On Wednesday, September 21, the HFCC Arab Cultural Studies program sponsored a panel discussion about the newly-released book, Arab Detroit 9/11: Life in the Terror Decade. The panel was comprised of three co-editors and one contributing author, including two HFCC professors, each discussing a different aspect of Arabs in the United States and the “Terror Decade,” the time since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Following a brief introduction by Michael Daher, director of the Arab studies program at HFCC, Kim Schopmeyer, one of the book’s contributing authors and the associate dean of social sciences at HFCC, began the discussion.

Schopmeyer discussed the history of Arabs in the Detroit metropolitan area. Arabs first came to Michigan in the late 1800s, with a large wave of European immigrants. Most of these original Arabs were Christian, but Muslims came soon after, and one of the first mosques was built in Detroit in the 1920s. Many Arabs worked in Henry Ford’s car building plant, and when his factory moved from Highland Park to Dearborn, the first Arab community grew in the city. Now, Schopmeyer believes the community is a fifty/fifty split between Muslims and Christians, and since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he believes the Arab community has grown by about a third.

“No one would have predicted that the community would have grown by a third in a decade when the economy of Michigan has really been suffering tremendously,” began Sally Howell, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Howell spoke to the group about the low points in the post-9/11 era, when hostility towards Arab-Americans grew. Because of Detroit’s large population of Arab-Americans and longstanding community, there were fewer problems in Detroit than in many other cities throughout the United States. She explained the three kinds of backlash Arabs experienced: “man on the street” hostility, including verbal and physical threats; media and public discourse backlash, where television programs and government officials spoke out against Arabs; and legal backlash through the passage of laws.

Dr. Nabeel Abraham, HFCC anthropology professor and head of the Honors Program, continued with the positive ways the community grew. Abraham told the crowd of about one hundred, “I was one of those people who felt, in the wake of 9/11, that immigration from the Middle East would stop.”

He explained the “unique and novel ways” Arab Detroit expanded, from large public and private grants funding the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, to the building of new mosques. There was a “compelling need to reach out to the wider community,” especially against the “media backlash” Howell spoke about.

Andrew Shryock, an anthropology professor from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, concluded the discussion with more positive post-9/11 community changes. He also described the factors that could explain community growth and the upward spiral of Detroit’s Arab-American community, including the age, size and diversity that make Dearborn unique. He joked about CIA sponsorship and the “army rock climbing wall behind the falafel stand” at the Arab International Festival, citing this as an example of ways the government continues to keep a close eye on the community.

Following the end of Dr. Shryock’s comments, the panel asked for questions from the audience. One audience member asked if there was a rise in Arab studies since 9/11, to which Howell answered, “Before 9/11, U of M-Dearborn was really the only place in the country that had an Arab-American studies program.” Now many colleges are developing or have programs, as well as a large demand for “Arabic language instruction.”

Another audience member asked why the “Arab spring” hasn’t stopped media backlash, to which Dr. Abraham explained “American history has always had a boogeyman,” whether it was the Japanese during World War II or the communists during the 1960s. However, as Dr. Abraham said, after the “clouds of the explosions in New York drift over the country,” the community barely diminished at all, and may be thriving more than ever.