Presentations: Building Islam in Detroit

Abstract

The public and private spaces Muslims have built in Detroit, their mosques, homes, schools, and neighborhoods, are products of careful thought and negotiation. In this project, a team of UM faculty and graduate students will examine how communal places and institutions have been made Muslim in Detroit, focusing on processes of building, inhabiting, and display. We will consider how Muslims in Detroit have imagined and redefined these processes as American. Our project is critical to understanding the place Muslims now occupy in American society. In the aftermath of September 11th, Muslims in the U. S. have been closely scrutinized. While this project recognizes that American Muslims now live as “a community under siege,” it also highlights fluctuations in this status over time, its variations in the present, and the multiple ways in which Muslims have successfully established their presence in a country that has often excluded them. The age and diversity of Detroit’s Muslim communities, which date back to the late 19th century, make this city a rich site of convergence and contest among Muslims and between Muslims and the larger society.

Our project has received support from the Rackham Summer Interdisciplinary Research Fund. We have begun to explore the complex political and aesthetic terrain of Islam in Detroit through research and documentation. We have also begun work on an interactive website which we will complete next semester and present alongside an exhibition of this work in the Duderstadt Center Gallery in April 2005. GROCS support will enable us to incorporate semantic navigation techniques into our exhibition and website, augmenting the educational outcomes of these representations. Several of our students will work to provide historical, photographic and rich media content based on our on-going research, particularly archival research designed to identify photographs, building plans, video footage, neighborhood maps and other materials to be included in the exhibition and website. Other members of the team will create from these traditional and rich-media materials a navigational spatial diagram that is able to vary in detail according to the amount and type of information needed at different points in the navigational experience. This tool will allow an exploration of Islam in Detroit with analytical potential that exceeds the capacity of simple virtual-spatial tour. This new technology will greatly enhance our exhibition and website, making them of interest and usefulness to multiple audiences. Both the exhibition and the website are also intended to make our research and representational practices more accessible to input from area Muslims, whose support and cooperation have made this project possible. By providing a wealth of historical, geographic, spatial, and rich media information in a graphically pleasing and web-ready state, we hope to strengthen our work as public scholars.