c. 2005 Religion News Service

DEARBORN, Mich. _ Suddenly in late spring, Fridays brought a new feeling along the strip this Detroit suburb calls Altar Alley.

Dearborn’s big, older churches cluster on an access street that parallels teeming Ford Road, west of the tinted-glass forest of automotive corporate towers.

A striking new institution joined them in May, after seven years of planning, fundraising and construction.

The 92,000-square-foot, $14 million Islamic Center of America buzzes with activity most days, observers say. But Friday, the Islamic day for congregational prayer, brings hundreds of worshippers, filling parking lots with cars and the classrooms, banquet areas and prayer room with people.

The nation’s largest mosque opened its doors less than four years after extremists inspired by their own violent vision assaulted the nation on Sept. 11, 2001. A message from the Shiite Muslims who worship here is that, however others respond, they will not hide their religious practices in the heart of their own country.

Three months after its opening, the big worship place already has become a familiar feature of Dearborn’s landscape, its shapes and symbols contrasting with those of its Christian neighbors. From the road, the face shows golden-hued domes, Moorish arches, a stone exterior of desert tones, deep-green decorative tiles and two 110-foot-tall minarets topped with crescent moons.

“It’s our statement of peace and understanding to the world” from one of America’s capitals of Muslim life, Ed Bedoun, a member of the mosque board, said.

Dearborn has many mosques. Arab-Americans (nearly half of them Muslims) make up 30 percent of the population.

The 2000 census counted more than 29,000 immigrant and first-, second- or third-generation Middle Easterners in the city, most from Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Another 4,600 lived in Dearborn Heights; 100,000-plus called the Detroit metropolitan area home.

Drive through sections of Dearborn, and you will find Arabic script on every other shop and restaurant. Go into any public place, and you will see women wearing long, modest dresses and, if not veils, Islamic head coverings.

The municipal home to Ford Motor Co. has the highest proportion of Arabs of any city in the country (though New York and Los Angeles have larger Arab populations).

And Dearborn’s newest mosque seems destined to become “the calling card for Muslims around America,” Mayor Michael Guido said. “It’s something the community is very proud of.”

Many who worship here talk about their own pride, too, at erecting the most conspicuous new sign of religious and cultural devotion in the Detroit area, home to 5.5 million.

“We want people to know we’re here, and they should get used to it,” said Ali Hamka, son of Lebanese immigrants.

He and others had just completed a two-hour Young Muslims Association service and were about to walk to evening prayers in the new mosque’s prayer room.

“We’re Muslim, but like everybody else here, we’re Americans,” said the 25-year-old high school economics teacher in Rochester, another Detroit suburb.

Did he sound defensive? Standing in a banquet room with 200 other young Arab-Americans, Hamka cited all too many reasons he and his peers might feel that way. On July 7, terrorists in London had bombed the transit system, killing scores. Islamic violence was all over page one.

“The media is always ready to point out that it’s Muslims involved in terrorism,” he said. “I don’t think they get the message that, you know, we’re a religion, about peace, not killing people.”

Hamka summed up what many others Arabs say: “We are not terrorists. It’s horrible when things like this happen. They are criminals.”

Earlier, at midday prayers, Eide Alawan leaned against the frame of an arched portal to the center’s expansive prayer room, or musalla, explaining in a hushed voice the intricate rituals 700 to 800 Shiites were engaged in.

Shoeless worshippers stood facing easterly or kneeled and bowed or pressed foreheads to the carpet (some to small clay shapes they placed on the colorful carpet). They positioned their hands and responded in prayer to an imam’s musical chants.

Alawan, an energetic and fit 65-year-old of Syrian parentage, is a community leader focused on interfaith worship and cross-cultural understanding.

He said he handles outreach to groups of other faiths and encourages neighboring churches on Altar Alley _ and beyond _ to visit the mosque. Many have. He’s had special success in urging Jewish congregations to join the Muslims, and vice versa.

He reached into a wooden box by the threshold, rummaged through prayer beads and pulled out a tiny tablet the size of a very thick business card stamped with Arabic text.

“When they kneel and pray, a lot of Shias want to press their heads against the soil,” he said.

The unglazed tablets were fired from Middle Eastern sand and clay.

Many worshippers dressed in casual clothing, some in shorts. Alawan said a lot of them work at Ford’s Rouge auto plant or the automaker’s executive offices. On Fridays, they rush to prayer on lunch breaks.

The building’s principal architect, David Donnellon, showed and discussed the mosque’s features. He positioned the round prayer room, which holds 700 on the ground floor and 350 on the mezzanine, not just toward the East but so worshippers pray facing precisely along the shortest straight line to Mecca _ “52 degrees, 30 minutes north of east,” he said.

The musalla includes two levels to acknowledge Islamic tradition that women and men pray separately. The mezzanine is for women _ officially.

But during prayer hour, starting at 1:30 p.m., women kneeled on the same main-floor carpet as men. They prayed toward the rear of the room, often with children, all wearing scarves (though rarely the full hajib, which covers most of the face).

As prayers waned, worshippers rose and walked through the portals to retrieve shoes left on wire racks in the granite hallway.

Men paused to speak with and ritually kiss Alawan’s cheeks. He seemed to know everyone.

University of Michigan researcher Sally Howell, who worked on a major study of Arab communities around Detroit, said she does not think the high visibility of the new mosque signals “a sea change in the Arab community,” a brash response to other Americans’ sometimes unfavorable notions of Islam.

Dearborn Shiites were planning the building years before the 2001 terrorist attacks, Howell said. The new mosque “is a triumph for them, but the message is: `We’re not cowering in fear. We’re going on with our lives.’ A big part of that is their religion.”

That’s one message. Eide Alawan suggested another.

He was sitting among trustees and others at a conference table in the mosque’s administrative wing Friday morning, the big day for people of his faith.

He seemed a man gentle enough to embrace friends and family members, kissing them on the cheeks, tough enough to demand firmly that a reporter not reduce Muslims in his report by yoking Islam to terrorism.

That was a message he wanted powerfully to transmit.

“We do have a mission,” he said. “It’s to speak to this country. And the Islamic Center of America can have a role in communicating what Islam is about: We are a peace-loving people.”

MO/JL END BENTAYOU

(Frank Bentayou is a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of the Islamic Center of America.