TRAVELOGUE - DETROIT DAY 2

In Dearborn, at ACCESS Community Center serving largest Arab American population in the United States, staff member Celena Khatib points out items of spiritual significance to Muslims and Christians as L.A. Bishop Jon Bruno looks on with Hands in Healing travelers Sara Clinehens and Luis Garibay Jr.

VOLUNTEERS INTRODUCE VISITORS TO
NATION’S LARGEST ARAB-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
By Bob Williams

(Dearborn, Mich., Friday, May 10) – A crucifix hangs near a copy of the Koran while an antique prayer rug, gently worn from use facing Mecca as many as five times daily, is positioned not far from a vintage christening dress.

All contained within the same display case under the title “Keeping the Faith,” these objects reflect not only the several faiths practiced by Arab Americans, but also the diversity born of a community that unites Chaldeans and Egyptians, Iraqis and Lebanese, Palestinians and Yemenis, among other constituent groups.

The point of this diversity was made clear here today for a group of Los Angeles visitors addressed by Celena Khatib, education outreach representative for the cultural arts department of ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services).

Based here in an expansive and recently built complex with various satellite sites, ACCESS is the principal agency serving the more than 250,000 Arab Americans living in Southeast Michigan, the largest such population in the United States.

“You won’t see just Arabic people in our clinic,” Khatib told her guests, travelers with the Hands in Healing initiative of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, who were accompanied here by their bishop, the Rt. Rev. J. Jon Bruno. “We reach out to the whole community.”

Thanks to Khatib and her colleagues, Arab American women—whether recent immigrants or second- or third-generation residents—find in their community not only specialized, language-specific health-care services such as mammograms and pap smears, but also counseling in the vent of domestic violence. “We’re making progress in the difficult area,” said Khatib, who volunteers as a translator at a local women’s shelter.

As Khatib speaks, she is seated beneath a framed photograph of local university graduates wearing mortar boards atop their traditional head-coverings worn by many women in the Islamic tradition who adhere to the belief that they should cover all but their face and hands in front of men who are not closely related to them.

Asked by one L.A. visitor why she wears the head-scarf, Khatib replied that she grew up as a first-generation Arab American whose parents did not observe a strict practice of Islam. “I started covering when I was 14 years old,” she said, “the traditional age (for beginning this practice). My mom then followed four years later (by practicing the covering), and my parents became more religious…. Last year my parents made their first pilgrimage (to Mecca). I see this (pattern that) kids make their parents more religious.”

Khatib added that her Nablus-born father left Lebanon in 1948 and that her mother grew up in a refugee camp. From her remarks followed a round-table discussion during which each of the Hands in Healing travelers explained his or her birth heritage, ranging from Mexican- or Filipino-born naturalized U.S. citizen to native-born South African.

Pointing to the diversity of Islamic practice and expression, Khatib pointed to the different specializations and branches among Muslims, who include the perhaps more spiritually-focused practices of the Sufi, the politically-based priorities of the Hizbatahrir, and the door-to-door evangelism enacted by the Tablighi Janaat.

United by the practice of Islam as a “comprehensive faith, the several branches hold in common the practice of praying five times daily, Khatib said, calling for the importance of understanding among the faith’s several constituent groups.

Cultural competence for area youth
Khatib was joined in her presentation by Nicole Namy, ACCESS youth coordinator and a Beirut-born Christian, who spoke of the importance of fostering culturally competence experiences for students in local public schools.

Nearby Salina Elementary School—located directly across from a Ford Motor Company plant—has an enrollment that is 99% Arab American, Namy said, while local Fordson public high school’s enrollment is estimated at 85%. Meanwhile, the recently built campus of the area’s Islamic High School stands along Schaeffer Avenue near ACCESS’s new headquarters.

Both Namy and Khatib emphasized the importance of teaching tolerance and cross-cultural outreach in the area in an effort to foster understanding to prevent conflict.

The local Dearborn community and metropolitan Detroit is not exempt from Aram American youth gangs, Namy said, noting that these groups are typically identified by their countries of origin and called by name as the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Yeminis, and others. This practice mirrors the nationalistic self-identification of some Salvadorean and Chinese gangs in Los Angeles, Bishop Bruno added.
The activity of local gangs is root no only in some youths’ struggles as acculturating immigrants, but also their “mismanaged emotions,” Namy said, and how the youths find ways to let that emotion out.”

Another form of conflict also arises in the region, Namy said, when a neighborhoods dominant cultural group perceives that businesses are being “taken over” by an immigrant group. The experiences of the region’s black Americans dealing with, for example, the infiltration of Chaldean business owners parallels the experience of black and Korean residents of L.A.’s South Center district during the 1992 riots and thereafter, Bishop Bruno noted.

Chaldeans, who hail from a village in northern Iraq, mostly do not consider themselves Arab Americans, Khatib said. They typically speak a form of Aramaic and practice Catholicism, with their largest populations found in Detroit and Los Angeles.

Area Arab Americans also experienced considerable fear and stereotyping after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, both Khatib and Namy told the Hands in Healing group. The FBI arrived in the area first recruiting translators and later enforcing “mandatory” interviews, residents said.

When asked how seeds were planted that led to the growth here of the nation’s largest Arab American community and its predominantly blue-collar workforce, Khatib recounted the story of Henry Ford, who is said to have met, somewhere around the Great Lakes, a Yemini whose hard work and dedication to detail greatly impressed the automaker. After that point, the 1920s saw Ford recruiting workers for his first Highland Park plant who were Arab American immigrants willing to work for $5 per day without insurance and with no union affiliation.

Some historians and cultural anthropologists have juxtaposed the region’s thriving Arab American culture with the contrast of the arguably anti-Semitic views held by some white Anglo Saxon Protestants of the day.

But today’s Detroit, now a city that is more than 300 years old, affirms a new form of interfaith relationships, noted Khatib and Herb Gunn, staff member of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan, who accompanied the Hands in Healing travelers on their visit to ACCESS.
Khatib pointed to the vigils shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, while Gunn said a Sept. 23 interfaith prayer service at a downtown Presbyterian church demonstrated not alliances that were newly formed, but rather longstanding “interfaith relationships that had existed already. People came together that day and already new one another.”
 

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