What an Islamic takeover looks like
The nation’s first and only all-Muslim city council had just voted to rename Holbrook Avenue, one of Hamtramck’s main arteries, as Palestine Avenue, in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war, then in its fourth month. The road was originally named after Dewitt Holbrook, a 19th-Century lawyer who owned a farm not far from this very spot. The name had stuck for about 125 years. Until this day.
Waves of Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants who swiftly made this America’s first majority Muslim city. White people were strangers in a suddenly strange land where women now walked the streets robed from head to toe in black niqabs, where the signs on the storefronts were now written in foreign scripts, where schools replaced Easter vacation with time off at the end of Ramadan, and where the sound of the Islamic call to prayer now competed with the tones of church bells.
Waves of Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants who swiftly made this America’s first majority Muslim city. White people were strangers in a suddenly strange land where women now walked the streets robed from head to toe in black niqabs, where the signs on the storefronts were now written in foreign scripts, where schools replaced Easter vacation with time off at the end of Ramadan, and where the sound of the Islamic call to prayer now competed with the tones of church bells.
