Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past by Sally Howell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past by Sally Howell Adam Yaghi Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 366 pp. $35.00. In Old Islam in Detroit, Sally Howell studies two groups of Detroit’s Muslims. She uses the term “old Islam” to refer to the first and calls the second “new Islam.” The book, however, mostly focuses on the former to reconstruct its history from the chards of local elders’ memories, personal collections, interviews, and press accounts. The result is a revisionist history of pre-1970s immigrant Muslim presence in Detroit, an account that challenges the dominant perceptions sociological and historical academic research and popular imagination assign to early modern waves of immigrant Muslims in the American Midwest. These early newcomers have been generally depicted as an Americanized, assimilationist, isolationist, religiously ignorant, and politically disengaged population, one strictly [End Page 49] divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. Rarely are their contributions to the establishment of Islam in America acknowledged. In fact, their religious identity is repeatedly described as deformed, nonexistent, or at best lax. Howell offers a different account. In eight chapters organized historically, Howell carefully pieces together early twentieth-century Muslim institution-building activities in Detroit. She inscribes the histories of Islamic American institutions, like the Federation of Islamic Associations and the Albanian Islamic Centre, and offers biographies of leading Muslim figures, including Sheikh Khalil Bazzy, Mazen Alwan, and Hussein Adeeb Karoub. Howell convincingly unearths seldom-acknowledged early Muslim American diversity, ingenuity, flexibility, political activism, transnational ties, and dynamic religious identity, besides a remarkable ability to strike roots in the United States. Pre-1970s immigrant Muslims of Detroit, Howell argues, built strong Muslim American communities through constructing places of worship, social and educational institutions, and a body of religious and cultural structures whose primary goal was to establish Islam in America and to foster a visibly positive Muslim American identity. Although, or probably because, these earlier Muslims struggled against Orientalist clichés, Islamophobia, and economic difficulties, they were successful at establishing a proud American identity while participating in transnational Muslim political activism that was not always in agreement with American expansionist or hegemonic agendas. Their religious institutions attracted African Americans, including Nation of Islam followers, as early as the 1960s and facilitated the transformation the Nation of Islam underwent in the following decades. They have also contributed to later immigrant visions of American Islam. But as waves of newer immigrants and converts struck roots in Detroit, old Islam quickly became invisible. Indeed, early twentieth-century Muslims became a minority in the 1970s after the newest Muslim immigrants arrived from the Middle East and South Asia and were joined by new Black converts. In the eyes of the scripture-oriented newcomers, their predecessors were tradition-oriented and responsible for everything wrong with Islam in Detroit in particular and the Midwest in general. The latter Muslims were taken to be assimilationist, their Islam unorthodox. The post-1970s newcomers marginalized these older generations and suppressed their Islam to usher what they believed to be a needed renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s. They took over mosques, imposed stricter Islamic practices, separated the socio-cultural [End Page 50] from the religious, the profane from the sacred, and restricted the institutional participation of Muslim American women. Howell here does not stand in judgement on the new Islam or its Muslims, but she rather weaves a multilayered map to capture twentieth-century early and new immigrants’ interactions, struggles for influence, and contributions to what American Islam has come to be. In the process, Howell draws attention to a fascinating pattern: Detroit’s Islam of the turn of the twentieth century was forced out to make room for the new Islam of the 1970s and 1980s; yet, this latter Islam is currently experiencing many pressures, in the post-9/11 US, to Americanize, modernize, reform, and devise a new vision, one in harmony with American values and US foreign policy. American Muslims, as Howell describes them, defy absolute interpretations of who and what they are: they are religiously heterogeneous, ethno-culturally diverse, politically dynamic, and are invested in belonging to...