Dearborn: A Complete Muslim city in United States.
Dearborn is a city in Wayne County, Michigan, United States. It is an inner-ring suburb in Metro Detroit, bordering Detroit to the south and west, and roughly 7 miles (11.3 km) west of downtown Detroit.
In 2023, Dearborn became the first Arab-majority city in the US. It’s one of the few US cities whose mayor is both Muslim and Arab, the first US city to make Eid a paid holiday for city employees and one of only a handful of places in the country where the Islamic adhan (call to prayer) is allowed to be broadcast from a mosque’s loudspeakers. And it gives a feel of “the motherland away from the motherland”.
Dearborn is best known as the hometown of the Ford Motor Company and of its founder, Henry Ford.
The first written settlement of Dearborn is from the 18th century by French Canadian voyageurs who initially called the settlement La Belle Fontaine or Place aux Fontaines because of the abundant springs in the city.
Dearborn was once named Springwells, an anglicization of the French name.
The settlement was connected to the Detroit River ribbon farm communities and other farms connected to the Rouge River and the Sauk Trail.
The community grew in the 19th century with the establishment of the Detroit Arsenal on the Chicago Road linking Detroit and Chicago.
In the 20th century, it developed as a major manufacturing hub for the automotive industry.
Henry Ford was born on a farm that was once at the intersection of Ford Road and Greenfield Road.
Ford later built his estate, Fair Lane, and his River Rouge Complex, the largest factory of his empire, in Dearborn. And developed mass production of automobiles, and based the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company.
The city has a campus of the University of Michigan, and Henry Ford College. The Henry Ford is the largest indoor-outdoor historic museum complex in the United States, and Metro Detroit’s leading tourist attraction.
Dearborn residents are Americans primarily of European or Middle Eastern ancestry, many descendants of 19th and 20th-century immigrants.
The census identifies primary European ethnicities as German, Polish, Irish, and Italian. later waves of immigration came from the Middle East in the late 20th century, Muslims and Christians from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Now Dearborn has the largest Muslim population in the United States per capita and the largest mosque in North America.
Dearborn Township was formed in 1833 and the village of Dearbornville in 1836, each named after Henry Dearborn, a general in the American Revolution who became Secretary of War under President Thomas Jefferson.
The Town of Dearborn was incorporated in 1893. Through much of the 19th century, the area was largely rural and dependent on agriculture.
the city was little more than sparsely populated farmland until the early 1900s. That all changed after 1920s when car maker Henry Ford relocated the headquarters of his Ford Motor Company from Highland Park 10 miles away to Dearborn.
Once the new Ford plant opened, people were coming from all over the United States, all over the world to work for Ford Motor Company and that was the big start of the Middle Eastern population here.
When Ford began creating his famous Model T automobiles, he needed people to build them. The industrialist, looked to the Detroit area’s newly arrived Middle Eastern immigrants for labour. Soon, waves of workers from areas now covered by Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories flocked to greater Detroit in search of these new high-paying jobs.
Majority of the workers on Ford’s Model T assembly line were of Arab descent. When Ford relocated to Dearborn, many of his employees followed. This not only transformed the town from a sleepy 2,400-person hamlet to the headquarters of the world’s single largest industrial site but, also paved the way for Dearborn to become home to the greatest concentration of Arab Americans muslims in the US.
According to the 2020 Census, 54.5% of the city’s nearly 110,000 people claim Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.
The Arab American National Museum (AANM) opened in 2005, the first museum in the world devoted to Arab American history and culture.
Arab Americans in Dearborn include descendants of Lebanese Christians who immigrated in the early twentieth century to work in the auto industry, and more recent Arab immigrants and their descendants from other, primarily Muslim nations.
The Arab Muslim community has built the Islamic Center of America, the largest mosque in North America, and the Dearborn Mosque.
Warren Avenue has become the commercial center of the Arab-American Muslim community.
The Arab American National Museum was opened in January 2005 to celebrate the Arab American community’s history, culture and contributions to the United States.
Year 2019 U.S. Census estimates, the largest ethnic groups were Lebanese Americans Muslims, and the second largest were Yemeni Americans Muslims.
as more Arab and Arab Americans relocated to Dearborn over the decades, they created a community network that encouraged others to follow.
Community friendly Doctors offices started to open, restaurants, grocery stores and many more. And then, unfortunately, in the home countries, especially Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq there were continual disruptions, civil war, US military invasion, which kept forcing people to migrate. So, Dearborn continually kept receiving new people because there were already people here from those countries.
The Islamic Center of America opened a 120,000sq-ft mosque on Ford Road in 2005, just two miles from Ford Motor Company’s headquarters. In addition to being the largest mosque in North America, it’s also the oldest Shia mosque in the US, with space for 1,000 people at prayer.
Shia mosque (Islamic Center of America) welcomes people of all faiths, and tourists can walk the grounds and admire the mosque’s golden domes, soaring 110ft minarets and ornate Islamic calligraphy inside.
In Dearborn’s southern end, the American Muslim Society is also open to all and offers tours. Built in 1937 and expanded over the years to include an auditorium that hosts guest lecturers on the weekend, it was the first mosque in the US that was allowed to transmit the adhan (AZAN) through a loudspeaker.
Arab American National Museum tells the stories of Arab American immigration through its Coming to America exhibit and showcases notable Arab American contributions to US society in its Making an Impact exhibit.
In addition to its core galleries and annual events like the Arab Film Festival (15-19 May 2024), the museum also unveiled its Al-Hadiqa heritage garden in 2023.
