Hussein lived less than ten miles from John, a short drive down Southfield Freeway in the very Detroit where I grew up and where my mother still makes her home. His neighborhood blossomed into what locals lovingly refer to as “Little Iraq.” It’s a one-mile drag where Shia Muslim barber shops and bakeries, storefront mosques and restaurants proudly bear the names of Iraqi towns and villages that the proprietors left behind to build new lives in the Motor City. These were not just businesses, but shrines they reconstructed along a central artery of an Arab American capital. After several wars in Iraq and endless bombs over Baghdad, a semblance of Iraq was built in the belly of west Detroit.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 194