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xanthe's review
5.0
I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, going into the city every few years – at most – for a school field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), Orchestra Hall, or the Detroit Science Center, but never really seeing the city or thinking about it beyond a vague awareness of it lurking, exerting a geographic and cultural pull that I couldn’t – wouldn’t – see or identify. We ignored it while saying we lived in the “Detroit area,” outside it, bordering it, but never really believing we were connected. We of course had a brief unit on local history in school, hitting those scrappy voyageurs, the establishment of Fort Detroit and then motoring forward in time that local hero, Henry Ford, and then considered it sorted. Local history was white, mostly Christian, and of the hard-working farmer stock. Anything that didn’t fit those categories was invisible to us.
Of course, I’ve been terribly blind. Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, even the ones portrayed as lily white by waves of urban flight, in truth are anything but, and are rich in history, conflict, and diversity of culture and religion.
The Detroit Metropolitan Area is home to the largest concentration of Muslims outside of the Middle East and has a hundred-year history of Muslim settlement and religious establishment. Sally Howell’s magnificent history of the religion in the region, Islam in Old Detroit digs deep into the people and communities, investigating how the institutions grew and changed and how their past is now viewed from a distance by community members whose families had weathered those changes. I spent several months reading this book, mostly because I am a slow reader of non-fiction, but also because it was simply jammed with information and ideas that I wanted time to think over and consider. Reading this book transformed how I view my home and its history and is giving me much to examine about its present day.
Islam in Detroit, old and new, has never been a monolith. Through copious interviews, Howell includes the voices of the Black Muslim community, the Syrian and Albanian Muslims, and the many other groups who all came to Detroit, Dearborn, Highland Park, and the surrounding suburbs to settle and establish their own religious institutions. She traces how, over the years, questions of orthodoxy and practice were shaped and then in turn shaped their communities. I’d love to be very eloquent and sum up the amazing about of information and scholarship that is in this book, but in truth, I’m still processing it all myself. I am grateful for the new awareness I have of how Islam has changed in the Detroit area as well as how it has changed as a result of international forces, local tensions, and the continual debate about the role of women, of laypeople, of new converts, and what it means to be a true Muslim. Like any truly great work of non-fiction, this book changed how I understand my world, especially my hometown the surrounding region, and gave me questions that I didn’t even think to ask before I read it.
Of course, I’ve been terribly blind. Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, even the ones portrayed as lily white by waves of urban flight, in truth are anything but, and are rich in history, conflict, and diversity of culture and religion.
The Detroit Metropolitan Area is home to the largest concentration of Muslims outside of the Middle East and has a hundred-year history of Muslim settlement and religious establishment. Sally Howell’s magnificent history of the religion in the region, Islam in Old Detroit digs deep into the people and communities, investigating how the institutions grew and changed and how their past is now viewed from a distance by community members whose families had weathered those changes. I spent several months reading this book, mostly because I am a slow reader of non-fiction, but also because it was simply jammed with information and ideas that I wanted time to think over and consider. Reading this book transformed how I view my home and its history and is giving me much to examine about its present day.
Islam in Detroit, old and new, has never been a monolith. Through copious interviews, Howell includes the voices of the Black Muslim community, the Syrian and Albanian Muslims, and the many other groups who all came to Detroit, Dearborn, Highland Park, and the surrounding suburbs to settle and establish their own religious institutions. She traces how, over the years, questions of orthodoxy and practice were shaped and then in turn shaped their communities. I’d love to be very eloquent and sum up the amazing about of information and scholarship that is in this book, but in truth, I’m still processing it all myself. I am grateful for the new awareness I have of how Islam has changed in the Detroit area as well as how it has changed as a result of international forces, local tensions, and the continual debate about the role of women, of laypeople, of new converts, and what it means to be a true Muslim. Like any truly great work of non-fiction, this book changed how I understand my world, especially my hometown the surrounding region, and gave me questions that I didn’t even think to ask before I read it.
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