Almasmari stresses that faith wasn’t a selling point during the election campaign, and his three Muslim constituents – Mohammed Hassan, Anam Miah and Abu Musa – are focused on representing all Hamtramck residents.
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Cathie Gordon, who lost in this year’s election, congratulated the winners on her Facebook page by saying: “I want to congratulate the winning candidates ALMASMARI, MUSA, and MIAH”. Opponents claimed it was an intrusion of Islam into their lives. The city councils 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.
“The growth is taking place in these Muslim communities, and they are transforming the city scape”, Howell told Washington Post.
“It is different”, he said in describing Hamtramck today, “but we have a lot of Polish tradition still in our community and we embrace all that tradition along with different cultural traditions”.
Hamtramck – once a Polish enclave inside the city of Detroit – has become the first city in the U.S.to elect a Muslim majority council to run the city.
Meyer, who is not Muslim, said that Muslims in Hamtramck “have helped bring stability, security and sobriety while lessening the amount of drugs and crime in the city”.
In Tuesday’s election – with six candidates running for three seats – the top three vote-getters were Muslim, while the bottom three were non-Muslim.
Hamtramck was settled by Germans when it was founded two centuries ago and was later flooded by Polish-Catholic immigrants, but the Muslim population has exploded due to immigration, according to Professor Sally Howell of the University of Michigan-Dearmorn. “It’s become much more visible in the last 15 years”. Now the town is made up of Asian and Arab immigrants to especially with most being from the countries of Yemen, Bangladesh and Bosnia. Three members are now Bangladeshi-Americans.
“The Polish are only 11% of the population and Yemeni people are 27%”, Almasmari told 7 Action News.
Getting to a Muslim majority wasn’t easy.
Newly elected Saad Almasmari assured everyone will be represented.
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“Although we are Muslims, it doesn’t have anything to do with serving the community”, he said. “It’s not about religion”. Hesaid the new Muslim-majority city council is not about Muslim unity. We are planning to work for everyone.
