Posted on 05/05/2004 9:57:17 PM PDT by Pikamax
Tensions rise in a Michigan town John Leland NYT Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Broadcasts of Muslim call to prayer anger many residents
HAMTRAMCK, Michigan To hear people in this blue-collar town tell it, things were fine until the al-Islah Islamic Center petitioned to broadcast its call to prayer, or azan, over an outdoor loudspeaker.
Masud Khan, the mosque's secretary, sat on the carpeted floor one day last week and reflected on what he had learned about some of his neighbors in the last few months. "How much they hate us," he said softly.
Jackie Rutherford, a librarian and youth worker, sat on her front stoop watching three men in Islamic shirt-dresses at the house across the street. "I don't know what's going to happen to our little town," said Rutherford, 39.
"I used to say I wasn't prejudiced against anyone, but then I realized I had a problem with them putting Allah above everyone else," she said, of the plan to amplify the call to prayer, which mosques announce five times a day. "It's throwing salt in a wound. I feel they've come to our country, infiltrated it, and they sit there looking at us, laughing, calling us fools."
For the population of Hamtramck, a city of 23,000 surrounded by Detroit, the battle of the loudspeaker, which the City Council approved on Tuesday, has revealed a crossfire of religious, ethnic and lifestyle grievances, aggravated by the lingering memories of Sept. 11, 2001, which left many Muslims here feeling they were under suspicion.
Once an enclave of Polish immigrants, Hamtramck has since the 1990s become a haven for immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen, Pakistan, Bosnia and other countries, including a large Muslim population. In the 2000 census, 41 percent of the city's population was born outside the United States.
On spring afternoons, the sidewalks of Joseph Campau Avenue echo snatches of Polish, Bengali, Arabic and hip hop, punctuated by the sound of bells from several Catholic churches. Three mosques have opened in the last few years, increasing in size while the congregations at neighboring Roman Catholic churches dwindle.
Yet for all this churn, the ethnic populations coexisted with little overt friction.
"Even after 9/11, we had no problems," said Abdul Motlib, the president of the al-Islah mosque, which serves a mostly Bangladeshi membership (the other two mosques are primarily Bosnian or Yemeni).
Then last year, Motlib applied for approval to amplify the call to prayer, a sonorous invocation in Arabic that lasts up to two minutes.
For some longtime residents, like Joanne Golen, 68, who described herself as a born-again Christian, the request crossed a line. Golen said she had always gotten along well with the Bangladeshi families in her neighborhood. She noted that at Easter one of her new neighbors brought her a turkey that he had gotten at work. But she said the call to prayer was too much.
"My main objection is simple," she said. "I don't want to be told that Allah is the true and only God five times a day, 365 days a year. It's against my constitutional rights to have to listen to another religion evangelize in my ear."
At City Hall last week, before the final vote on the loudspeaker, a crowd of more than 100 crammed into a room, with dozens more listening or arguing in the hallway outside.
Chuck Schultz, 49, a computer programmer from nearby Grosse Pointe, spoke against the measure.
"Everyone talks about their rights," Schultz said. "The rights of Christians have been stripped from them. Last week, there were Muslims praying downstairs, in a public building. If Christians tried to do that, the ACLU would shut us down."
Some residents complained about the potential noise. Others, like Veronica Wojtowicz, 81, reminded neighbors of a time when life in Hamtramck was simpler.
"My parents came to this country and worked hard," Wojtowicz said. "I think the grace belongs on the other side. The intolerance doesn't come from the people who object; it comes from the other side. We all lived in peace and had no problems. You moved too fast."
In response, Abdul Latef, the imam at Masjid Al-Falah, a mosque in Detroit, asked the community to be patient.
"You can make history," Al-Falah said.
"This is part of our religion. If it is too noisy, then you can complain, and they will stop it forever."
Council members emphasized that there was nothing technically preventing the mosque from amplifying its call to prayer, even without amending the city's noise ordinance, and compared the amplification to the chiming of church bells.
The amendment just gave government officials leverage to limit the volume and hours of the broadcasts, said Councilman Scott Klein.
Motlib said the mosque had applied for approval "because we want to be good neighbors."
Paradoxically, the call to prayer is one that even most of the Muslims at al-Islah mosque cannot understand, because they speak Bengali rather than Arabic, said Khan, the mosque secretary.
Yet for many Muslims in town, the dispute seemed less about noise or the content of the azan than about insecurities of an older immigrant population feeling threatened by a newer one.
"They see we are coming more and more, and they think we are taking their city," said Abusayed Mahfuz, 34, the editor of Bangla Amar, a local Bengali magazine and Web site. "It's not really a religious problem. It's about migration, which is a reality."
Musad, who moved to Hamtramck from New York in 1999, said he understood the insecurity.
"It's human nature," he said. "You feel an invasion. It could happen to me also."
Like others in his mosque, Musad said, he was drawn to the Muslim community here not for its engagement with the rest of America, but for its distance.
"What attracted me was seeing school girls with veils and burkas," he said. "It's more authentic here than in New York, more roots. There's village life."
The New York Times
This is a problem which is not going away but is only going to get bigger, first in Lambtramck, then in the rest of the country.
The tenets of Islam require submission of everything to it's demonic theology. It cannot assimilate in America without extreme violence. It is more humane to simply send these people back home now before the eventual bloodbath which will inevitably take place when Islam makes itself intolerable in America, which it will. You can see the beginnings of it here.
A like question undoubtedly was asked in August of 1945.
------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for mentioning that. I think it is extreemly important. And so what is it that we did? We got serious about things, we decided that better them than us. We decided to end things once and for all. That 'innocent' casualties are a fact of war and always have been.
In 1945 we were in a rush, as rush to get the bomb before the Germans. We knew that whoever got it would use it. The most important thing to remember is that we were completely prepared to pre-empt someone getting it, in order to save ourselves.
Here it is, 2004 and we have not learned anything.
Every single American knows in his heart that it is not a matter of "if" but only a matter of "when". And so we jerk around with these savages year after year. We know who the enemy is but we don't seem to have the resolve as a nation yet.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.