Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream
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Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream
by Nabeel Abraham; Andrew ShryrockReview by: Victoria BernalJournal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), pp. 105-107Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History SocietyStable URL:
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Reviews 105
tions common among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and can be put to excel
lent use in courses dealing with religious pluralism and diversity in North
America.
Andrew Shryock
University of Michigan
Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Edited by Nabeel Abraham and
Andrew Shryrock. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2000.
639 pp. Photographs and index. $49.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Arab Detroit is a labor of love. Many of its twenty-five contributors have
deep personal ties to “Arab Detroit,” having lived or worked there. This gives
the volume a distinct character, The writers are not outside observers but par
ticipants in the community they seek to understand and describe. A number of
the pieces are poignant personal memoirs about growing up Arab in Detroit and
about the difficult lives of the authors parents who often fled to America from
political unrest in the Middle East only to face difficult economic conditions in
the United States. A couple of the pieces are long personal interviews focused
on one or two individuals. A few of the entries are in the form of poetry. Oddly,
the personal character of many of the essays can be off-putting?like looking at
someone elses high school yearbook or family album. The reader as an out
sider simply does not know enough to supply the larger context that makes the
picture so meaningful to those involved. For this reason, Andrew Shryrocks
piece, “Family Resemblances: Kinship and Community in Arab Detroit,” which
is in the last section of the book ought to be read first. It presents theoretical
perspectives that help make sense not just of his own contribution but many of
the others and it even includes an analysis of the immigrant memoir as an
American gerne (pp. 591-592).
The volume is divided into six sections?Qualities/Quantities, Work, Reli
gion, Politics, Life Journeys, and Ethnic Futures?each with a cogent introduc
tion by the editors that seeks to draw out larger themes. The central theme of
the volume is summed up in its sub-title “from margin to mainstream,” which
the editors see as a process of moving from being Arab in America to being
Arab American. The volume contains thirty-nine entries, including the various
introductions and poems. Two pieces in the section on Work deal with
shopkeeping, a major line of employment in Arab Detroit; Alixa Naff s chapter
(pp. 107-148) is a memoir about growing up “an immigrant grocers daughter,”
and Gary Davids chapter (pp. 151-178) is a study of Iraqi Chaldean store
owners. Davids piece is one of the few that positions Arabs in Detroit not
simply in relation to some abstract mainstream of America but to others in their
immediate environment. In the case of Chaldean storeowners this means Afri
can Americans, and the title of his piece, “Behind the Bulletproof Glass,” says
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106 Journal of American Ethnic History / Winter 2002
a lot. In the section on Religion, Sally Howells interview (pp. 241-278) with a
married couple about their personal religious growth and their involvement in a
local mosque and Abrahams chapter (pp. 279-309) on the social history of one
Detroit mosque offer windows into the Islamic revival in America. Linda
Walbridge and T. Azizs piece in the Politics section, “After Karbala: Iraqi
Refugees in Detroit” (pp. 321-342) is a summary description of conditions and
issues affecting Iraqis in Detroit. Like some of the other contributions it fails to
make a theoretical argument but would be valuable to anyone, such as a social
worker,