Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

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: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27502822 .Accessed: 21/11/2014 19:10Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .University of Illinois Press and Immigration & Ethnic History Society are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of American Ethnic History.http://www.jstor.org

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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 else's 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 Shryrock's

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 grocer's daughter,"

and Gary David's chapter (pp. 151-178) is a study of Iraqi Chaldean store

owners. David's 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 Howell's interview (pp. 241-278) with a

married couple about their personal religious growth and their involvement in a

local mosque and Abraham's chapter (pp. 279-309) on the social history of one

Detroit mosque offer windows into the Islamic revival in America. Linda

Walbridge and T. Aziz's 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,