When the call to prayer finally issues from the loudspeakers atop the little mosque in Hamtramck today, the sound is likely to be drowned out not so much by organized opposition as by the noise of the city itself. The collision of cultures in the 2.1-square-mile city jammed with shops and homes has already turned the busy cross streets of Caniff and Jos. Campau -- steps from the mosque -- into a deafening echo chamber. Church bells ring out hymns. Trains whistle. Trucks roar and squeal their breaks. Seagulls scream as they vie for litter. Hip-hop booms from cars. Janis Joplin belts out rock tunes from the door of the Record Graveyard, a trendy secondhand music shop. Boys under a basketball hoop in St. Ladislaus Catholic Churchâs parking lot yell, "Shoot! Shoot!"
And Wednesday, a vanload of tough-looking men who had driven more than five hours from southern Ohio spilled onto Caniff outside the Al-Islah Islamic Center to protest the mosqueâs plan to broadcast the call to prayer for the first time today. "Lord Jesus, we ask that you would move powerfully upon this city!" shouted the Rev. James Marquis of New Covenant Worship Center in Wellston, Ohio, as he marched with his men in front of the mosque. Most of the 10 men were big and broad-shouldered, with sternly furrowed brows. They moved quickly and shouted prayers spontaneously, using phrases like "Davidâs Mighty Men" and "spiritual warriors" to describe themselves. One had a black eye. Finally, two of the men raised shofars, horns traditionally used to invoke God, and punctuated their prayers with an ear-shattering exclamation point. Then, they jumped back into the van and headed 300 miles home.
| Yeah, yeah. Cue the dueling banjos... |
"These men coming here like this, thatâs scary," said Zakaria Ahmed, owner of the nearby Bengal Spices grocery store and a member of the mosque. "People are too overheated. Iâm alarmed at what could happen. I had a couple of windows broken in my shop last week. I think it could have been because of the call to prayer. Some people have called me names because of it." He shook his head in frustration, and added, "So much of this is based on misunderstandings. It didnât have to be like this."
| "I'm the voice of sweet reason, and they're not..." |
A dozen Catholic, Protestant and Muslim leaders from Hamtramck met at the Al-Islah mosque on Thursday to discuss the rising tension. They reached a consensus that, as the calls to prayer begin, theyâll make a joint public appeal for a cooling-off period of interfaith prayer and fasting.
| Ecumenism in action. That's why the churches are full to overflowing, y'know... |
They also agreed to try to disengage from the cityâs political turmoil. As things stand, a hotly contested city ordinance designed to regulate noise from houses of worship is on hold pending a citywide vote, likely in August. Before the City Council approved the ordinance last month,there were no local regulations governing sound levels outside religious institutions. The ordinance, which would have taken effect on Wednesday but was blocked by a petition drive, would have given the council the ability to regulate the level of such sounds. However, at this point civic and religious leaders agree that a call to prayer is legal with or without the ordinance. "So, weâre not going to take any position on the ballot issue," the Rev. Stanley Ulman, pastor of St. Ladislaus, told colleagues at the meeting. "Itâs irrelevant."
Heads nodded. The consensus was that the blinding international spotlight now cast on Hamtramck has led to far more confusion than cooperation. Contrary to the impression given by many news reports around the world, Muslim calls to prayer have drifted through the air of Hamtramck since the 1990s. However, because the four mosques broadcasting the call are located just over the line in Detroit, the Al-Islah case became the first to generate religious and cultural sparring in Hamtramck. And sparring is an accurate description of the in-your-face encounters that have erupted at the Hamtramck City Council. Months ago, leaders of the Al-Islah mosque, many of them recent immigrants from Bangladesh, went to City Hall much like a naive Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
| Oooh. Nice imagery. You can tell they're the good guys at a glance... |
"These are good, simple guys who work hard, take care of their families and, as their community grew, organized this mosque a couple of years ago," said Victor Begg of Bloomfield Township, the vice chair of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan who coordinated Thursdayâs meeting of Hamtramck clergy. "These guys loved hearing the call to prayer back in Bangladesh, and they wanted to do that here, too," Begg said. "They were just trying to be good neighbors by asking City Hall about it. The next thing they knew, they were in the middle of a firestorm." Like an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show," Tuesday nightâs council meeting generated the latest in a long series of wild verbal confrontations in which people step up to a podium near the five council members and rail at them in furious tones.
| So if you oppose the Islamic caterwauling you're a red-necked chair-flinger. Your better half â you're not married, 'cuz you don't want to be tied down â is a 350-pounder named Tiffany who has four children by five men and is having an affair with your sister on the side. Both of you are on welfare, at least one of you fraudulently... |
This week, Robert Zwolak, an opponent of broadcasting the call to prayer and a political rival of the council, compared the councilâs actions in supporting the mosque to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986. The council is poisoning the city, he said.
| "Yasss... Everyone's radioactive now..." |
Later, Councilman Scott Klein shot back at critics in an emotional, quavering voice: "I am appalled by the level of racism thatâs flowing around on this." At another point, a man in the audience jumped up and shouted, "Idiot council!" and stormed out.
| Probably a reference to Councilman Klein... |
Only a few feet from the podium, former Councilman John Justewicz heckled the council all evening, calling one councilman a liar and saying that another looked like he was high on drugs. Then, during a recess, Councilman Chuck Cirgenski shouted at Justewicz, "Eat me, John!"
| Dang! Now that's some civil, well-reasoned discourse! |
Justewicz barked back, "Yeah, youâd like that!" A day later, in calmer tones, both sides admitted that the flaring tempers were embarrassing. "It gets very nasty sometimes," said Shahab Ahmed, the brother of shopkeeper Zakaria Ahmed and, since January, the first Muslim to sit on the council. "I do fear that it could lead to violence, actually. And, now that the call to prayer issue will be on the ballot in August, this means weâll continue picking at these wounds."
Under the layers of scar tissue is a long history of harassment of non-whites in Hamtramck. In the 1950s and 1960s, city officials used an urban renewal plan to raze black neighborhoods. Black residents sued in 1968, but it was only in the last few years, after decades of delays, that the city began to move on a multimillion-dollar agreement to rebuild housing for affected families. Financial and political stresses have led to chronic woes, ranging from broken water mains to an explosion in the rat population three years ago. In 2000, the city was placed under a state-appointed financial manager because of unresolved deficits.
| None of which has to do with the howling of Islamists blasting people from bed first thing in the morning... |
As Tuesdayâs council meeting ended, Masud Khan, the mosqueâs secretary, sighed deeply. "Thereâs such a complicated political mess in this city, itâs hard to know what to do," he said. Recent years also have been hard on the Polish Catholics who once defined Hamtramck, Ulman said, sitting at home across the street from the mosque. Like other Polish-Catholic parishes in the city, Our Lady Queen of Apostles and St. Florian, St. Ladislaus is shrinking and now has only 1,250 members, Ulman said. "Weâve been slipping 3 to 5 percent a year for some time and, in the last two years, itâs been closer to 10 percent a year," he said. Within a year or two, the three parishes likely will share only two priests, he said.
| That happens when you don't listen to the Pope. If you go using birth control, there aren't any little Catholics coming along, are there? |
The U.S. census reported a steep drop in Polish-American density among the cityâs 23,000 residents, from 50 percent in 1990 to 23 percent in 2000. African Americans are 15 percent of the population, Arab Americans 9 percent. But because of a rapid influx of Bangladeshi immigrants since 2000, no one knows how many Asian Americans live there. After 22 years as an influential community leader, Ulman is moving away this summer to St. Mary of the Hills Catholic Church in Rochester Hills. For Catholics, this is a lot to accept, he said. "People fear theyâre losing their identity. This isnât the city they remember."
The dispute is dredging up a lot of vivid memories. One of the most vocal opponents of the call to prayer, Joanne Golen, a lifelong resident, said she recently has been thinking back to the 1940s and her own anxieties about her immigrant grandparents. Thomas and Wanda Yonkoski arrived in Hamtramck in the 1930s and, by the 1940s, when Golen was a little girl, a decade in the United States had not changed their Polish ways. As Golen learned more about American culture at the Queen of Apostles grade school, she grew embarrassed by their customs. "I still remember the smell of Grandma cooking cabbage. Phew! Phew! Phew! It stunk," Golen said. "Grandma never learned to read English. And she wore this babushka, this scarf." At age 6, Golen summoned her courage and told her grandmother, "Babcia to jest Ameryka!" or, "Grandma, this is America!" She desperately wanted her family to assimilate as Americans and keep their Old World customs as private matters. "And thatâs what I want these immigrants to do, too, to assimilate," Golen said this week. "Donât impose your call to prayer on us. Keep it to yourself."
| My grandmother was a stout Italian lady with a faint moustache â actually not that faint â and eyesight failing from diabetes. She never quite got the hang of English. My mother spoke Italian with a pronounced American accent, and she understood more than she actually spoke. My experience with Italian was between the ages of 6 and 8, reading Il Progresso to Grandmaw, pronouncing the words better than I understood them. After she died, virtually the entire language fell out of my head. None of my brothers or sisters got even that much experience with the language and not much more with the culture, and we're all more hillbilly than we are Italian. Most people don't assimilate in a generation. Most families eventually do assimilate. |
Thatâs not the way people regard diversity today, said Tanya Whitfield, who runs the business closest to the mosque. Only three feet separate her Envy Me Salon from the Al-Islah center. "Iâm Catholic, too," she said, although as an African American she prefers to attend St. Gregory Catholic Church in Detroit, a more diverse parish. "I like to express my culture, and I think that these Islamic people have a right to express theirs, too. Thatâs what it means to live in a multicultural community, and I think thatâs healthy. Itâs not a problem."
Shahab Ahmed agreed. He named the driving school he operates in Hamtramck, Shondhan Enterprises Inc., because "the word âshondhanâ in Bengali means âEureka!â You say it when youâve been searching for something great and, after a long time, youâve found it. Hamtramck is a great city, if we would only understand its beauty." Ahmed said that the call to prayer is an essential ingredient to help the burgeoning Bangladeshi-American population feel at home.
| That doesn't make much more sense than the lady who wanted the Banglas to assimilate this afternoon. A big part of the reason Bangladesh is in the condition it's in is the control of Islam on people's daily lives. If there is a rathole, where come here for a better life and still try to make it like there? |
Muslims are expected to pray five times a day. Prayer times are based on the rising and setting of the sun and vary with the seasons. The daily rhythm of prayer is deeply ingrained in the cultural background of the cityâs new residents, Ahmed said. "This is important so that people coming here donât treat this city like a bus stop to someplace where they are more welcome," Ahmed said. "I love this city and I want these people to live together here for many, many years." |