Author: Amanda Paulson
Publication: of The Christian Science
Monitor
Date: April 30, 2004
URL: http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2004/0430/p01s03-ussc.html
A local mosque's broadcast tests
the tolerance of a city.
In this working-class town surrounded
by Detroit, every street corner is a meeting of nations. Kosinski Hardware
sits across from Aladdin Sweets. Olga and Ania's Beauty Salon is next door
to a Bosnian restaurant, and the local King Video advertises movies in
Albanian, Arabic, Polish, and Hindi. Conversations on the street are as
likely to be in Bengali or Polish as in English.
But if Hamtramck's immigrant past
has always been a source of pride, lately it's caused tensions as well,
now amplified - literally - by a call to prayer that local mosques will
broadcast from speakers five times a day.
The city council's adoption this
week of an ordinance that allows the calls between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. has
spurred debate about where the right to religious freedom ends and the
right to quiet begins. Now, a flood of dissent has turned Hamtramck into
a national symbol of culture clash, an intersection of turmoil and tolerance.
What began as a simple question of noise has become a flash point of religious
distrust, difference, and fear of Muslim "outsiders."
"Fear is the driving factor here,"
says the Rev. Stanley Ulman, a mild-mannered pastor who has presided over
St. Ladislaus church for 25 years. Many Polish residents "feel that this
isn't their town anymore - that they're being shoved out." The Reverend
Ulman has urged his congregation not to rush to judgment - to give the
broadcasts a chance and, more important, to start a dialogue with Muslim
neighbors. But many are skeptical. "Change is the issue here," he says.
"And change is always difficult,
'Blown out of proportion'
When the Al-Islah Islamic Center
submitted its request to the council last year, it didn't anticipate a
firestorm. Instead, its leaders thought they were simply being courteous
- offering the city government a chance to approve and regulate the calls
to prayer, which were already permitted under local laws.
"It's been blown way out of proportion,"
says Masud Khan, the secretary for Al-Islah, as he sits in the mosque's
prayer room. He points out that three Detroit towns on Hamtramck's borders
have been issuing the calls for years without objection. Mr. Khan and other
Muslims compare the calls to church bells - religious sounds that travel
into the community. And with so many Muslims living nearby, he says, broadcasting
the calls is the mosque's duty. "This is a freedom-of-religion country.
And if you follow your religion, you have to have tolerance for others."
In Al-Islah's foyer, flyers explain
the calls to non-Muslims. They'll sound five times a day - at sunrise,
noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and nightfall - last a little over a minute,
and include proclamations that translate as "Allah is the greatest," "Mohammed
is the messenger of Allah," "Come to prayer," and "Come to success." They
are meant only for Muslims, says Mr. Khan. "We are not preaching."
But some residents disagree. While
early objections centered on noise, they quickly morphed into discomfort
with the calls' content. Area churches don't project their sermons beyond
their own walls, dissenters point out. And church bells don't carry a specific
message.
"The fact that Allah, who is not
my God, is being praised five times a day, seven days a week, for 365 days
a year, is upsetting," says Bob Golen, a retired legal consultant who's
lived in Hamtramck for 68 years. "I don't intend on moving, and I'm not
out to start a war. But we will never see eye to eye on this particular
issue."
Prejudice in a Polish enclave
In many ways, the controversy is
simply a symptom of a community's growing discomfort with its own evolution
- and more particularly, a sign of just how deep the distrust of Muslim
cultures has grown in the wake of Sept. 11 and the war with Iraq.
Hamtramck has long prided itself
on being a "touch of Europe in America," an enclave of pirogis and polkas
in the midst of Detroit. A statue of Pope John Paul II, next to a mural
of Poles dancing in Krakow, stands in the center of town, and some storeowners
greet customers in Polish.
Over the past decade, however, Hamtramck
has changed. It's still the first stop for many immigrants, but now they
come from Bangladesh, Yemen, Bosnia, Somalia, and Pakistan, as well as
from Eastern Europe. Muslims make up a third or more of the population,
and shops selling halal meat and Bengali spices are as common as the Polish
bakeries.
These latest arrivals have been
hard for some longtime residents to accept. And the prayer controversy
has stirred up an old uneasiness with, even hostility toward, a culture
and religion that remain mysterious to many here.
"Why can't they look at their watches
like everyone else?" asks one middle-aged woman, walking her long-haired
chihuahua. "This is going to split the community and cause a lot of havoc."
To immigrants, too, the clash brings
up issues of assimilation, even beyond the calls' religious import. "They
just want to advertise their religion and show everybody the Islamic religion
is stronger than others," says Zbigniew Malkiewicz, a construction worker
who came here from Poland 30 years ago. "If they want to do this, they
should go back to their own country."
Reverberations of Sept. 11
Such anger saddens many in Hamtramck,
both Muslims and non- Muslims, and points to a divide they say has widened
in the past three years. "This is the reality of Sept. 11," says Imad Hamad,
director of the Michigan branch of the American-Arab Anti- Discrimination
Committee. "The concept of intolerance and the high sensitivity is spreading
so fast."
People are disappointed, too, with
how the media has fanned the flames. Since the first city council meeting
on this subject three weeks ago, many say, the media has leapt aboard the
idea of a town taken over by Muslims, even relaying incorrect information
- as when journalists have referred to local Muslims as Arabs, or played
tapes of "calls to prayer" that are actually religious songs or verses
of the Koran.
Shahab Ahmed, Hamtramck's first
Muslim member of the city council, says most of the 1,000 or so vitriolic
calls and e-mails he's received are from nonresidents. At a recent city
council hearing, dissenters came from as far away as Ohio.
The issue before the city council
was simple, Mr. Ahmed explains. The previous local noise ordinance exempted
religious institutions from noise restrictions. This was simply an opportunity
for the council to have some say in regulating the calls to prayer - restricting
the hours and decibel level, for instance. "Then it turned into a huge
religious issue that I never dreamed of."
For now, some here are suggesting
lawsuits or a referendum. Karen Majewski, the council's president, hopes
it doesn't come to that, widening the debate into "a civil rights issue
rather than a noise issue."
She's confident that once the media
spotlight moves on, and the calls to prayer become a daily reality - they
can begin 20 days from the ordinance's adoption - the issue may blow over.
"People will quickly come around," says Ms. Majewski. "They're used to
dealing with each other. Once they hear the call, and realize there is
cooperation from the mosques, things will die down."
