As Suehaila Amen, a 45-year-old activist and organizer from Dearborn, Michigan, was preparing to deliver a lecture in Malaysia, she got a call — the location of her lecture now had to be changed to a much larger venue to accommodate a higher turnout.
“It turned out people were coming because they remembered me from the show, and weren’t coming for my lecture,” she tells New Lines.
The show in question is “All-American Muslim,” a TLC original slice-of-life reality show and one-season wonder that debuted in 2011 — a few years before the lecture. The show followed and documented the day-to-day lives of five families from Dearborn, the midsize city now widely considered a stronghold of Arab-American and Muslim communities. (Contrary to popular belief, Michigan isn’t the state with the largest number of Arab Americans; per the Arab-American Institute, that is actually California. Instead, Michigan has the highest proportion of Arab Americans in the country.)
The Amen family was one of those featured in the show. The family’s storylines included Suehaila potentially moving to Washington, D.C., and her desire to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The show also juxtaposed the seemingly devout, hijab-observing Suehaila with her younger sister, Shadia, who sports visible tattoos and whose arc focuses to a large degree on her engagement and marriage to a man who was raised Irish Catholic.
“You should have seen [the production team] when they came to [preliminarily] interview us,” Shadia, a 44-year-old full-time photographer and nurse aide, tells New Lines, recounting how the producers’ curiosity was piqued by how different her lifestyle is from that of her sister’s. “Their eyes pretty much popped out of their heads. … Like, ‘Oh, my God. You guys are a show in one house!’”
Now, more than a decade since the debut of “All-American Muslim,” Dearborn is once again a name one is likely to come across in the news, albeit because of a different kind of representation-related issue. The Arab-American electorate is increasingly dissatisfied with the stances taken by President Joe Biden’s administration and the electoral campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris regarding the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, and what implications this could carry for U.S. foreign policy, along with the recent expansion of the ongoing conflict to Lebanon.
Even six years before they got their own category on the U.S. census and other official forms, members of the Arab-American electorate in Dearborn (along with members of the Muslim electorate) played an instrumental part in developments around the 2024 election. Dearborn, for example, is now widely viewed as the epicenter of what are known as the “Uncommitted,” “Abandon Biden” and “Abandon Harris” movements, the main demands of which include a cease-fire in Gaza and Lebanon, along with an embargo on U.S. aid and weapons going to Israel. This perception is, for the most part, thanks to Dearborn’s Arab community.
To Suehaila, this is just one example among many of how the Arab-American community remains integral to the fabric of America and its democratic process. “Our community has done a tremendous amount of work,” she says. “And now we’re in the National Review, given everything that’s happening with the ‘Uncommitted’ movement, which was established here in Michigan with our community, given the fact that we are a force to be reckoned with, whether they want to admit it or not, and that this community can sway the way the elections will go for the state of Michigan.” This, she explains, is why persuading her community has become vital for politicians from both sides of the aisle.
A critical swing state, Michigan — and thus Dearborn — is usually a hotspot for campaigns every election season. Even the campaign of former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance is currently trying to woo Dearborn’s Arab-American electorate (as George W. Bush did in 2000), focusing on dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s stances on Gaza and Lebanon, but also seeking to tap into the socially conservative stances of many first- and second-generation Arab Americans. (Bush ultimately lost Michigan but won over its Arab Americans, who welcomed him and his campaign surrogates with open arms in closed-door meetings and banquets. Trump made a recent stopover in Dearborn this election cycle as well.)
Whether the 2024 elections — presidential and otherwise — represent a bona fide olive branch between the Republican Party and Arab-American communities, years after the Democrats exploited their dissatisfaction with multiple post-9/11 GOP positions, will become more apparent on election night. But the Trump reelection campaign’s canvassing seems to be largely working so far, with the Trump-Vance ticket having secured endorsements from the likes of Amer Ghalib, a Democrat and the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan — another stronghold of American Muslims and the nation’s only Muslim-majority city. Imran Salha, the imam of the Islamic Center of Detroit, recently offered an endorsement of the former president as well, though he rescinded it shortly afterward “out of respect for [his] community.” He added that, just as the Arab-American voting bloc broke away from the GOP 20 years ago over many Republican lawmakers’ support for the Iraq War and other policies in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Democratic Party deserves the same treatment this election cycle. A number of controversial incidents involving the Harris campaign and pro-Palestine individuals in Michigan and beyond may also be partially to thank for this.
Trump was able to make up for Salha’s climbdown when he was joined by a group of imams from all over the state during a Saturday rally in Novi, a Detroit suburb, where they expressed a belief that he would be able to bring peace to the Middle East and would be instrumental in cracking down on LGBTQ-friendly curricula in public schools, earning him their endorsements. Trump himself and other surrogates (some of whom are also Arab Americans) had repeatedly touted their confidence in the power of the Arab-American electorate on stage and in multiple media appearances.
Meanwhile, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Lebanese American and Democrat, announced that he will not be endorsing any candidate for the 2024 election cycle. A different group of Arab-American community leaders within the city did, however, endorse Harris while emphasizing their disappointment with the Biden-Harris administration’s stances on the war in Gaza and its escalation into Lebanon, adding that they believe a second Trump administration would likely have “dire” consequences domestically and on the world stage.
“All-American Muslim” — a title finalized only after the production and postproduction phases — was created and produced by Mike Mosallam, the president and CEO of his own eponymous production company, who grew up in Dearborn.
As the executive producer of the show, Mosallam mostly intended for “All-American Muslim” to be a love letter to his community, which he described to New Lines as “the perfect cross section of Arab America.” One thing is noticeably puzzling about the way Mosallam describes his project, however: By “Arab,” does he mean “Muslim”? Or both Arab and Muslim?
If you ask a Muslim American about the representation of their faith in mainstream media, you are likely to get some version of a familiar age-old lament that many people are still unable to grasp that Arab culture and Middle Eastern cultures at large are not synonymous with the religion of Islam, nor are all Arabs Muslim. Collecting data on religious adherence among different ethnic groups in the U.S. can be difficult, given that the census does not include or collect data about religion. It can also be difficult to gauge the exact numbers or concentrations of Arab Americans in the U.S., as the census will only begin to include a distinct “Middle Eastern and/or North African” category at the next headcount in 2030. Even within mainstream coverage of such communities and their significance in the 2024 elections — in Dearborn, in Michigan at large and beyond — Arab-American and Muslim-American communities are conjoined in a way that often renders them interchangeable.
Mosallam, who is a Lebanese-American Shiite Muslim, maintains that the show’s raison d’etre was shaped by his own experiences and that it aimed to highlight his own community. “My upbringing and my awareness of the diversity within the landscape of Muslims worldwide has always been somewhat narrow to Arab-identifying Muslims,” he says. “So, I don’t want to erase or diminish the landscape of Muslims worldwide.”
The idea of putting Dearborn’s Muslim community on national radars via the small screen first came to Mosallam when he was involved in the production of “On the Road in America,” a 2007 product of the early-2000s reality TV surge, which took four young Muslims from different Arab countries on a road trip across the U.S. and chronicled how they reacted to the various facets of American life and the people who made up its fabric — from average Joes to politicians. Since the show also focused on relations between the U.S. and the Arab world, multiple hot-button geopolitical and foreign policy issues naturally made their way into discussions throughout the episodes. The most notable of these were the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and U.S. influence on both, along with the two-state solution often proposed for the latter and whether it can or should be implemented.
One aspect of “On the Road in America,” which was broadcast throughout the Arab world on the Saudi Arabian state-controlled network MBC, involved having the protagonists meet with various Arab-American communities to discuss the similarities and differences in their upbringings. These on-camera conversations were also taking place behind the scenes between the show’s executive producer and Mosallam, whom he saw as a potential helping hand in building trust with the predominantly Arab and Muslim communities of Dearborn for a different show. The idea was for such a show to be pitched to TLC as a companion piece or spiritual successor to “Sister Wives,” one of TLC’s most prolific and controversial religion-adjacent franchises.
“Because of my upbringing and connections there, I was able to take a meeting and pitch a variety of families of varying degrees of religiosity,” Mosallam recalls. “And, ultimately, we all collaborated on putting that together in a show. These are all families that have some form of connection to me, like friends of friends, friends of family members, actual family members, people I’ve grown up with, people who were very connected to some of my siblings, people who I had gone through kindergarten, through all of my schooling with. It was just people that have been in my life in Dearborn for many, many years and in different fashions.”
When it comes to covering a community — any given community, but especially one that has been misconstrued and rendered monolithic at best, and vilified or orientalized at worst — building trust to gain access is paramount. Even when the concept is solid and valid at a surface level, one key element is needed for successfully documenting or reporting on certain communities: Work related to issues within these communities should be presented for them, not about them.
That is why many of the families who were considered for “All-American Muslim” and were ultimately featured say they were adamant that Mosallam be involved in a significant decision-making capacity — that of an executive producer, which he ultimately was.
“There was a lot of excitement, and there was a lot of learning that had to happen both on the production side and on the participant side,” Mosallam recalls. “I think people were very excited to be a part of something new and innovative, and at the same time, as you can imagine, it’s quite exposing to have a camera in your face catching every nuance that your face makes. So, I think there was a lot of education around [that] and a lot of trust that needed to be built around how the information would be used, and that took a little time. But, ultimately, I think the cast and the crew very much gelled.”
TLC sold out of all its advertisement slots for the show’s commercial breaks as it made its nationwide broadcast debut in 2011, even after Lowe’s Home Improvement notably caved in to multiple calls to boycott and pull funding from the show, most of which were made by the political activist David Caton through the Florida Family Association, an anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Islam organization of which he is the sole founder and employee. Lowe’s later denied that the decision was influenced by any one organization, after some progressive groups and advocates called for a subsequent boycott of their establishments nationwide (though it stood by its decision), with some staging protests at Lowe’s stores throughout Michigan. The hacktivist group Anonymous also targeted the Florida Family Association’s website following the furor.
The show subsequently directed a lot of attention toward the Dearborn community, who in turn overwhelmingly supported the show as barrier-breaking and as the first of its kind to focus on a group of North American Muslims. (The first show of the scripted variety to do so was “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” a Canadian television show that had debuted a few years earlier and lasted for six seasons, until 2012.) But as if by the “Streisand effect” — when attempts to bury bad press fail and snowball into more negativity — a lot of the coverage surrounding “All-American Muslim” in its early weeks and months revolved around the Lowe’s pullout, including coverage of the fact that the show was ultimately not picked up for subsequent seasons. The underlying premise or angle of such coverage, as Anderson Cooper put it rather dramatically in a promo for an episode of “Anderson Live” that featured some cast members and opponents of the show, was: “Ten years post-9/11, what did we learn?”
Ironically, it almost seemed as if the Lowe’s controversy were a sixth family cast as part of the show. If it were, then it would certainly have become the favorite of Keith Ellison, the first-ever Muslim U.S. representative, and now Minnesota’s Democratic attorney general, who made various TV appearances criticizing Lowe’s and its decision to pull its advertising from the show (although he did not call for boycotts of the establishment). Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American and Democratic representative for Michigan, who was then a Michigan state representative and the first Muslim elected to the state legislature, wrote a letter directly to the Lowe’s CEO at the time voicing her disapproval of the decision.
Nevertheless, the show was also a life-changing experience for many of its participants, who embarked on a full-fledged media tour and subsequent local and national media features, many overwhelmingly positive and supportive of the fact that such a show was greenlit in the first place and made it onto a major network’s airtime every Sunday night. It did, however, come with its fair share of opposition.
Nina Bazzy, an event planner who was featured on the show alongside her then-spouse, recounts to New Lines that she was on the receiving end of both sides. “Back then, I think we only had Facebook and Twitter [since renamed to X],” she says. “I was getting messages, I was getting inboxed, and people were saying really awful things to me,” expressing their disapproval with how she dressed and behaved on the show, or saying, “‘If I see you, I’m gonna punch you in the face.’ It got to that point, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, I really need a break.’”
A recurring theme, present in Reddit forums discussing the show, comments on grainy YouTube clips and old Twitter posts, is whether the characters’ religious observance is up to an acceptable standard. The cast, being exclusively Arab and overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim, also earned some snide criticism, some of which appeared to be sectarian in nature. Some were also puzzled by the fact that the show revolves only around Dearborn.
“Maybe you’re all-American, but you’re not all-Muslim,” read one comment on a clip depicting a cast member getting a new tattoo. “It will be canceled before the end of its first run,” prophesied another comment, this time on Reddit.
As an event planner, the highly fashionable Bazzy is shown on “All-American Muslim” performing some of her day-to-day duties, which at times entail working on events where alcohol is served. Her arc on the show also depicted her toying with the idea of potentially opening her own nightclub, although she maintains that the idea was exaggerated throughout (“If I wanted to open a club, it would have been open 10 years ago,” she says). While many observant Muslims might view nightclubs with suspicion because of their association with alcohol and debauchery, Bazzy points out that just as many Muslims are OK with them.
“Lebanon is like Miami,” Bazzy, also Lebanese-American, explains. “In Dearborn, the people here are not as open-minded as the people in Lebanon are, especially in Beirut. In Beirut, it’s completely different. That’s what I want to say I’m drawn to. I’m drawn to the open-mindedness, the be-who-you-want-to-be kind of attitude, but some people are a lot more conservative and I respect that too.”
Even then, something like owning, operating or working at a nightclub does not always send the message many people might think it does, which is where Bazzy also feels something was lost in translation between real life and her depiction on the show — although she is glad the show opened the door for such a conversation.
“It showed a perspective, because are there Muslim, Arab club owners? There’s a million,” she says. “In Dearborn, we have clubs. In LA, I know a lot of Muslim Lebanese club owners. In Miami, in Lebanon, the whole country’s clubs. Every corner has a club and a bar. Even more conservative countries now do concerts and parties. Saudi Arabia just started doing concerts heavily, right? And they became more mainstream. The performers are still restricted to a degree, but still, their budgets for these events are in the millions, and they want their people to attract tourism, so they have to adjust and be more mainstream. Then, personally, I know people that own bars and clubs, and they don’t even drink. My brother owns a bar and he doesn’t drink. He will not put a drop of alcohol in his mouth.”
Beyond the internet the story was very different for Bazzy, with fans and viewers — Arab, Muslim, non-Arab and non-Muslim alike — approaching her on the street to express their love and appreciation, thanking her for choosing to be featured on the show. Still, she decided to take a break from the media attention (and even colored her hair brown, as opposed to the blond locks she sports on the show and again now) to focus on her work and family.
That is, until she took a vacation in Barcelona, Spain. “A group of people stopped me in Barcelona, and it was really cute and really nice,” she says. “And then I realized, why am I being so hard on myself? There are some people that got a lot of positivity out of this. They learned about us, and they realized all Muslims are just like all Christians, all Jews, we’re all different. We’re all practicing our own way. Everybody has their own spirituality. There are a lot of Muslim girls that are like me, that are not the stereotypical hijabi girls or whatever, and they’re living their life.”
A while after that, a local cleric who had taken offense at Bazzy’s depiction on the show also made amends with her, extending an apology for having previously criticized her at a local mosque.
“[He], over the years, got to know me, because we had done some events together, and he apologized to me,” she says. “He said, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry I judged you. That wasn’t my intention, but I respect you and your family very much.’ So, I think that just proves that sometimes you have to get to know someone, and then judge them, because judging someone based on a TV show is not gonna do much for you, right?”
In true reality TV fashion, the vast majority of the main and background characters featured on “All-American Muslim” are as charming as one would imagine a typical casting director might hope. Viewers are treated to multiple scenes of the cast bonding over hookah (or “arguileh,” as they affectionately call it) in lieu of the “Real Housewives”-esque spreads typical of such shows, recounting and discussing matters pertinent to their storylines.
Something that sticks out like a sore thumb, however (and is perhaps echoed in Bazzy’s gripe about her storyline’s “party girl” angle) is how they each seem to be “boxed” into certain archetypal aspects of Muslim-American life as generally understood — almost like each individual character was supposed to represent one point on a scale of nonpracticing to sincerely devout — and how said archetypes almost exclusively dictate the cast’s interactions and the mid-scene confessionals interspersed throughout. For example, interactions in the show between cast members who wear the hijab and others who do not inadvertently fall back on this juxtaposition a number of times, even when, in real life, such matters are of no concern between friends or family members.
Cliched reality TV character stereotyping aside, the fingerprints of “On the Road in America” are, for better or worse, all over “All-American Muslim.” If the former was made for Arab and Muslim communities with next to no familiarity with American culture, the latter (down to its very name and cover art, which depicts a woman in a hijab with her mouth and nose covered by an American flag she is holding) is almost the mirror image for an American audience — to a fault. From an American-style wedding reception with a dabke dance to the local high school football team reciting the opening chapter of the Quran before their game, to the life of one character as a policeman and federal agent, “All-American Muslim” lives up to its title by way of all these plotlines and anecdotes, yet also makes one realize the untapped possibilities of exploring other communities, in other cities.
For Evelyn Alsultany, a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, analyzing shows like “All-American Muslim” is her bread and butter.
An expert on the representation of Arab and Muslim communities in mainstream media and contemporary Arab and Muslim popular culture, Alsultany uses “All-American Muslim” as one of the case studies in her most recent book “Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion.” The book further expands on her scholarship on such representation, specifically the idea that a lot of contemporary representation of Muslim communities in the pop cultural vernacular has been shaped by what she calls “crisis diversity.” (Another prominent case study in the book is Hollywood’s response to then-President Donald Trump’s now seemingly reversed campaign call in 2015 for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” which was followed in 2017 by a notorious executive order, often dubbed his “Muslim ban,” restricting entry into the U.S. for various foreign nationals — based on an Obama-era list of countries.) Despite this, Alsultany clarifies that “All-American Muslim” was not a “crisis diversity” project per se but more of a response to the stereotypes prevalent in the climate that followed the immediate post-9/11 era.
She uses the phrase “stereotype-confined expansions” to characterize the 2010s-era representation of Muslims in the media. “Which basically means: You have a stereotype — ‘Arabs and Muslims are terrorists.’ And then, the response is: ‘No, no, no, they’re patriotic Americans, too!’ because there’s this binary. You’re either a patriot American, or you’re a terrorist, and a lot of this kind of thinking put Arabs and Muslims in this binary position. So, the show ends up entering to tell Americans, ‘We’re patriotic Americans, too,’ and on the one hand, it’s doing important work, and on the other hand, it reveals a very limited space that exists for Muslim representation.”
Another representation-related issue raised a lot in the wake of “All-American Muslim” — mainly by other all-American Muslims — has to do with the show allegedly being a one-sided portrait of American Muslims (something that, again, internet trolls were quick to make clear). For many, the main issue was not necessarily cast members opening a nightclub or having tattoos. As Alsultany says, “I know that a lot of Muslims said it should have been called ‘All-American Lebanese Shia Muslim.’”
The vast majority of people featured on “All-American Muslim” are Shiite Muslims. Even within the umbrella discourse surrounding the representation of Muslims in the media, the narrative is almost always concerned with Sunni Islam (the largest sect of Islam, followed by approximately 87% to 90% of Muslims worldwide). This means that, inevitably, Shiite Muslims almost always get left out by most of the available mainstream representations of the faith. As “All-American Muslim” was a first of its kind, its hat trick of not only representing the faith but also its second-largest sect, and doing so in such a high-profile setting, may have been a commendable effort but was arguably a risk.
“I would argue that Muslim policing, or policing of anyone or their identity, is unproductive,” Alsultany says. “But we are left there because of the dearth of representation. We have been portrayed for over a hundred years as backwards, exotic, terroristic, violent. So when there is something, there’s so much at stake. There’s so much investment from the community to ‘get it right,’ but then, what does it mean to ‘get it right?’ Getting it right is actually showing the diversity of Muslim experiences, identities, and also expressions of faith. Some Muslims are very religious, some aren’t. So, I think the show showed diversity of Muslims within that one community, and it was met with some Muslims criticizing the show and saying, ‘Oh, they’re not real Muslims.’”
Alsultany is the co-author of the Obeidi-Alsultany Test, which aims to examine and evaluate TV and film works that feature Muslim characters for nuanced and intersectional plotlines and stories. New Lines asked her to evaluate “All-American Muslim” using the test. The project scored positively for having a Muslim-identifying writer on staff, for Muslim characters maintaining a strong presence and being essential to the storyline, and for Muslim characters having diverse backgrounds and stories (although Alsultany maintains she was not a fan of how all the Muslims who starred on the show came from a Lebanese background). However, it failed to score on not reproducing or reinventing old tropes. (“This is a tough one, because it was trying to do something new, but for me, portraying Muslims as patriotic is very limiting. We’re so much more than that. So, I feel like it’s very reductive to say ‘patriotic,’” she explained.) It also failed to score on Muslim characters not being solely defined by their religion.
Thus, “All-American Muslim” gets a 3 out of 5 on the test — not bad for a first of its kind, but clearly a score indicative of its time and era. Even then, Alsultany — speaking as a regular viewer rather than an expert — says she actually did enjoy watching the show.
“I felt happy to finally see Muslims on television as normal people, because I’d never seen that before,” she says. “I actually, as professor Alsultany, got to do a panel once at the University of Michigan, where some of the cast members came out, and I remember talking to them and they were like, ‘We don’t know why people are interested, we’re just normal people,’ but for me, it was just really significant to see everyday Muslims being portrayed on television.”
Contrary to popular belief, the decision to feature a cast almost exclusively comprising Lebanese-American Shiite Muslims was actually unintentional. “There were other families that were asked, Sunni families [from Dearborn’s] Yemeni community,” says Lila Amen, who starred on the show alongside her daughters Shadia and Suehaila. “They chose not to participate. Some people just don’t want strangers in their home. And you know what? We’re sort of adapted to the camera.” Lila herself comes from a Lebanese Sunni family, leading her children to jokingly refer to themselves by the portmanteau “sushi.”
She and her family enjoyed the experience overall, and still maintain contact with members of the production team and executives from Discovery, TLC’s parent company. With that in mind, Shadia is on the fence about the prospect of doing something of that nature again.
“I love the concept of doing something like that, and Mike knows that if he ever came up with something along the lines, he’s already sworn me into it, whether I wanna be or not,” Shadia says. “I’m sure he’s got little things brewing in his head, because he brought it up years ago, so I know it’s something he will continue to work on because it did do well. People were just not ready yet. But you know what? We opened a door.”
Some criticism directed at the show had to do with an Amen family subplot around Shadia’s wedding to Jeff, an Irish Catholic who was due to convert to Islam. Part of the storyline’s tension comes from questions about whether he should even convert in the first place (much to his family’s dismay) and whether such a conversion would be a sincere one or one of technicality. Reflecting on the events, Shadia, who has since divorced Jeff, now says that she does not believe he was converting for the right reasons, although she sincerely believed he was at the time.
“The backlash we got from Arab communities was more like, ‘You’re not representing us,’” Shadia explains. “No, we’re not. I’m representing me. That’s all. I guess my confusion is … not one of these people will be standing next to me on the Day of Judgment. It’s really none of their concern what I’m doing, and I would never try to represent anybody else, because I’m not them. But I was on that show representing me and how I deal with me as a person and me as a Muslim and me as an Arab.”
When New Lines speaks to Mosallam about the prospect of ever recreating “All-American Muslim,” he welcomes the idea, but explains that he now thinks any potential successors would best revolve around other predominantly-Muslim communities in America — a view Suehaila echoes.
“I think the intention of the show was, ‘Here is our story, or stories. The door is open, now go tell your own,’” Mosallam says. “And, you know, when there was some feedback that, ‘Why is everybody Lebanese?’ or ‘Why is everyone Shia Muslim?’ or ‘Why is everyone from Dearborn?’ my thought, my instinct, was not to say, ‘Because this encompasses all Muslim Americans,’ it was more to say, ‘Because this is the story I know, now go tell your own.’”
Mosallam seems to have made good on that promise — he has since been involved in shows like “Ramy,” the semi-autobiographical show from Egyptian-American comedian Ramy Youssef, which has also been touted for its representation of Muslim Americans. On the reality TV front, many Hulu subscribers tuned in to the shenanigans of another Muslim-American family last year, with the debut of “Secrets and Sisterhood: The Sozahdahs,” a show many have called the Muslim “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
And that flavor of representation doesn’t stop at the ballot box either — thanks in part to Lila’s efforts with Arab refugee children in the Dearborn public school system, Arabic is now a language on offer in Dearborn’s public schools, becoming one of the fastest-growing foreign languages across the district.
But for now, all roads still lead back to Dearborn and the stories of its Arab-American and Muslim residents that continue to resonate, as the city also provides an ostensibly convenient one-stop shop for canvassing an electorate whose importance, always undeniable, is now even more so thanks to the ramifications of events in the Middle East. Even roads to lectures in Malaysia, as Suehaila Amen would tell you.
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