LGBTQ Rights, Moral Boundaries, and Municipal Temporality

This chapter discusses how Muslim and non-Muslim American residents in Hamtramck became embroiled in contestation over a proposed municipal ordinance involving the rights of LGBTQ residents to equal access in housing, employment, and public accommodation. The issue brought about an identity rupture between progressives and conservatives in the city, sundering interfaith relationships that had been formed earlier, while new alliances were being built. The chapter analyzes how a sense of moral urgency onboth sides contributed to a temporal sensibility shift that I call “ordinance time.” This schema entailed a loosening of civility standards in rhetorical comportment, encouraging the public expression of Islamophobia and homophobia. In attending to both the pace and tenor of social relations during this tense period, the chapter considers the essentialism attached to religious and secular moralities, while addressing how the municipal debate influenced boundary formation processes.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the central assertions of the study: that Muslims’ experiences in urban America test pluralism as a model of secular inclusion, and that Muslims and non-Muslims expand the boundaries of belonging together by engaging in social, spatial, and material exchanges across lines of difference. Because anxieties over Muslim minorities are often expressed through the idiom of gender, this study further asserts that contestations over Muslim women’s visibility and queer Muslim visibility provide significant opportunities for the elaboration of difference. After describing the context of the study and its interlocutors, the introduction discusses the challenges faced by scholars who focus on Muslim American identity as an object of analysis in the post-9/11 age. These challenges include representational dilemmas inherent in studying individuals from many backgrounds under a unified signifier, and in offering counter-representations of a group that is often stereotyped in media and popular accounts marked by Islamophobia.

Prayer Calls and the Right to the City

This chapter discusses how Hamtramck residents engaged in public debates over the adhān, the Muslim call to prayer traditionally broadcast five times a day in Muslim-majority nations. The chapter introduces the concept of the “urban sensorium” to discuss how individuals on both sides of the debate described the adhān as rhythm that either facilitated or compromised harmonious relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans, and how residents engaged in shared listening as a mode of spatial and temporal embodied practice across religious lines. Expressions of Islamophobia fomented by media coverage of the call-to-prayer campaign gave rise to an interfaith alliance in which Hamtramck Muslim and Catholic Americans publicly demonstrated new forms of identification with one another. The chapter considers how Muslim sound altered social and sensory dimensions of city life and how the debates presented opportunities to expand the sensory and cultural boundaries of municipal belonging.

Gender, Space, and Muslim American Women

This chapter analyzes how Yemeni and Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck establish a particular type of gender organization—what I call “civic purdah”—across a variety of different contexts. 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 expressed through patterns of dress (hijāb) and proximity, enacted in an effort to protect the sanctity of women’s bodies and spaces from the gaze and interference of unrelated men. 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. 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.

Bangladeshi Women and Gender Boundaries

This chapter analyzes how Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck renegotiate conceptualizations of the public-private divide through ongoing interpretive and explorative spatial practices while referencing religious and cultural frameworks. It discusses 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. The analysis centers on how Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck are self-consciously and actively engaged in a process of negotiating their relationship to urban space, searching to interface with the city and its institutions in ways that maximize their sense of mobility, mastery, and centrality within public, semi-public, and domestic spaces of the city. In doing so, they advance new agendas of cultural citizenship, thus encouraging municipal environments and institutions to become more democratic spaces that represent and uphold the values of those who participate in them.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion 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. Since pluralism itself is part of the dominant liberal secular paradigm for organizing difference, reference to this ideology both bridged boundaries and perpetuated uneven encounters between dominant and marginal groups. 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 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.

Yemeni Women, Civic Purdah, and Private/Public Divides

This chapter analyzes how Yemeni American women’s everyday space-making practices in Hamtramck blur the lines between public and private, complicating mainstream modes of organizing space and scrambling the ideological correlates associated with these two discursive realms. The chapter discusses how Yemeni women across generations choreograph the gendering of space within homes, streets, neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, enriching their lives with social, cultural, spiritual, and economic exchanges. The chapter shows how areas in Yemeni homes, such as women’s living rooms, sometimes function as semi-public spaces open to an extended and loosely bounded set of non-kin visitors during times set apart for sociability and religious instruction. The chapter includes a discussion of how women-only spaces in mosques reproduce or echo some features of home-based gender norms. In secondary schools, Yemeni female youth sustain or modify community-based gender separation practices to establish comfortable spaces for themselves in an ethnically and racially mixed context.

The Making of a Muslim American City

This chapter situates the rising prominence of Bangladeshi and Yemeni Americans in Hamtramck within an account of the city’s development since its founding as a township in 1798. Beginning with a history of African Americans, who have the most enduring presence in Hamtramck of the groups included in the chapter, the chapter then analyzes the experiences of Polish Americans in Hamtramck, who were the dominant majority for many years. The chapter considers 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. It considers how changes in Hamtramck connect to national socioeconomic fluctuations, internal migration, and immigration reform, as well as regional patterns of Muslim American incorporation found throughout the metro Detroit area.