Monday, July 25, 2016

Creeping Sharia? What Creeping Sharia?

There's a suburb of Detroit that has a Muslim majority, and U.S. edition of British newsmagazine The Week wants everyone to know that, for the most part, everything there is hunky-dory:
The Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, Michigan, used to be 90 percent Polish-American and overwhelmingly Catholic. But most of the Poles moved out after the struggles of the U.S. auto industry, and immigration from Yemen, Bangladesh, and Bosnia has transformed the blue-collar town of 22,000 residents into the nation's first majority Muslim community. It's also the first to elect a majority Muslim council. The transition was sometimes tense — beginning in 2004, the town gave a local mosque permission to broadcast the 6 a.m. call to prayer from loudspeakers. Some residents — and anti-Muslim voices on the internet — accused the council of planning to usher in sharia law. But city councilor Saad Almasmari says he represents all Hamtramck residents in accordance with local laws and the Constitution: "It was a political election, not a religious one." His goal, he says, isn't to make the city more Muslim but to "bring more financial resources to the city." Polish-American Mayor Karen Majewski says that Hamtramck is a place where diverse people "live next to each other, but not in some idealized Kumbaya, Epcot Center kind of way. It sometimes gets contentious, but we deal with it."
 "Contentious" but with no discernable sharia-creep? Tell that to some disgruntled non-Muslims in the town (my bolds):
The debate over the Muslim call to prayer is reverberating once again. 
          At last week’s city council meeting, several residents of the Hamtramck Senior Plaza apartments on Holbrook complained about the volume level of the call to prayer coming from the Ideal Islamic Center, located across from the apartment complex. 
          Jeanette Powell said she’s not complaining as a way to “bash anyone’s religion.” 
          She said the call or prayer was broadcast at 6 a.m. and found the volume “overbearing.” 
          “Just turn it down a little bit.” 
          Carol Marsh said not only was the call to prayer too loud, she insisted that the organizers of the center never said it would serve as a mosque. 
          “We were lied to,” she said. “We were told it would never be turned into a mosque.” 
          But Sakrul Islam of the center said no one ever said it would not be a mosque, saying an Islamic center “covers everything.” 
          He warned Marsh that if she continued claiming she was lied to he would file a defamation lawsuit. ...
In other words, not only is it not an idealized Epcot Center Kumbaya kind of place. It sounds like it's shaping up to become a little slice of Yemen (even if it does have "ham" in its name).

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