Dreams of D-Mecca: Racial Crossings and Islamic Renewal in the Two Detroits

Abstract

On the Motor City’s West Side, DREAM of Detroit (“Detroit Revival Engaging American Muslims”), a Muslim-led non-profit organization, is remaking the disinvested neighborhood around an historic Black American mosque, once slated for service shutoffs and depopulation. Analyzing qualitative data collected through participant-observation and forty-eight interviews conducted over two years of fieldwork, my dissertation examines the nature and limits of multiracial Muslim place-making in the segregated U.S. city, taking DREAM as an ethnographic case study. As the birthplace of the Nation of Islam, the city of Detroit is known by some Black U.S. Muslims as “D-Mecca.” Yet the city—once an international metonym for municipal failure and urban decay—evokes disdain and avoidance amongst many non-Black Muslims who tend to live in the metropolitan area’s sprawling suburbs. Approaching the city as both discursive construct and lived geography, I show how DREAM mobilizes religious ideals and strategies of community organizing to encourage Muslims to cross racial and socioeconomic boundaries. Through a range of programs, DREAM stimulates faith-based commitment to civic action, interracial sociality, and an expansive understanding of Islam that prioritizes ethical relations and just works over doctrinal or ritual conformity. Bringing together conversations in U.S. Islamic studies, urban studies, and racial and ethnic studies, I show how DREAM of Detroit is remapping its neighborhood and the city of Detroit as a sacred and attractive place of pilgrimage and reverence for U.S. Muslims, contravening prevailing racial-spatial logics. In this, I contend that scholars should consider civic spaces like DREAM as not only expressions of religious beliefs and values, but as sites of cultivation and negotiation in which understudied and novel forms of U.S. Muslim leadership and religiosity take shape. As the Muslim domestic non-profit sector expands, I ask how race and religion coalesce in this civic space and examine the ways in which DREAM’s project of urban place-making is embedded in the broader drama of Detroit’s contemporary “renaissance.”