On the Westside of Detroit, a Muslim nonprofit organization called DREAM of Detroit, or “Detroit Revival Engaging American Muslims,” is remaking the northeast corner of the historic Dexter-Linwood neighborhood, one of many severely ravaged by urban blight and strategic underinvestment. Anchored by a decades-old community of African American Muslims alongside a growing network of non-Black Muslim partners, DREAM is restoring this three-square mile section of “D-Mecca” as a showcase of Muslim sociality and prophetic values, making evident on the physical landscape its religious-ethical vision of the good society. However, the city of Detroit proper often evokes fear and avoidance for non-Black Muslims in Metro Detroit who associate the Black-majority city with crime and danger, mirroring racist discourses common nationwide. Despite great ethnic diversity across the many sprawling municipalities that constitute Metro Detroit, social and religious overlap between immigrant Muslim communities, largely Arab and suburban, and Black Muslim communities in the inner-city is often minimal and antagonistic. As DREAM revitalizes a Black-majority urban area through religious ethics in action, their efforts also work to bridge and unmake such intra-Muslim racial-spatial divides by engaging with non-Black Muslim partners and volunteers from outside Dexter-Linwood—that is, by cultivating multiethnic common cause with and ethical commitment to the inner-city. Through ethnographic interviews and participant-observation at service events, this research project probes the relationship between religious belief and belonging, civic activism, and urban space, asking particularly how moral geographies shaped by race and religious knowledge motivate new relationships to urban places deemed “dangerous” or “other.” How do multiethnic participants describe their involvement in DREAM’s revitalization projects? To what kind of Muslimness, or Americanness, or race consciousness, or spatiality, does DREAM call its participants? My own interviews will be supplemented with analysis of raw oral history recordings recently published by the Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project, a community-based participatory research project launched by DREAM. I also plan to create a network map visualizing the ways in which multiethnic Muslims in Metro Detroit move and travel across city lines—and attendant racial, ethnic, and class lines—to participate in neighborhood service.
Researcher: Lucy Ballard
Project Documentation (Google Earth)
Keywords: race, religion, Detroit, ethnography