Abstract
Muslim American City studies how Muslim Americans test the boundaries of American pluralism as a model for secular inclusion. This ethnographic work focuses on the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims in Hamtramck, Michigan, a small city situated within the larger metro Detroit region that has one of the highest concentrations of Muslim residents of any US city. Once famous as a center of Polish American life, Hamtramck’s now has a population that is at least 40 percent Muslim. Drawing attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civic life—particularly in response to discrimination and gender stereotyping—the book questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies, a viewpoint that has long played into hackneyed arguments about the supposed incompatibility between Islam and democracy. The study approaches the incorporation of Yemeni, Bangladeshi, and African American Muslim groups in Hamtramck as a social, spatial, and material process that also involves well-established Polish Catholic, African American Christian, and other non-Muslim Hamtramck residents. Extending theory on group identity, boundary formation, gender, and space-making, the book examines how Hamtramck residents mutually reconfigure symbolic divides in public debates and everyday exchanges, including and excluding others based on moral identifications or distinctions across race, ethnicity, and religion. The various negotiations of public space examined in this text advance the book’s main argument: that Muslim and non-Muslim co-residents expand the boundaries of belonging together, by engaging in social and material exchanges across lines of difference.
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