In 2015, the progressive press sang the praises of the small town of Hamtramck (Michigan), which had just acquired the very first American city council with a Muslim majority. In this neighboring municipality of Detroit, bringing together immigrants from Eastern Europe, Bangladeshis, Yemenis or African-Americans, a Polish sausage store could peacefully rub shoulders with a large Yemeni shop and another of Bengali clothing, and the church bells resound along with the Islamic call to prayer. The proof, for part of the American left, that multiculturalism was not just a progressive utopia, while Donald Trump was launching a campaign openly hostile to Muslim immigration.
In 2023, the fable seems to have taken a turn for the worse. On June 13, the city council of the now exclusively Muslim and socially conservative town of 28,000 passed a law banning the display of ethnic, religious, racial and political flags, starting with the LGBTQ+ flag on properties. city public.
According to the Guardianthe city councilor in charge of this resolution, Mohammed Hassan, reportedly assured supporters of the LGBTQ + cause “work [r] for the people, for what the majority of the people want”. The city council underlined that this decision was not discriminatory, but on the contrary was intended to reflect the “international character of the city”. some Internet users have gone so far as to hail on social networks a “city without fags (sic)”…
This episode comes in the middle of Pride month, when the Human Rights Campaign recently declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ + people in the United States, the first in more than forty years of existence, citing “a spike without dangerous precedent for anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults in state chambers this year.”
Unsurprisingly, the decision sparked the ire of some Hamtramck residents, and beyond – with some Americans scolding a “stupid and off-base decision” on social media. “There’s a feeling of betrayal,” said the city’s former Polish-American mayor, Karen Majewski. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are under threat, and it is you who are threatening us.”
Illusion of “majority”
It seems a long time ago when the BBC praised, in an article published in 2021, “the harmonious city of the United States run by Muslim Americans”, when its new mayor, Amer Ghalib (the country’s first Yemeni American mayor) had just been elected. How did this small town, which in 2005 – when the city council was predominantly Christian – passed an ordinance authorizing the broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer from the city’s mosques five times a day, come to this? ?
Hamtramck is the very example of the excesses resulting from the confusion between “religious majority” and “political majority”. Statistically, largely Muslim Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants effectively became the majority over those from Eastern Europe from 2013 onwards. to make his religion a political priority, the city served as a breeding ground for communitarianism, with the passive consent of part of the left. The municipality has thus come to terms with the low representation of women in municipal bodies. On election night, new mayor Amer Ghalib was praised by a Yemeni-American rally of more than 100 supporters at an all-male post-election party (none of the six Yemeni women who then made up his council were present). Today, the municipal council is no longer composed of men.
It is in this context of great confusion between inclusion, diversity, identitarianism and essentialization of citizens that the city council, for example, last year approved an ordinance allowing the sacrifice of animals in backyards, despite the fact that some townspeople were moved. And while the left confused multiculturalism and communitarianism, surprising alliances were tied. Other US cities have passed similar bans on rainbow flags, but these are overwhelmingly politically conservative. The city council of Hamtramck has also received support from Republicans in the nearby city of Dearborn, who last year tried to ban books with LGBTQ + themes. In Dearborn, many conservative Muslims then joined the Christian right in a demonstration during which speakers described gays as “poor guys and pedophiles”, equating their sexuality with … zoophilia. The proof that by sacrificing its ideals on the altar of communitarianism, the left becomes the reactionaries’ best ally.