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This paper explores political struggles that took place in the Southend of Dearborn in the 1970s that coincided with the rise of Arab nationalist and Islamic movements in Michigan and linked these interests to those of ArabAmerican activists involved in the civil rights movement, labor organizing, and other campaigns for social and economic justice. These struggles launched the careers of activists who cooperated in the 1970s and 1980s to establish several of the nations leading Arab- and Muslim-American service, religious, and community-based institutions and played a significant role in transforming Dearborn into the well-known Arab American hub of today. In the Southend, newer and older Arab constituencies joined forces to build an unprecedented institutional infrastructure, both the left-liberal, secular, politically empowered Arab-American establishment of Dearborn and its equally engaged, but pious and socially conservative Muslim-American establishment. Thus the Southend struggles provide key insights into the social challenges that came to define Arab-American (and Muslim-American) identities in the half century that followed. In this essay I bring these histories together and explain why more work needs to be done before we can make sense of the political challenges Arabs and Muslims-as distinctive and overlapping communities-have faced in the U.S.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Detroit's large and nationally prominent Arab and Muslim communities have faced heightened prejudice, government surveillance, and political scapegoating, yet they have also enjoyed unexpected gains in economic, political, and cultural influence. Museums, festivals, and cultural events flourish alongside the construction of new mosques and churches, and more Arabs are being elected and appointed to public office. Detroit's Arab population is growing even as the city's non-Arab sectors, and the state of Michigan as a whole, have steadily lost population. In Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade, a follow-up to their volume Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream (Wayne State University Press, 2000), editors Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock present accounts of how life in post-9/11 Detroit has changed over the last ten years.Abraham, Howell, and Shryock have assembled a diverse group of contributors whose essays range from the scholarly to the artistic and include voices that are Palestinian, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Lebanese; Muslim and Christian; American born and immigrant. The book is divided into six sections and begins with wide-angle views of Arab Detroit, looking first at how the community fits within greater Detroit as a whole, then presenting closer portraits of Arab Detroit's key ethnonational and religious subgroups. More personal, everyday accounts of life in the Terror Decade follow as focus shifts to practical matters such as family life, neighborhood interactions, going to school, traveling domestically, and visiting home countries. Finally, contributors consider the interface between Arab Detroit and the larger society, how this relationship is maintained, how the War on Terror has distorted it, and what lessons might be drawn about citizenship, inclusion, and exclusion by situating Arab Detroit in broader and deeper historical contexts.In Detroit, new realities of political marginalization and empowerment are evolving side by side. As they explore the complex demands of life in the Terror Decade, the contributors to this volume create vivid portraits of a community that has fought back successfully against attempts to deny its national identity and diminish its civil rights. Readers interested in Arab studies, Detroit culture and history, transnational politics, and the changing dynamics of race and ethnicity in America will enjoy the personal reflection and analytical insight of Arab Detroit 9/11.

The Arab community has played a critical role in the development of Detroit's economy and culture throughout the 20th century, and its influence on high politics and everyday life in the Arab homelands is so pervasive. After the 9/11 attacks and the expansion of the Bush administration's war on terror, however, Arab Detroit's rich history of domestic integration and transnational connection is being truncated, questioned, re-politicized, Americanized, and selectively erased. Moreover, Arabs in Detroit have been forced to distance themselves from Arab political movements, ideologies, causes, religious organizations, and points of view that are currently at odds with US policy. The privilege of transnational identification, that is, the ability to sustain political and economic ties to sites of belonging and social reproduction that are not American and are not fully subject to US sovereignty, has been, for Arabs in Detroit, the first casualty of the War on terror.

National and international media often turn their attention to Detroit when exploring connections between the United States and the Middle East. So too do federal authorities. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the “special relationship” between Arab Detroit, the media, and law enforcement agencies intensified significantly. America was in crisis, and prevailing anxieties were felt by and projected onto Arab and Muslim citizens in unique ways. The Detroit suburb of Dearborn, with its heavy concentration of newly arrived Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Palestinian immigrants, was an early target of investigation and concern. Here, journalists and Arab community leaders

“The more the immigrants enter into the religious life of America, the better and quicker they become Americans,” observed historian Philip Hitti in 1924 (121). He intended the statement as a criticism of the early Syrian immigrants to the United States, whose churches—Maronite, Melkite, and Orthodox—he feared were perpetuating sectarian conflicts among the immigrants and isolating them from other Americans. In Detroit and its suburbs today there are dozens of Arab churches and mosques. Chaldean, Maronite, and Melkite Catholics have their own congregations, as do Egyptian Copts and Syrian, Greek, and Antiochian Orthodox Christians. Among Muslims, the Sunni-Shi’a

The literature on Jordan is awash in studies of the history, politics, and possible futures of the Hashemite family. In a polity so closely identified with its ruling dynasty, one would be surprised if this fixation did not prevail. More curious to the anthropologist is the extent to which the scholarly attention lavished on the Hashemites has centered on the rather obvious fact that they rule, but has given less concern to the fact that they rule as a family—that they express their dominance in a patriarchal rhetoric brimming with kinship metaphors, and that they preside over a body politic in which households and their influential heads are of far greater significance than electoral constituencies, public opinion, or (least of all) individual citizens and their rights. When King Hussein described his realm as “the big Jordanian family” (al-usra al-urduniyya al-kubra¯), he invoked an image of community (and authorized a style of political exchange) that made immediate sense to his subjects. In his final years of rule, Hussein artfully consolidated his role as national father figure. His heir, King Abdullah II, who was 37 years old when he inherited the throne in 1999, affects the “older brother” persona appropriate to his age. In announcing Hussein's death, Abdullah II relied heavily on the vocabulary of political kinship his father had standardized: “Hussein was a father, a brother, to each of you, the same as he was my father. . . . Today you are my brothers and sisters, and with you I find sympathy and condolences under God”1