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Christians and Jews and all people of conscience in Dearborn should not need a federal judge to be welcome in their own city.
Although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here.”Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said that to a Christian pastor at a city council meeting last year. The pastor’s offense was objecting to the renaming of a street in Dearborn for Osama Siblani, a local publisher with a long public record of support for Hezbollah and Hamas. The mayor added that the day the pastor moved out, he would “launch a parade.”
That was not a mayor losing his temper. It was a mayor revealing a worldview.
Now a Dearborn resident has taken that worldview to federal court. Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for The Federalist, is suing the city and its mayor with the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC). Her complaint lays out a pattern: $1,500 in public funds for “Ramadan Kareem” banners, $5,000 for a lighted crescent in Peace Park, police department T-shirts pairing the department’s seal with a crescent moon, and, this year, crescent-and-star lights on municipal streetlights across the city.
When Cleveland asked whether Easter and Passover would receive equal recognition, the city did not answer. She never asked Dearborn to take down a single Ramadan banner. She asked only that Christians and Jews be treated as equals. The city’s answer was silence and, she alleges, retaliation.
The CLARITy Coalition — Muslims, former Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others united “against the rise of Islamist tyranny” — supports this challenge. Not simply because Cleveland is right, but because her case is a leading example of how Islamist movements can be defeated in a free society. Not with “the proverbial sword.” Not with bigotry against Muslims. With the quintessentially American instrument — our Constitution.
Islamism’s Kryptonite
Muslims like me believe the way we practice our faith is different from what we call Islamism: A “Muslim” is any self-described practitioner or follower of the faith of Islam. “Islamists” are, however, self-described supporters of theo-political movements or parties (in Arabic — Islamiyeen) with specific, typically very theocratic, platforms for the governmental implementation of their interpretations of sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence).
Islamists of every stripe around the world —from the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, Shia Khomeinists, Saudi Wahhabis, to the Indo-Pakistani Jama’at Islamiya — disagree on much, but they share one premise: that legitimate law flows only from their reading of sharia (Islamic jurisprudence), interpreted by their clerics and enforced by the state. While certainly better studies need to be done, clearly a plurality of Muslim faithful support various forms of Islamist movements and their party constructs. One study that included “Arab Barometer” data noted that 48 percent of Arab Muslims supported Islamist parties. The massive nature of this movement underscores the dire need for reform within Islam against the ideas that entrench Islamists.
The American founding rests on a premise that is the polar opposite of that held by Islamists. Our inalienable rights come from God, not from government, and certainly not from any cleric or any sect’s reading of sharia. Because those rights belong to each person directly, government may not establish a religion to stand between a citizen and his Creator.
That is why the establishment clause is the Islamists’ kryptonite. When government enacts what it claims are the literal laws of God, government becomes God — and faith becomes coercion. As a devout Muslim whose family fled Syria, I can love God more freely in America than my parents ever could back home. The first victims of Islamist tyranny are Muslim dissenters, dissidents, modernists, and reformists.
The separation of mosque and state is not a threat to Islam. It is the condition under which Muslims can practice their religion freely. It is the ultimate definition of a non-coerced faith — the premise that you can decide on your own what interpretations to practice and which ones to ignore.
Majoritocracy
Dearborn’s leaders seem to believe they are immune from that principle because they are now a majority. To Islamists, democracy is not the protection of individual rights; it is majoritocracy — a tribal mobocracy where 50 percent, plus one, are deciding what to do with everyone else.
The cyclical pattern of populist Islamism is familiar. Islamist organizations spend decades crying victimhood as a religious minority. Once in power, they extend “tolerance” to others on their own terms — the terms of the mob, the tribe, they now control. But tolerance implies superiority; pluralism implies equality.
The traditional sharia model in application to non-Muslims is not about equal citizenship but second-class status — traditionally known as “dhimmi” (a person “protected” by the theocratic Islamist state). Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Baha’is and dissenting Muslims across Syria, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan live with its consequences today.
A city hall that funds one faith’s holidays while ignoring others, and tells a Christian he is unwelcome in his own town, is importing that mindset into an American city. Why? Because it’s their Islamist worldview and they think they can get away with it. When he was mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the head of the AKP Party in Turkey (the country’s equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood), famously said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, and then you step off.”
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