That evening was the first night of an Arab-American festival in Dearborn, and the festival was our next stop. When we arrived, an Egyptian band was playing at full volume, and a closed-off section of the street was crowded with people, many of them standing in a semicircle and watching. A small group in the center of the circle were dancing the dabkeh, an Arabic dance that involves people holding hands and stepping swiftly and rhythmically from side to side. To my horror, Yusif bounded straight onto the dance floor; lacking rhythm, balance, and the confidence not to mind about either, I skulked to one side. A couple of young men, who looked as if they were Yemeni, started to take instruction from Yusif in the finer points of the dabkeh. An old woman in a veil moved her feet to the tune as we passed her.
When he had danced enough, Yusif offered to drive me around the area. He showed me the Orthodox church where he had been altar server and nearly became a priest, and the Ford factory, where, like so many other immigrants, he had worked to support his family. Near the factory stood an Arab cultural center that he had helped to set up. He also showed me the young offenders’ school from which he had only lately retired as a volunteer. In the verdant countryside around the school lived many of his friends, several of whom were Jewish peace activists.
Yusif had come to America as a refugee, denied the right of return to his family home in what had been Palestine. He remained bitterly angry at Israel. Yet his own life in America seemed, like those of several other American Middle Easterners that I met, to be bound up with the Jewish community. Soon after arriving in America he had two children by a Jewish woman and, feeling that he was too young to marry, had decided with their mother to give them both up for adoption: one to a Jewish charity and one to a Catholic one. Decades later, in middle age, he wanted to find his children and succeeded in tracing his daughter, who had been brought up as an Orthodox Jew. He was still searching for his son.
—————
Yusif’s relationship was an unusual one not because his girlfriend was Jewish—several of the émigrés that I met in Britain and America, from religious minorities, said they found an instant affinity with American Jews—but because these minority communities tend to keep to themselves, and certainly to discourage cross-religious sexual relationships. “Sterling Heights is where we live,” one Chaldean told me. “Dearborn is Muslims.” The suburb of Troy was the best place to find Egyptian Copts. To find Maronites, I was advised to head to Grosse Pointe.
Immigrant churches both benefited from and helped cement communal identity. The priest at Livonia’s magnificent Orthodox basilica, Father Shalhoub, proudly showed me around. His community—Arabic-speaking Syrian and Palestinian Christians who follow the same traditions and teachings as the Greek and Russian Orthodox—are called Antiochan Orthodox and have five hundred churches in the United States. Father Shalhoub’s church looked like it might be one of the very best of the five hundred. “Here is marble from Syria,” he said as he pointed out the beautiful icons, which had been painstakingly painted in Syria and shipped over. The whole church was modeled on the church of St. Simeon Stylites near Antioch.
Their communities back home were, by contrast with the Chaldeans, not especially religious. But that changed when they came to America. “People make more effort to go to church here than in the old country,” he said. “What keeps the Orthodox Christian is the church. It preserves their culture, keeps their identity as Arabs. The first thing that families do when they come to America is look me up—the church becomes like a haven, a memory of home. The neighborhood at home”—meaning the Middle East—“protected people from outside attack, and here the church takes the place of the neighborhood. People come here and they see others who look like them, and they hear Arabic spoken. It’s a fellowship not just of religion, but of ethnicity and culture.” The priest’s room was full of books and photos and cards from the Middle East. “In this envelope is five dollars from my money,” a child had written on one of them. “Please give it to a needy person.” The Orthodox, he felt, would not assimilate in any meaningful way. Unlike Chaldeans and Maronites, they could not be tempted by their local Catholic parish, because they were not in communion with Rome. And so, it seemed, this Orthodox church would not just keep its people Christian: it would also keep them Arab.
A member of this Orthodox community later said something similar. After she arrived in the United States from Lebanon in the 1970s, the church was her link to home. It helped her make the transition to American life. “It’s a family away from family,” she said, although she added that her son had taken a different view, wanting to be Arab first and Christian second, and staying away from church as a result. The good thing about being religious in America, she said, was that it was not politicized: one’s livelihood does not obviously depend on one’s religion. She was drawing a contrast with her home country, Lebanon, where Orthodox Christians rarely get government jobs. What she did miss was the easy way that people in Lebanon mixed with those of other communities, such as Muslims and Druze. She believed Muslims in America were more religious than those in Lebanon, and all the hejab-wearing women she saw in Dearborn made her feel like an outsider among them. “People here group around religion rather than nation. People feel if they stick to their own, then their children will marry someone from their own religion.”
Just a hundred yards from the huge Greek Orthodox church was a Shi’a mosque, almost as large. A serious-looking receptionist with a strict hejab ushered me in for an impromptu meeting with its Iraqi imam, Hassan al-Qazwini. He was very optimistic about his community’s prospects in America. “It’s a pluralist society, where Muslims can integrate very well. It offers unparalleled freedoms. We can flourish here not just in the economic sense but in a religious sense.” To make sure that even the unreligious could stay involved, he preferred to call the mosque an “Islamic community center,” which could host wedding parties, for instance, as well as religious ceremonies. The majority, though, were devout. “In the second and third generations, the connection with the region is much less. People aren’t keen to go to the Middle East; they’d rather spend their summers here. But they keep their food traditions, their social traditions, and many are devoutly religious.” And the Iraqi Shi’a, who had just arrived, had more time to attend religious services. “Religion is a magnet, it often proves stronger than any other kind of affiliation, even racial.”
—————
George Khoury was an exception to the rule that Middle Eastern communities in Detroit tended to huddle around their place of worship. He was a Christian Palestinian living in a largely Jewish neighborhood. He had married a non-Arab woman. None of this meant that he had changed his identity, as I could tell as soon as I was dropped off outside his house. The clue was the license plate: pal 4 evr. It was cleverly ambiguous. It might just mean he was a good friend. But I knew that the pal stood for Palestine, which his family had left as refugees in 1948. George told me that he had chosen to live in a Jewish neighborhood in part as a challenge to the voluntary segregation most immigrants practiced. He was also thinking about his children. “The crime report here is close to zero,” he said as I sat in his home drinking a cup of Turkish coffee, its cardamom scent reminding me of countless cups drunk in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jaffa. “High school grads at 100 percent, those who go to college above 90 percent, that’s what I want for my children. Peer pressure controls kids. And they had Jewish friends, which made me happy—that we can coexist.” There had been some trouble with the older children at the school, and one time the teacher had told the class, “There’s no such thing as Palestine.” George’s children had come back confused and wondering whom to believe. So he had given them special classes of his own on Sundays, teaching them their history.
Quite unlike the Chaldeans, he saw his identity through a political lens. The history that he taught was the history of Western injustice. Indeed, George did not think that Arab Christianity would last long in Americ
a. “The death of the mosque is far away,” he said, “but I think it’s the beginning of the death of the church.” Encounters with Americans weren’t helping. “When we Arab Christians have a dialogue with American Christians, they say they’re Baptists or Unitarians. And they have no Mass, no Communion, no fasting. So the Arabs start wondering, are we the only ones left still doing these things?”
There was an elegiac side to George. He was telling me the story of the great poet and epic hero Abu Zayd when he stopped and sighed. “I am from the last generation that will understand these stories,” he said. This mattered a great deal to him. “The stories shape you—they teach you to think about the group more than yourself, to be generous. I try to transfer that to my children. But Abu Zayd fought only with a sword. In America they have tanks! These days he wouldn’t stand a chance.” He was thinking not just of the man Abu Zayd but of the culture that he had hoped to hand down to his children. “Coming here was the worst decision I ever made,” he said gloomily. “I thought it would be like a salad, every ingredient taking on flavor from the other. It’s more like a blender—everything ends up gray.” For the moment, though, George’s generation still held on to their identity. “It is an era of Arab Christians’ life,” George said, “when they are on the verge of being totally American and yet they have allegiance to their Arabism.” Still, he knew that other Americans would never understand who Arab Christians really were. “I was asked many times, ‘When did you convert?’ Our local priest was asked the same.”
—————
I tried to understand why Yusif and George were both so much unhappier with American life than the other refugees that I had met, especially those from Iraq. My sense was that it had to do with being Palestinian; the experience of exile had been poisoned by the knowledge that it was forced. And they had been in America so much longer and were more integrated, to the point that they were looking complete assimilation full in the face. I wondered whether coming to the West must always be a back-loaded contract for immigrant communities—get the benefit of prosperity now, pay the price of loss of identity later. Or was it up to them to fashion an identity and communal structures that could endure? I discussed this with Yusif at a shop run by a Druze émigré from Lebanon. “We are melting,” Yusif agreed, quoting a line of Palestinian poetry. “We are to blame. We didn’t find the glue.”
The shop was an Aladdin’s cave of scents and tastes from the Middle East: bags of oregano and aniseed, tins of vine leaves and olives, and flour-dusted Lebanese treats. Halim, the Druze shopkeeper, came over from behind a stack of boxed Alwazah tea bags and added his gentle voice to the conversation. “You have to hold on to your culture, faith, and heritage if you don’t want to be lost here, in a huge ocean. But we Druze have no church. We have no mosque. We have no teacher. We practice our religion individually. In Lebanon there are sheikhs who keep us united. There are none in America; maybe we’re too materialistic here. And so many people lack faith in the Universal Mind,” he said. Their community schools taught children Arabic, not religion. And their small numbers made it hard for children to find Druze husbands and wives.
I knew the Druze had much trouble explaining themselves in the overtly religious culture of America. Milia, a Druze woman who was brought up in Dallas, Texas, had told me of the embarrassing day at school when she and the rest of the class had to stand up and describe their religion: What was its holy day in the week? What were its beliefs? What kind of prayers did it have? She said: “I’m a Druze. We don’t have a holy day, I don’t know our beliefs and I never have to pray.” The teacher said, “You’re making it up! I’m going to tell your mother.” Of course, when she did, Milia’s mother could confirm it was all true. “It’s really strange for others who conform to rituals to understand what it’s about,” Linda, a Druze academic based in the quiet and cerebral town of Ann Arbor, told me. “It’s like the Chinese system—we have traditions but no rules.” Despite these markers of difference, Linda had noticed a growing interest in religious identity among the younger generation of American Druze. “My daughter’s now thirty, and she is asking questions about Druze culture. She’s more interested in that than Lebanese culture. The younger generation are identifying more as Druze,” she said. “They are more fanatical.” I could hardly imagine how one could be fanatical in pursuing a faith that has no rules or rituals. Apparently, though, where American communities of Druze are larger, there is greater enthusiasm for tradition. California, she said, even had a Druze sheikh.
On the other hand, the liberty that children enjoyed in America made raising them more challenging than if the families still lived in the Druze homeland. “Raising children was hard,” Linda admitted. “We couldn’t impose our moral principles on them. At twelve, thirteen years old they saw cousins doing drink and drugs; they asked, ‘Why can’t we?’” Cross-religious marriages were another challenge. American Druze have established regular social events to bring Druze families together, with the not-very-hidden motive of encouraging young Druze to marry each other. They have also had to adopt a more pragmatic approach to outmarriage and no longer completely ostracize those who do marry out. A Druze sheikh once offered some consolation to a worried expatriate mother whose daughter had left the religion. “When your child dies,” he said, “she will be reincarnated back in Lebanon as Druze again.”
Druze communities in America are remarkably tight-knit. They look for work in the same towns, so that at least six or seven Druze families can live together in a neighborhood rather than staying apart. Like Yusif and George, Milia’s family had also found unexpected common ground with American Jews. “Wherever we went we ended up meeting and connecting with Jewish people without knowing. There’s a similarity of culture,” she said. Many Middle Eastern émigrés from these smaller religions find common ground with Jews—especially because the latter practice their traditions and customs in private, keeping their identity and community alive but outwardly assimilating into secular society.
There is another obvious similarity between Jews and Druze. Judaism doesn’t seek converts. The Druze go even further by refusing converts. Some American Druze want to change this, along with the culture of secrecy that prevents them from learning about their religion and explaining it articulately to others. In Boston, I attended a seminar of young American Druze during which they discussed their faith. What were they to make, they asked of the older people who were present, of the traditional belief that the souls of the dead who are not reincarnated in Lebanon are reborn in China?
—————
Boston, where I lived in 2010 and 2011, has witnessed not just Druze religious seminars but also a Mandaean baptism. The ceremony was described by the scholar Edmondo Lupieri at the start of his fascinating book The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics: “Sunday, June 13, 1999. A man dressed in a long, white robe, his long beard concealed by a kind of white scarf that covers his mouth, his long hair wrapped in a white turban, stands in the river, holding in his left hand a long, wooden stick.” The river is the Charles, and the book describes kayakers paddling past the ceremony without giving it a second glance. Wisam Breegi, a silversmith and Mandaean activist who organized the ceremony, remembers the kayakers. That was the good thing about Massachusetts, he told me when we met at his silver shop near the center of Boston: nobody was bothered.
The ceremony should have drawn a second glance, because it was the first Mandaean baptism ceremony in the New World. It was as significant, to those who took part, as the first Thanksgiving was to the Puritans and native Americans who celebrated it. And the Mandaean Pilgrim fathers have followed in its wake. Wisam was the only Mandaean in Massachusetts at the time. Now, just twelve years later, he told me that there were 650. In his shop he held classes to teach traditional Mandaean skills to the new arrivals. In Worcester, to the west, he was trying to found a community center for members of his faith. He saw the Jews of America as the model for his own community. But the specific mod
el that he had in mind was the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, who passed a decree in the 1920s against accepting intermarriage even with converts to Judaism. Wisam approved: such marriages, he thought, would dilute the Mandaeans to the point that they would become wholly secularized and the community would vanish. They should never be allowed.
As we talked calls came persistently on Wisam’s cell phone from Iraqis who wanted his help in getting to the United States. Born in North Africa, he had been brought up as a Mandaean—“but,” he said, “I never knew what it meant.” As with many émigré Druze, the secrecy of religion sat uneasily alongside exile; separated from the temples and priests, Wisam found it hard to keep his faith. But he persevered, and worked to draw Mandaeans in the United States together and cement their group identity. Asylum was necessary but double-edged, rescuing Mandaeans from harm but also speeding up their departure from Iraq: “saving Mandaeans, and killing Mandaeanism,” he said.
—————
What, then, would happen to a religion that was even less understood in the West, that had strict and complex marriage rules, and whose teachings remain largely secret? Chapter 2 described the life of Mirza Ismail, a Canada-based activist campaigning for Yazidi rights. When I wrote to him in 2011, he invited me to join him that summer on a trip to Buffalo, New York, just over the border from Canada. He was there to see his old friend Abu Shihab, with whom he had escaped from Iraq, and whose house was in a quiet suburb. When Mirza knocked, one of Abu Shihab’s children opened the door—and instantly knelt to kiss Mirza’s hand. It was a custom the family had kept from the days when they lived in Iraq, because Mirza was Abu Shihab’s “brother in the afterlife.” Mirza saw himself, he said, as more like a Christian family’s godfather, someone who gives spiritual guidance and explains some of the teachings of the religion to his “other family.”
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 33