Dearborn, MI: Where Muslims Are…Americans

posted on: Feb 3, 2015

At the border between Detroit and Dearborn, you’d never know that in the space of one step, you’d leave a land governed by the U.S. Constitution and enter a city where sharia law holds sway.

Because, of course, you’re not.

Dearborn is a sedate Detroit suburb, more prosaic than revolutionary. It’s the kind of place where folks really care about school districts, property values, and code enforcement; for generations, bored teenagers have called it “Deadborn.”

But for the last half-decade, Dearborn has been the unwilling darling of the extreme right, a bogeyman invoked to perpetuate the ersatz notion that sharia law, a system of justice derived from the Koran, has gained a foothold on American soil.

More than 30 percent of Dearborn’s roughly 95,000 residents are Arab-American or of Arab descent (PDF). In reality, that means the city has some pretty great restaurants, a handful of mosques, and a more genuinely multicultural feel than most Midwestern towns—McDonald’s serves halal meat, business signs are bilingual, and every diner serves hummus.

For some, it’s enough to assign Dearborn a central role in a larger conspiracy theory, the claim that worldwide there are hundreds of so-called “no-go zones,” breeding grounds for jihad where sharia governs and non-Muslims aren’t welcome.

With five minutes and a search engine, it’s easy to disprove the radical right’s pet theory about Dearborn—or any of the cities and neighborhoods featured on the no-go list. Yet the creeping-sharia myth is so pervasive that it’s been repeated by folks like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, considered a 2016 presidential hopeful, and by failed 2010 Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle, a Tea Party adherent, among numerous other Republicans. Fox News was forced to apologize after a commentator labeled parts of Europe no-go zones.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com