This U.S. city has become the first to elect a Muslim-majority city council

November 6, 2015 at 8:58 am

Hamtramck, a historically Polish-Catholic enclave of Detroit, rose to national prominence more than a decade ago when its city council gave permission to a mosque to broadcast its call to prayer from speakers on its roof.

At the time, opponents were angered by what they saw as an intrusion of Islamic practice onto a public space. The city council’s approval of an ordinance to allow mosques to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer onto public streets made it one of the few cities in the United States to approve the practice, according to a 2004 story in the Detroit News. “This is about uniting our community,” Shabad Ahmed, the first and only Muslim member of the Hamtramck City Council, told the newspaper.

Fast forward to 2015, when the city of some 22,000 people physically surrounded by but politically separate from Detroit has elected a Muslim-majority city council, believed to be the first in the nation. On Tuesday, the city elected six city council members, four of Muslim faith.

Hamtramck was originally settled by Germans, but Polish-Catholic immigrants flooded into the area when the Dodge Brothers plant opened in 1914. At that time, Irish and German Catholics dominated the Detroit political scene, so Poles gravitated to Hamtramck.

But the Muslim population in Hamtramck has grown steadily due to immigration, said University of Michigan-Dearborn associate professor Sally Howell, who has written a book on Michigan and U.S. Muslims. Dearborn has many Arab-American immigrants, but Hamtramck likely became the first city to have a Muslim-majority population in 2013. She estimates that about 50 percent of the city is made up of Muslims, and the city has at least seven mosques, more mosques per capita than anywhere else in the country

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