Tex Mecca
Ever since a worshiper at Arlington’s Center Street mosque was linked to terrorist Osama bin Laden, its neighbors have cast a wary eye at the city’s growing Islamic community—and Muslims have wrestled with whether and how to embrace American culture.
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The sheik represented the voice of the past; he was a spokesman for worlds that the congregation had left behind. While he urged them not to assimilate, other forces silently tugged at them to blend, to merge, to become less strange. I found that this question of how American to become preoccupied Muslim immigrants. So did concerns about how their new neighbors viewed their faith. Whenever I visited the Center Street mosque, women greeted me warmly, then inquired if I was Muslim. After I explained I was not and told them who I was, they invariably responded with gently scolding lectures on the failings of the press. Why, they asked, did reporters find it impossible to write about Islam without writing about terrorism at the same time? Did crimes committed by Christians prompt the same study of churches?
After the sermon, the congregation made a series of prostrations. They bowed, knelt, then leaned over until their foreheads touched the carpet. This motion was repeated over and over again, the women’s backs lifting and falling in unison like ocean waves. When the service was finished, Umm Hamza came over. We were joined by a slight blue-eyed woman dressed in a navy robe and a white scarf. A fringe of blond hair peeped out from below her scarf, and her accent revealed her to be a native Texan. “Are you a teacher here?” she asked.
“Well, I’m the principal of the school,” replied Umm Hamza. “Are you interested in classes for children?”
“No, for me,” replied the young woman. She explained that she was married to a Muslim who attended services at the mosque.
“Oh, you’re a new Muslim,” crooned Umm Hamza.
“Well, I haven’t, you know, proclaimed that I’m Muslim yet,” the young woman responded with embarrassment.
“Oh, you haven’t said shahada!” cried Umm Hamza. She proceeded to deliver an impromptu sermon on the joys of Islam. (“Islam softens the heart!” she proclaimed.) Religion had changed Umm Hamza, and with fervor she asserted that faith would transform her listener too. (“Once you become Muslim, you will have all these Muslim sisters that you see around you. We’ll be closer to you than your blood relatives!”) Before I realized what was happening, the woman decided to convert. As an Arabic-speaking woman coached her, she stumbled through the foreign words of the shahada, a pledge of devotion to Allah. Afterward, her face grew red, and she started blinking repeatedly, overcome by the experience. Watching her, I realized that all of my ideas about Arlington were too static. People born on the other side of the world sometimes borrow from this place, as with the woman in the blue-jean hijab. And sometimes, as with this woman, the opposite happens: Arlington becomes more like its newest residents.
CENTER STREET BISECTS ARLINGTON on a north-south axis. Along the way, it passes through a tableau of suburban innocence: Here are modest brick homes, one after another, part of Arlington’s endless plain of strip malls, chain stores, and tract houses. In the forties the town had 7,500 residents; today it is home to 300,000. Tom Vandergriff, a former radio personality and car dealer, served as mayor for more than two decades beginning in the fifties (he’s now a Tarrant County judge). “We’re the dash in Dallas—Fort Worth,” he told me, the phrase sounding like an old campaign slogan. While he was mayor, bulldozers carved out Interstate 20 and Interstate 30, bringing all kinds of development, including Six Flags Over Texas, to Arlington; at night the panoply of colored lights attached to the towering Ferris wheel and roller coaster rides lend the Arlington skyline a loopy, manic quality. Still, many intersections feature white clapboard churches, outcroppings of the Christian faith that underpins the town like bedrock.
The rapid expansion created thousands of new jobs, which is one reason that the city has become home to an enormous pool of immigrants. Several other factors also played a role. “The first Muslims came for education,” said Yusuf Z. Kavakci, a Turkish scholar who is the imam of a mosque in Richardson. “They were thinking they would go back, but where they came from, people become rulers by force or the army dictates how the country is run. Muslim countries unfortunately are like that. So when people tasted the beauty of freedom, they stayed.” Beginning in the seventies, when the U.S. loosened immigration laws for non-Europeans, Muslims started arriving from India, Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, and various other countries that are not part of the Arab world. They also started arriving from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Kuwait, which are predominantly Arab. The newcomers settled first in Richardson and Fort Worth, and later in Arlington, which attracted many newcomers because of the growth of a humble institution once known as Grubb Self Help and Vocational School into a branch of the University of Texas.
Another factor often cited is climate. Syed Ahsani, a courtly gentleman who once served as Pakistan’s ambassador to Brazil and several other countries, lives in a well-to-do subdivision in Arlington. From the outside, Ahsani’s handsome brick home looks exactly like any other in the tract. Walking through his front door, however, I felt transported to his native land: The spacious rooms were carpeted in a series of Persian rugs and large throw pillows were strewn about to sit on. “Arlington has the same weather as Islamabad,” Ambassador Ahsani observed. Later he introduced me to a Pakistani friend who first settled in New York, where he found it horribly cold. “I took out my globe, and said, ‘Okay, here is Lahore, where I am from,’” his friend recounted. “I turned the globe around, ran my finger along that latitude, and said, ‘Aha! Dallas!’”
A concentration of people who share the same traditions is the kind of phenomenon that snowballs. “One invites the other,” said Aziz Shihab, who was born in Palestine. “In my case, I brought my brothers.” Shihab grew up in Jerusalem, but left to go to school in the U.S. His family home has since become a yeshiva for students of Judaism. After moving to Texas, Shihab became an editor at the Dallas Morning News, and he now publishes a weekly in Arabic and English. (His daughter, Naomi Shihab Nye, is a well-known poet.) In the late seventies Shihab helped build the mosque in Richardson, which he still attends. The city council wasn’t keen on a minaret, feeling it was out of step with the local aesthetic. “I told them I was going to do a nasty story in the Morning News,” said Shihab. “They said, ‘Okay, you can have a minaret, but only of a certain height.’” In time the Richardson mosque became the mainstay of the community, attracting tens of thousands of Muslims to its annual festivals.
Lately, charities have placed hundreds of Muslim refugees in the area, attracted by the existing immigrant population. Most recently Bosnians and Kurds have flooded the region. One evening I visited a Kurdish family in an apartment complex in south Arlington. Jian Abdulrahman, who knew the most English, acted as the family’s spokesperson. Jian, who is seventeen, has tawny skin and reddish-brown hair. She wore a turtleneck, stretchy bell-bottoms, and platform shoes. “Everybody thinks I’m Mexican,” she said. Despite her composed appearance, Jian told unsettling stories—of exodus, of watching her uncle die, of living for three years in a Turkish refugee camp. In 1993 World Relief brought the family to Fort Worth. “All we heard back in Turkey was ‘America, that’s where you could get freedom, that’s where you can make it,’” said Jian. Seated on a sofa across the room, bewildered by the indecipherable conversation, her parents retained the weathered look of peasants. Jian’s mother wore a capacious aqua-colored dress and a mauve head scarf, and her father wore baggy gray trousers that bunched at the waist, a white shirt, and a gray vest. While we talked, a gold plastic mosque on top of the TV suddenly emitted the sound of Arabic chanting. “It goes off when we’re supposed to pray,” explained Jian. “It’s like an alarm clock.” After her parents said their prayers, she gave me a lift in her fiery red 1997 Pontiac and left me pondering the contradictions of her Kurdish roots and her American lifestyle.
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