By Namo Abdulla --- Rudaw
In this piece, Rudaw’s Namo Abdulla investigates the difficulties Iraqi immigrants face as they attempt to assimilate into American culture.
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Maya School students praying en masse at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan.
Photo by the author. |
DEARBORN, Michigan – Hawra Al-Tai has heard much from her parents about the intensity of the struggle they underwent in their search for freedom in Iraq. She knows well all the hardship inflicted on her Shiite parents and relatives under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni dictator. She was still in her mother’s womb when her parents spent a month in a prison run by Iraq’s notorious Secret Services. Iraq executed two of her uncles. The uncle who survived is suffering from schizophrenia. In 1991, after Saddam Hussein crushed a Shiite-led pro-democracy protest, Hawra Al-Tai’s family realized that freedom was too costly to achieve in Iraq. They left the country. Their initial destination was a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia where they stayed in tents for three years until they were finally granted asylum in the United States.
After all the hardship they had to bear in their quest for freedom, 22-year-old Hawra Al-Tai, who has lived in America since she was four, is still not as free as she wishes. This time around, the dictator who restricts her freedom is not a leader like Saddam, but rather entrenched tradition. Hawra Al-Tai’s conservative parents are themselves free to practice their Shiite version of Islam, and to profess whatever political belief they want. But they, who once used to aggressively struggle for freedom in Iraq, now dictate everything their daughters can and cannot do: their clothing, their friends, their jobs. Freedom is no longer the parents’ aim. Restriction is.
“I want to go to other countries to study. My family doesn’t let me.”
Wearing a hijab, Islamic clothes covering almost all of her body, Hawra Al-Tai explained the fight she has been waging against her parents in America. “I just think I deserve more freedom,” she said longingly, sitting at her home next to her sister Walaa Al-Tai. “I want to go to other countries to study. My family doesn’t let me.”
The Al-Tais live in the city of Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn is home to the biggest Arab community in the U.S., of which Iraqis are the second most sizable group, after the Lebanese. Arabs have lived in Dearborn in significant numbers since the late nineteenth century; most Iraqis arrived in the city after the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 and after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Arabs make up a third of Dearborn’s 98,000 residents. Middle Easterners usually get married young, preferring to have more children than Americans do, so two-thirds of all schoolchildren here are of Arab heritage. When you ask people why they chose to settle in Dearborn in the first place, the reason is likely to be what it has always been: the presence of the automobile industry, where many Arabs are employed. Dearborn is home to the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company, one of the world’s largest and oldest automobile firms.
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| "We are providing the kids with an Islamic environment," said Hala Hazimi, the principal of Maya. In this photo, Maya School students are praying en masse at the Islamic Center of America located next to their school in Dearborn, Michigan. Photo by the author. |
But for Iraqis, another significant reason for choosing to live in this tight community is to maintain their strict cultural traditions. As a result of the lack of a job her family approves of, Hawra Al-Tai is a ‘household’ woman. Her parents don’t have university degrees. None of the members of this family is a fulltime employee. The fact that she was allowed to finish school has made Hawra Al-Tai praise her parents as the kind of people who “value education.” Not every Iraqi does that in Dearborn. When asked why other Iraqis don’t allow their daughters to study, she was given an answer deeply rooted in Iraqi culture: “We don’t let our daughters do that. Our daughters are precious to us. We keep them at home.”
Five years ago, Hawra Al-Tai wanted to study at a school outside Dearborn “just to see somewhere else.” Her wishes created a dispute with her parents. They wanted her to stay in Dearborn, but she preferred Oakland University, nearly an hour’s drive from her home. “I had to beg them,” she said. “I had to be really persistent to get them to make those changes, because they’re really traditional.”
Hawra Al-Tai’s family is from Najaf, a conservative and holy city in southern Iraq. It is home to the tomb of Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the first Imam of Shiites and the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed. Every year, thousands of Shiites from around the world visit Najaf on pilgrimage. Last year, Hawra Al-Tai went back to visit and work in Najaf. There, she observed a shocking reality -- that women enjoy more freedom of movement in Najaf than they do in Dearborn. “Because in Najaf, they feel safe and they don’t feel isolated within a community that they don’t recognize, like the American community,” she said, sitting on a sofa in the presence of her parents in their living room. The walls of the room are inscribed with passages from the Koran. “They don’t have fears that we will be assimilated into the American community if we mix with them. They’re more free and liberal over there, in some ways, than here.”
“Our daughters are precious to us. We keep them at home.”
The two sisters give some examples to explain how curtailed their freedoms are. Western friends they have made at school, even girls, are not allowed to visit them at home. They can’t go out to shop on their own. Sunset is when their curfew hour starts. No Iraqi family here allows its daughters to go to nightclubs, of course. It’s not unusual to see Lebanese women dancing at nightclubs or serving as waitresses and bartenders. These two jobs are part of a long list of taboos for Iraqi women. Walaa Al-Tai, for example, was allowed to choose photography and design as her college major, but she has been banned from going alone to shoot photo assignments. When Iraqi Shiites went to Washington DC twice last year to protest Bahrain’s use of excessive force against pro-democracy protestors, Walaa was only able to cover the demonstration because her sister and mother were there too.
A brown-eyed woman wearing a black hijab with her nails polished grey, Walaa Al-Tai, who was born in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, wants a different life than the one her sister does. While Hawra Al-Tai wishes she had more freedom, Walaa Al-Tai sees the “red lines” drawn by her parents as being for her own good. “My family is conservative in general. They don’t like us hanging out too much. They want us to spend our time in a better way,” she adds. “I value my religion. I am allowed to do most things that girls here do… I think they [my parents] have adapted more than other Iraqis, because no other family here would ever allow their daughters to study in a different city.”
The degree of restriction Iraqi Shiites impose on their young daughters takes few by surprise. That is because Dearborn-based Iraqi parents are not only uneducated (most don’t hold even a high school degree); they come from an authoritarian society where obedience was unquestioned doctrine. They grew up in Iraq’s southern villages, where tribalism places a higher value on loyalty than on merit, and a higher value on honor than on freedom. Men continue to be viewed as guardians, whose consent is required for women to even get a passport. Most older Iraqis in Dearborn have never had a white-collar job. As the American economy struggles, these conservative parents are increasingly becoming reliant on their educated children, whose freedom they attempt to curtail. Hawra Al-Tai said she had helped ease the family’s living expenses when she had a part-time job, insofar as no one in the family has a well-paid job.
Iraqi men enjoy much more freedom, of course. Young Iraqi men, who have grown up in the U.S. with little, if any, memory of Iraq and its culture, behave very much the way Americans do. They are seen frequently at nightclubs and at non-Islamic restaurants. Having studied at American schools, they speak English much better than Arabic, a language that they use only at home with their parents. They rarely prefer to go back to Iraq, where it’s impossible to achieve the type of freedom that America offers. Here they are at liberty to go to a mosque or a club, eat Iraqi kabob or Japanese sushi, smoke Egyptian hookah or drink American Budweiser. “America just gives you options,” said Kamal Al-Sawafy, a 23-year-old Iraqi-American at a Japanese restaurant in Michigan. “You can be very religious and pray all day, or you can just party all day. Some people took one option and went with it. It either benefited them or destroyed them.”
“You can be very religious and pray all day, or you can just party all day. Some people took one option and went with it. It either benefited them or destroyed them.”
Dearborn displays many signs of pride in Iraqi culture. On Warren Avenue, on a chilly January morning, I pulled over at a barbershop, because I had noticed, from a distance, an attempt to preserve Iraqi tradition. The shop had an Arabic-language banner reading Al-Sindibad—that’s an Iraqi fictional character who has been a hero among children, before and under the US-led occupation. The owner of this barbershop, Moyad Jawad, is from Basra, where fairy tales say Al-Sindibad used to live. Jawad had hung a big American flag on his shop after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so that it looked, from a distance, like a government office, but inside the picture was more complicated.
Within the barbershop, there was a television set tuned to Fayha TV, one of Iraq’s numerous post-dictatorship independent channels which broadcasts news on the culture and politics of the war-torn country. When I was in the shop, the TV was airing news of a renewed wave of sectarian conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis. The customers, who were largely Shiites, cared about what had happened that day: a suicide bomber had taken the lives of nearly a hundred fellow worshipers in Nasiriyah, a province located some 225 miles southeast of Baghdad.
The incident added another layer of disappointment for Jawad, who is a Shiite. He was gazing at televised images of the destruction, wounded and dead bodies and debris caused by the explosion, in a country where he once supported a war to end a dictatorship. But as events played out, Saddam’s removal eroded what little hope Jawad once harbored for return. At least his American shop has a television set to show him home—and he displays a little Iraqi flag to show others his identity. “I will never ever return to Iraq,” he said, repeating parts of the sentence for emphasis. “I need Iraq to have a system like that of the US. It needs to have good hospitals and schools and enjoy a security like America does.”
As Iraq tries to emerge from years of sectarian violence, few Iraqis in Dearborn want to return there. Long regarded as a ‘cradle of civilization’, Iraq had, before the discovery of oil, been a strategically vital location for great empires, including the Ottoman, Acadian, Babylonian, and Sassani empires. As oil was discovered in the early 20th century, Iraq became a colony of the British and later a battlefield for the Americans. Caught in numerous holy and unholy wars over land and resources, the Iraqi people, currently estimated at 30 million, have never had a genuine democracy.
But in some ways, Jawad’s barbershop seemed like an Iraqi-American version of France’s pre-Industrial Revolution coffee shops, where average people discussed world events. On the morning that I arrived, Jawad ordered tea and food for a small group of his Iraqi friends, including a political activist, Ghalib Al-Yassiri. “In Iraq, we had a closed culture,” said Al-Yassiri, a prominent anchor for a weekly Arabic-language, largely religious radio show -- a show that once served as a voice for opposition to Saddam Hussein. “[Iraq had] a culture of a single tendency. A culture that called for Baathism and Saddam as the sole truth. We didn’t study other peoples’ cultures. We weren’t aware of other civilizations.”
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| Many Iraqi Americans say their culture even dictates the kind of hairstyle they have. In this photo, Moyad Jawad, an Iraqi hairdresser, is trimming the hair of Ghalib Al-Yassiri, an Iraqi political activist and radio host in Dearborn, Michigan. |
Many Iraqis visit Jawad because he knows how to give a traditional Iraqi haircut. “They want that I give them an acceptable hairstyle,” he said referring to the more conservative Iraqis. “Their relatives back home should approve of it. It’s a shame to have certain hairstyles in Iraq.”
Jawad himself is still culturally conservative. He points to a photo, displayed high on the wall, of his son, Alaa, who was then 3 years old. Taken 20 years ago in Basra, the photo is placed between two flags, Iraqi and American, just as Alaa’s life seems to lie somewhere between the two. Disputes often arise, Jawad said, between himself and his son over the degree to which Alaa should assimilate into American culture. Jawad dictates the type of hairstyle his son should or should not have. He is willing to cut an American customer’s hair into a Mohawk, but, he says, he wouldn’t allow it for his now-23-year-old son.
“One of the obstacles that we face is marriage. Our parents want us to marry a girl back home, and that’s difficult.”
But even Jawad has not been unaffected by the dominance of American culture. While he remains religious, praying in a regular manner and attending Friday prayers, Jawad’s business card says his hairdressing shop is open for both men and women, which means he is breaking a taboo that continues to prevail in Iraq. When asked whether he actually styles women’s hair too, he made a shy response in a much-lowered voice: “I’ve done only those women wanting their hair trimmed like men.”
Inside the shop, a big mirror reflects a catalog displaying dozens of varied hairstyles representing different time periods and cultural preferences. But in parts of the shop -- decorated with leafy green container-grown trees -- there are things representing fixed beliefs as well. On the reception table, for instance, Jawad honors his religion by displaying a portrait that introduces international customers to a dozen prominent Shiite imams, their work and lives. The walls also display passages from the Koran. There is, as well, a photo of Jesus Christ’s Last Supper. “God Bless America,” reads a banner on top of the bathroom’s small door.
Alaa is a university graduate, whose bilingual skills helped him get a job with the US Army, serving in both Afghanistan and Iraq. On an assignment with US troops in 2008, five years after the ouster of Saddam, Alaa had a chance to visit the new Iraq for the first time. The short trip made him realize a chilly reality of migration. The decision they made to flee from Iraq nearly two decades ago had put them at odds with other Iraqis who had remained subject to dictatorship, sanctions, and war. “The few days I spent there, I felt like an outcast,” said Alaa. Iraqis still in Iraq “believe that most Iraqis that are based out of the States are not so much Iraqis, because they feel like we’ve abandoned the country. It wasn’t by choice. Don’t get it wrong. We left them because we had to.”
It was a cold night. I got into Alaa’s fancy black Chrysler. He continued on, picking up two other Iraqi friends of his. We were driving to dinner at an Asian restaurant. There we joined two hijab-wearing Lebanese female friends of Alaa’s to have Sushi -- a word that some liberal Iraqis here use to refer to their attempt to bridge their Sunni-Shiite differences. After finishing the meal, the situation turned into a customary Iraqi dispute, with verbal displays of generosity as everybody offered to pay the entire bill. It all sounded Iraqi, apart from the language, which was English. Iraqi hospitality seemed to not tolerate the Western way of “going Dutch.” In this case, it meant that Alaa had to pay the total amount. “There’s always next time,” his friends nodded.
In Alaa’s car, Al-Sawafy and Mohammad Al-Baiatty, each 23 years old, rode in the back seat, leaving me to sit in the front. After a stretch of a Michigan highway, we reached a drive-thru Starbucks, where we had America’s most prominent coffee. The bitter coffee served as a substitute for a cup of black tea that one would have after an intense meal in Iraq.
I lowered the volume of a hip-hop song in the car. The sound system offered other options, including Koran recitations. Asked if they face any obstacles from their families who belong to a different culture and generation, Al-Baiatty, who has never visited Iraq, started with a marriage-related issue. “One of the obstacles that we face is marriage,” he said. “Our parents want us to marry a girl back home, and that’s difficult. The girls back home, a lot of them don’t know English. Their lifestyles are different than ours, and their beliefs are different than ours. They want us to have the same marriage that they did. It’s basically a forced marriage. But for us, it’s a lot different, we want to pick a girl, we want to find out who she is.”
“Parents think their daughters are angels, but they’re not.”
Al-Baiatty goes on: “When I was 16, my parents talked to me about getting married to a girl back home. I told them I didn’t want to. And they asked me why? I told them ‘my lifestyle is a lot different than hers. I was like ‘if I was to bring her here, she couldn’t basically do anything but clean the house and cook for me’… there’s always arguments and fighting going on.”
Al-Sawafy, whose parents have already arranged a marriage for him with a relative from Iraq, interjected a more positive vision: “My dad never said ‘you have to,’ nor my mom. They said ‘this is an idea. This is why we think it’s good.’ It’s optional… They want to strengthen the relationship in the family.”
Alaa Jawad said he could not envision picking a western wife, but “an Iraqi American” would work. A woman from America “would again be a clash of cultures. The way she dresses and everything, it’s just too much.” Al-Baiatty agreed, with a discouraging example: “we have a friend of ours. He married an American girl. It’s not so good. It’s very hard. One wants the child to be a Christian, the other one wants him to be a Muslim.”
The kind of marriage prevalent in Iraq and extending to America has long puzzled Westerners. A few months after the 2003 U.S. invasion, the New York Times printed a striking statistic, reporting that in Iraq “nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins.” The Times article quoted the author of ''Kinship and Marriage,'' Robin Fox of Rutgers University: “Americans just don't understand what a different world Iraq is because of these highly unusual cousin marriages. Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of autonomous individuals committed to a public good, but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world. Their world is divided into two groups: kin and strangers.''
As many Iraqis don’t let their women work outside of the household, this adds another reason why unemployment remains high among immigrants in Michigan. But the irony is that money proves to be a significant factor in preserving Iraqi culture as well. If you don’t have money, you will not be able, for instance, to send your children to private Islamic schools where Arabic language, culture and religion courses are taught. In a state where more than 50 percent of Arab immigrants are unemployed, most Iraqis have no choice but to send their children to public schools where they grow up with children from different cultures, ranging from Americans to Latinos, Mexicans to Asians. This is where Iraqis assimilate most thoroughly into American society.
Those who can afford it send their children to Maya School, the biggest private Islamic school in Dearborn, which currently enrolls some 300 students. It charges each student $6,200, of which $5,600 covers tuition. Maya, also known as the Muslim American Youth Academy, tries to preserve Islamic cultural values by offering its students a religiously homogeneous experience. “We are providing the kids with an Islamic environment,” said Hala Hazimi, the principal of Maya, where students from preschool to the eighth-grade study. “Not just teaching them, but all the environment, not being exposed to all the bad stuff that’s out there.”
“I believe 70 percent of the (Arab) girls have done everything from dating to sleeping with a man to everything you could imagine,”
Hazimi explains what she means by “all the bad stuff”. It’s not, she says, just the use of drugs, or crime, or sexual abuse, which are reported as occasional occurrences in public schools. At Maya, children are not allowed to listen to non-religious music, nor are they allowed to open social media Web sites such as Facebook. They’re prohibited from reading certain books that encourage female-male friendship. It’s a requirement that all the school’s girls are covered up after the third grade. Children are sometimes led to believe that wearing hijab will get them extra credits in Islamic classes. Restrictions, Hazimi said, include, “the whole boy-girl relationship thing. You know a lot of the high schools and middle schools now with the whole drugs or drinking or something of that sort, and the bad language, and the music that they listen to. I know a lot our kids listen to music. At school, no music, very restrictive Internet access, no Facebook or chatting websites." What is more, the school’s website makes a monthly announcement, selecting the best students on the basis of “showing good akhlaaq (moral) and Islamic behavior.”
It’s not surprising that the Islamic school pays enormous attention to male-female relationships. In Muslim societies like Iraq, women represent family’s “honor.” If a woman does something judged ‘immoral’ she would tarnish the family’s honor. The punishment can be as harsh as murdering the woman in a practice widely known as “honor killing.” Though the term remains controversial, honor killing applies to those women who have sex with a man before marriage or a man other than her husband. It can also apply to woman for merely falling in love with a man. This is what happened to Noor Al-Malaki in Arizona last year. Al-Malaki, a 20-year-old Iraqi woman, was killed by her father in an honor killing because she refused to obey her father’s orders. She dressed like an American girl and hung out with friends. She had a boyfriend and did not want to marry the Iraqi man her father had chosen for her. Her father murdered her by rolling over her with his car. The court convicted the father of intentionally killing his own daughter on a first-degree charge.
In the past, Saddam Hussein did not ban honor killings, a clear attempt to win the allegiance of Iraq’s tribes. There were light, if any, punishments for the killers. In parts of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, such as Kurdistan, there have been amendments to the law so that honor killing is no longer distinguished from any other form of murder. But even there, law enforcement vis-Ã -vis social issues remains a big challenge.
Despite family restrictions, young Iraqis have, to different degrees, become assimilated into American culture. It’s difficult to measure how much has changed, of course. To a young religious person such as Ali Al-Najjar, who gives public lectures on Islam all over the U.S., 30 percent of young Iraqi Americans have “totally lost their identity.” Alaa says restrictions Iraqi parents impose on their daughters have not been so successful. “I believe 70 percent of the (Arab) girls have done everything from dating to sleeping with a man to everything you could imagine,” said Alaa. “Parents think their daughters are angels, but they’re not. University is fifteen miles away. What are you going to do? Are you going to follow her all day?”
It’s for this reason, Alaa believes, that Dearborn-based Iraqis prefer their sons to marry a woman who has lived in Iraq rather than only in the United States. Hazimi, the principal of the religious school, said despite the conservative education provided by schools such as hers, Muslims have become much more Americanized than she would like.
“Islam is harmonious towards democracy. It’s harmonious towards American culture.”
“For the most part though, most of our kids, when they go home, they are exposed to everything and anything,” she said, adding that Arabs have “embraced the Western culture a little too much. They’ve stepped away from the morals and our Islamic duties; I guess a little bit too much. In their mind, it’s okay because they don’t see the right and the wrong.”
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| “Islam is harmonious towards democracy. It’s harmonious towards American culture,” says Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini, the leader of the Islamic Center of America. Photo by the author. |
But the present cultural clash Iraqis have with American culture is temporary, according to Tallal Alie Turfe, the author of Unity in Islam- Reflections and Insights. “Over time,” said Turfe, on a snowy January day in Michigan, “the Iraqi immigrants that came here today, that has children, children, and grandchildren, let’s say by the year 2050… they might be by living common law without marriage, they might be having pregnancy without being married. They will have all kinds of things even showing disrespect to their parents.”
Despite the cultural threats Iraqi tradition faces here, most Iraqis who came to the US in search for freedom are not willing to go back to their war-torn country. Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini, the leader of the Islamic Center of America, the biggest mosque in the U.S., believes Iraqi youngsters have benefited more from the good parts of American culture.
“Americanization is not only about the hairstyle. It is about pursuing education,” said Al-Qazwini. “It’s about having freedoms and having civil rights…We have many of our youth Americanized in this sense of enjoying their freedoms, their civil liberties, pursuing their life goals, pursuing higher education… Islam is harmonious towards democracy. It’s harmonious towards American culture.”
