Detroit’s mosques diligently memorialize key events in Islamic history. Religious holidays are observed, the Prophet’s birthday commemorated, and the Battle of Karbala remembered and re-enacted annually. The Hajj is dutifully simulated by perambulating elementary students. But it is difficult to find reference to the Muslim American past in local mosques. The cornerstone of the city’s oldest mosque, for example, which is dated 1938, is hidden in the back of a closet underneath an out-of-the-way stairwell. Records of the nation’s first purpose-built mosque, which opened in Highland Park in 1921, have all but disappeared, as have those of the dynamic array of Muslim, Arab, Turkish, and Indian organizations that sought to institutionalize Islam in the city, lobbied for the rights of their communities, and worked to expel colonial powers from their homelands in the 1910s and 1920s. A few mosques will bring out, when asked, tokens of their early struggles in the city – restrictive real estate covenants, hate mail they received during the Iranian Revolution, or Qur`ans that miraculously survived an arson attack in the early 1970s. Mosques with their roots in the Nation of Islam are a proud exception to this pattern. They display the Qur`an of their founder, Elijah Muhammad, the photographs and names of their pioneer members, even the career memorabilia of a well-known jazz artist from their community. A handful of other mosques, Arab and Albanian, that have recently passed their 50th or their 80th anniversaries, have commemorated their founders and key moments in their past through carefully curated photo displays and videos. Taken together, these varied, sometimes hidden objects suggest that the American history of Detroit’s Muslims is complex, uneven, and symbolically potent (occasionally toxic). This paper will examine the parts of this past that are publically memorialized through video, websites, newsletters, and exhibits in the lobbies, hallways, and jazz cafes of local mosques. It will also explore some of the objects that are held back from this widespread consumption. It will ask who the audience is for each representation, how ideas about Muslim American identity are shaped by such presentations (and withholdings), and how these displays contribute to (and suppress) Muslim American historical knowledge. These representations are sites of contest within the Muslim community and outside it. They express anxiety, belonging, and anxiety about the belonging of Muslims in Detroit today.

In the past decade, scholars have identified numerous ways in which the events/aftermath of September 11, 2001, affected Muslims' lives and sense of identity in the United States. Leila Ahmed (2011) wrote that 9/11 "exploded the myth of return" for immigrant communities, forcing them to reimagine themselves as American Muslims rather than Muslims in America. Similarly, Jamillah Karim (2009) argued that "9/11 marked the watershed moment when claiming Muslims' place in the United States became imperative," especially as a means of fighting Islamophobia. Sherman Jackson (2005) also asserted the importance of bridging historical divides between immigrant Islam and Blackamerican Islam to foster networks of mutual support. As their scholarship shows, Muslim American communities faced many challenges in the wake of the attacks but were also afforded an opportunity to reimagine their social relationships and participation in public life. In response to this panel's call for papers concerning "the process of memorializing Muslim identities in North American public spaces," this paper will analyze the evolving attempts of one organization, Park51, to meet the demand for a new image of Islam in America. I will first examine Sharif El Gamal's initial plans to create an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan to serve two purposes: uniting the diverse Muslim communities of New York and providing much-needed social services to the wider city. From there, I will trace how conservative pundits' condemnation of this proposal as a potential "victory mosque" at Ground Zero proved debilitating in getting the project off the ground. Finally, I will explore El Gamal’s recently revised plan to build a three-story museum at the site, one which will be dedicated to the faith of Islam and its arts/cultures. Utilizing ethnographic observations and interviews, my analysis will paint a complex portrait of this organization, its staff, and its mission. I will also engage theoretical works by Michael Jackson (on the politics of storytelling), Paul Williams (on museums), and Edward Linenthal (on American sacred space) to consider what is at stake for Park51 in creating this new museum. Some of the core questions for consideration include: Why did El Gamal shift his plans for Park51 from a community center to a museum, resituating the project around themes of memory and memorialization? How are local/national power dynamics or politics influencing the planning of the new site? And, in what ways might this museum reimagine the place of Islam in a post-9/11 America?

This paper interrogates the intersection of memory, grief, and cleansing at the National 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. I examine how memories of the past interject the memorial's present and its vision of the future through two cases that illustrate the exclusion of Islam and the inclusion of the Middle East in narrative sites of the memorial. The first case recites the exclusion of Pakistani-American Mohammad Salman Hamdani from the National 9/11 Memorial's list of deceased first responders. Instead, his name was included in a panel commemorating those who have a "loose connection, or none" to the WTC. A Muslim American, Hamdani was mistakenly thought to be involved in the attacks and not, as was later discovered, a hero who responded to victims at the site. The memorial not only failed to acknowledge Hamdani's heroism fittingly, but this omission denied his family, and the greater Muslim American community, the act of grieving for this man as an American hero. This denial resembles the particular kind of grieving that Lori Peek describes in Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11 (2011), where Muslim Americans were denied participation in the same kinds of grieving processes as the rest of the population in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the second case, a 2014 article by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury describes a visit to the memorial. The author considers what a memorial to martyrs of the Lebanese Civil War would look like. As Khoury gazes at the memorial waterfalls, his imaginative act extends to a tribute to the entire region of the Middle East, thus joining the losses of 9/11 to ongoing losses in the Middle East. Whereas Hamdani's case illustrates the exclusion of Muslim identity from an American memorial, Khoury presents a continuum from New York to the Middle East, extending a line of memory from the American mainland to consequences of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. The National 9/11 Memorial thus appears as a site of paradoxes; of memories that cannot be memorialized, of narratives that are both limited and limitless. I argue that the National 9/11 Memorial complicates the role of Islam and the Middle East in narratives of American public life. Both cases represent kinds of cleansing - a cleansing of Muslim life from the site of tragedy, and a temporal cleansing for both America and the Middle East, to a time "before pain and blood" (Khoury).