, 23, 25; stores, 95–97; travel ban and, 55–56 Yemeni Sheeba Restaurant, 54

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Yemeni women: citizenship and, 82–83; civic purdah and, 64–70, 98–105; clothing of, 88, 98–105; gender and, 62–63; gowns, 88; Hamtramck High School and, 108–12; hijāb and, 98–100, 103, 116; mosque civic purdah, 70–74; youth leaders and, 138–40 Yemen Town Project, 244n38 YouTube, 198 Yugoslavia, 39 Zajac, Jonathan Alexander, 43, 241n4, 242n8 zanah (gown), 88 Zawiya, 86 al-ziyy al-Islāmī (Islamic dress), 99, 249n14 Žižek, Slavoj, 173 zoning issues, 23–24. See also adhān; noise ordinance Zwolak, Robert, 158–59, 179, 253n33 Zych, Gary, 171–72

About the Author

Alisa Perkins earned her doctoral degree in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research on Muslim American civic engagement in metro Detroit has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation. Perkins’s earlier Fulbright research centered on Muslim women’s education and family law in Morocco.

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