| Frank Fuhrig |
HAMTRAMCK, Michigan (dpa) – Saad Almasmari and Anam Miah were tearing off pieces of fresh-baked flatbread and scooping bubbling chicken seltah, a Yemeni stew served in a clay pot.
The two city council members, both naturalised US citizens from Muslim countries, gathered in a corner of the Sheeba Restaurant in their adopted hometown, Hamtramck, Michigan, over a late dinner to watch the State of the Union address taking place in Washington.
On the television, the Yemeni-born Almasmari spotted the Michigan congresswoman who had vainly invited him to attend the speech.
She was shaking hands with President Barack Obama.
“She’s saying hi to the president,” Almasmari said, pointing to the TV. “That’s her.”
Miah, a Bangladeshi-American who won his second term on the city council in November, scolded him, ”You coulda been there.”
The Ideal Islamic Centre (left, snow on the roof) is one of several mosques in Hamtramck, Michigan, which is believed to be the first US municipality with a majority Muslim city council.
City council members Anam Miah (left), a Bangladeshi-American, and Yemeni-born Saad Almasmari (right) eat in a Yemeni restaurant after the first meeting of the Hamtramck, Michigan, city council with an elected Muslim majority.
But Almasmari had higher priorities that night. He shook his head and said, “I can’t miss my first council meeting. I was elected to serve this community.”
Almasmari made international news when he won his seat on the non-partisan city government in November.
Joining three Bengali-Americans already on the six-member council, they formed what is widely believed to be the first local government in the United States with a majority of Muslim members.
Almasmari, 28, found himself besieged by media outlets from CNN to Al Jazeera.
From the outside, the election was portrayed as a watershed moment.
But in Hamtramck, which has elected Muslims to city government since the 1990s, Almasmari’s addition to the council was less a breakthrough than an incremental change.
Once a German farming village on the outskirts of Detroit, Hamtramck – pronounced ham-TRAM-ik – and its Dodge assembly plant became a magnet in the early 20th century for European immigrants.
“We brag now that we’ve got 26 languages spoken in the schools,” Mayor Karen Majewski said. “In the 1920s, we had 60 languages spoken in the schools.
Even though Poles dominated in terms of percentage, there were still people here from all over.”
According to 2010 data, Hamtramck, population 22,000, is 53.6 per cent white, including people of Middle Eastern descent, 19.3 per cent African-American, and 21.5 per cent Asian.
The US census does not collect data on religion, but locals estimate the city’s Muslim population at one-third to one-half.
Hamtramck’s first Muslims were Albanian immigrants who arrived in the 1960s, followed by Yemenis, Bangladeshis and Bosnians.
The Bangladeshi community includes a Hindu minority, and Hamtramck has a notable population of Iraqi Chaldean Christians.
“It’s really misleading to talk about a Muslim community, because there are multiple communities, some of which are Muslim,” Majewski said.
“They don’t necessarily – in fact they don’t, period – really work together, any more than the Poles and the Italians work together.”
She predicted that the four Muslim city council members sometimes “will vote together on an issue, and sometimes they won’t”.
Almasmari was the leading vote-getter among six candidates on the November ballot in the at-large council election for three seats. He “absolutely” had support from non Muslims, Majewski said.
More than the other Muslim candidates, Almasmari “made a real effort to reach out to everyone”, she said.
“I think that that’s the reason he got the most votes, period.”
Almasmari said he and his supporters knocked on 2,800 doors across Hamtramck.
A Yemeni-themed mural by Chilean artist Dasic Fernandez on the side of Sheeba Restaurant in Hamtramck, Michigan, portraying dragon trees, a woman in a headscarf, a face-veiled person and a man in a traditional turban.
Grafitti art of an American eagle in Hamtramck, Michigan, where a majority Muslim city council took office in January. PHOTOS: DPA
“That’s how it’s supposed to be. It isn’t supposed to be for a certain religion or certain ethnic group,” he said.
“Muslims, non-Muslims, non-religious… we talked to everyone in Hamtramck. We asked everyone to vote for us, and we told them our goals, why we’re running.”
He ran on a simple platform: economic development; support for the
Hamtramck public school district; and an embrace of the city’s “positive diversity”.
”We want people to taste each other’s food, to wear each other’s fashion, to speak the different languages,” Almasmari said. “We want Hamtramck residents to live as they are right now: they’re really living peacefully, respectfully, they love each other, and they help each other regardless of religion, ethnicity or the colour of their skin.”
The Dodge plant, which once employed 40,000 people, closed in 1980.
Hamtramck mirrored Detroit’s decline in recent decades, losing population and tax base.
As long-time residents left, new immigrants arrived seeking opportunity. The low cost of living has been a magnet – census data puts Hamtramck’s owner-occupied median home value at 47,000 dollars.
“You can buy a house here, you can live here, with or without a car, with or without speaking English, and get along and build a new life,” Majewski said. “It’s been a stepping stone for immigrants from all over.”
General Motors later built an assembly plant partly on the old Dodge site. That factory is expanding this year to a planned workforce of 2,800, making cars including the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt.
On a snowy, blustery winter Sunday, the bells pealed for noon mass at Saint Florian Church. Forty minutes later and one block away, the midday Dhuhr prayer call from the Ideal Islamic Centre was much more faint. Which is louder “depends which way the wind’s blowing,” said Cindy Cervenak, a lifelong Hamtramck resident.
She has seen the predominantly Polish community of her childhood give way to newer immigrant groups.
St Florian, which still holds Polish mass five days a week, drew some 200 faithful despite inclement weather. A Polish folk choir sang, and a surprising number of families with young children knelt in the pews under a Gothic arched ceiling.
The mass in Polish still attracts families with Hamtramck roots from the suburbs, Cervenak said. Hamtramck’s Albanian Muslim immigrants mostly left for the suburbs by the 1980s, and more recently some Yemenis and Bangladeshis have been moving away in a “continuing cycle,” she said.
Her own neighbours are Yemeni.
“That’s really how all the residential areas are in the city now – a Polish family, Yemeni, a Filipino, a Bangladeshi. … Most of Hamtramck is pretty integrated,” Cervenak said.
“Culturally, everybody has their own churches, their own mosques, your own cultural celebrations.”
In 2004, the city wrote an ordinance setting rules for the call to prayer, which Majewski described as an “intense” local issue that also drew international news coverage. Revisions last year sought to establish decibel limits putting the prayer call and church bells on an equal footing.
“A hundred years ago, the Poles came. The first thing they did was build churches, and that coalesced a community,” Majewski said. “And that’s the same that’s happening with the Muslim settlements now.”
At his first public meeting, Almasmari and the other council members heard local residents and city department heads discuss sanitation fees, property taxes and snow removal.
“People are very happy for the streets to be cleaned,” he said, praising city workers for quickly clearing the six-centimetre snow that had fallen two nights earlier.
Almasmari, a native of Sanaa, had never seen snow before arriving in the United States in 2009 with his wife and son, joining his father-in-law in Hamtramck. He studied English at a local community college and learned his way around the sprawling Detroit region.
“It was hard in the beginning here,” Almasmari said. “But when you understand the life, when you understand how to get a job, when you start learning the language, it becomes easier.”
After the city council meeting, Almasmari stood in the hallway shaking hands. He greeted one man in Middle Eastern custom with kisses on the cheeks. Before leaving for dinner, he slipped back into the empty chamber to snap a picture of his new nameplate marking his seat at the council table.
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