American Sharia Part 3: Islam’s Domination in Michigan

Michigan has emerged as a crucial battleground in the growing struggle between Islam and the American way of life.

The Great Lakes State is more than just a contested battleground during national elections; it is home to roughly 250,000 Muslims — nearly three percent of the state population and one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the country.

Dearborn and the Detroit area have witnessed a rapid surge in mosques, Islamic governance, and Sharia-dominated enclaves that illustrate the Muslims Brotherhood’s blueprint for the rest of America, as we have covered in previous essays.

Today, an estimated 178 Islamic nonprofits operate in the state, controlling around $100 million in assets. One of the most powerful is CAIR-Michigan, the state arm of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Additionally, around 160 mosques operate in the state. Most of the NGOs and mosques are based in the Detroit area, and some are controlled by the Brotherhood-linked North American Islamic Trust (NAIT).

Led by men, including some who openly preach terror and Sharia law, these institutions have become the tip of the spear for the type of “civilizational jihad” outlined by Muslim Brotherhood documents over 40 years ago.

The consequences of that infiltration are acute. The celebratory reaction of some Michigan Muslims to the October 7 attacks revealed that an alarming number — even if a minority — openly sympathize with jihad terrorism against both Israel and America.

Before Israel had even launched its ground invasion into Gaza, thousands in Dearborn — stirred by fiery sermons from local imams — marched in support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Many protestors wore kaffiyehs and chanted, “Intifada, intifada,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “America is a terrorist state.”

It was these events that led some in the media to dub Dearborn “America’s Jihad Capital.”

Two and a half years later, an attack from a naturalized Lebanese national at the Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township underscored that a growing terror threat was indeed festering within the state, openly incited by imams who call for replacing American liberties with Islamic law.

And just last month, thousands of Muslims in Dearborn flooded the streets for the Islamic holiday of Ashura, dressed in black, waving Islamic flags and those of Hezbollah and Hamas, and chanting, “Allahu Akbar.”

Some might be tempted to dismiss this Islamist faction as an insignificant minority; in reality, they are partnering with far-leftists to wield an outsized influence in state politics, most notably with the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate.

This essay, the third in our series on American Islam, will examine the realities of shifting demographics, terror threats, and Islamic governance in Michigan and explain what this trajectory means for the rest of the country. It will explore four critical questions:

_IMMIGRATION AND HENRY FORD _

The story of Islam in Michigan begins with industrial innovation and the American dream.

Over 100 years ago, Henry Ford revolutionized American manufacturing with the moving assembly line, making his Model T affordable to millions of Americans and transforming Detroit into the manufacturing capital of the world.

Over 100,000 workers — many of them newly arrived immigrants — powered Ford’s factories, allowing him to circumvent the control that labor unions exerted on many American workers. By the 1920s, a significant portion of his well-paid employees were Arab, including both Christians and Muslims from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Yemen.

The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) virtually paused a surge of immigration that had followed America’s Civil War and brought Ford’s Arab employees to Michigan.

Despite the pause, Islam continued to bloom. In 1949, the Islamic Center of America — now the largest mosque in North America — was founded in Dearborn by Imam Mohammed Jawad Chirri, becoming another anchor for a multigenerational Shia community. The Center created the Muslim American Youth Academy (MAYA) and opened its first facility in Detroit in 1963.

Democratic President Lyndon Johnson then passed legislation that would change America forever, dramatically increasing the country’s Muslim population. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (The Hart-Celler Act) opened the floodgates again, not just to Europe, but to Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim countries.

Each successive wave brought new mosques, cultural centers, and advocacy groups — including some linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — that influenced a growing Muslim population.

A third surge followed with the September 11 attacks, war in the Middle East which led to President Obama’s resettlement policies, and President Biden’s open borders policies. Many new arrivals hailed from Iraq, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, bolstering an already sizable Muslim population.

_INCITING TERROR_

This spring, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old naturalized US citizen from Lebanon, drove a car filled with explosives into the Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, in a failed attempt to kill the 140 children and teachers gathered there.

Ghazali launched the attack after his brother — a Hezbollah terrorist commander — was killed by Israeli forces. He said the synagogue represented “the largest gathering place for ISRAELIS in the State of Michigan” and that he wanted to “kill as many of them as I possibly can.” His battle cry was “Allahu Akbar” – literally, “Allah is the greatest.”

Ghazali’s attack was not the first and is unlikely to be the last in the state. It followed a spate of other recent jihad terror threats, including an ISIS-inspired plot over Halloween last year that was thwarted by the FBI. Three Dearborn men – Ayob Nasser, Mohamed Ali, and Majed Mahmoud – were charged in the attack.

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, state Democrats — many of whom view Islamists as critical allies — failed to learn the right lessons.

Just two weeks later, Michigan Democrats ousted Jordan Acker, the Jewish incumbent on the University of Michigan Board of Regents, in favor of Amir Makled, a candidate who had lauded Iran’s Islamic regime and praised two slain Hezbollah leaders as “martyrs.”

While some would dismiss terrorist attacks and threats as the work of unhinged individuals, they occurred within a broader context of religious and militant incitement, as demonstrated by the documented statements of some leading Muslim clerics and activists in the state.

This rhetoric echoes violent texts within the Quran, such as Quran 8:39, “Fight them until persecution is no more and religion is all for Allah,” and the “Sword Verse” (Quran 9:29), “Fight…the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Radical Islamic leaders and scholars in Michigan also praised Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran and terrorist leaders as “martyrs” whose example should be imitated by faithful Muslims.

_CREEPING ISLAMIZATION_

Islamic power in Michigan is highly concentrated in the Detroit area, where Muslims comprise over half of the population in Hamtramck and Dearborn, and around one-third in Dearborn Heights.

To observers, these areas function as third-world enclaves on American soil, with the Islamic call for prayer sounding over loudspeakers, taxpayer-funded halal food offered in schools, and free speech assaulted for those citizens who object to the Islamic takeover.

Hamtramck’s transformation

For much of the 20th century, Hamtramck was a working-class enclave in the heart of Detroit populated by Polish Catholics and described as “Little Warsaw.” Today, the city of 28,000 is a Muslim-majority city and the first in American history to be governed entirely by a city council of Muslim men.

What makes Hamtramck notable is not its ethnic character — immigrant enclaves with their own shops, foods, and languages are as old as America itself — but how quickly its new leaders used the machinery of government to write religious norms into local law.

In January 2023, the council passed an ordinance legalizing religious animal sacrifice on residential property, allowing residents to slaughter goats and sheep in their own backyards after giving the city clerk one week's notice. A majority of residents reportedly opposed it, but the council passed it anyway.

The clearest example came in June 2023, during Pride Month, when the all-Muslim council voted unanimously to ban Pride flags from public property.

The vote stunned the progressive activists who had celebrated the council's rise as a rebuke to Trump-era “Islamophobia”; two human-relations commissioners were removed and later sued, arguing the ban violated the First Amendment. In September 2025, a federal judge upheld it.

Dearborn and the diminishing of free speech

Under Sharia law, sharing the gospel, criticizing Islam (blasphemy), or leaving Islam (apostasy) is a crime, with penalties including death. In Dearborn, shades of Sharia appeared in 2011, years before its Islamic takeover, when police arrested four Christian men, including former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi, for sharing the gospel with Muslims.

At an October 2025 city council meeting, residents complained that East Dearborn mosques were broadcasting the pre-dawn call to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers in violation of the city's noise ordinance. The council president acknowledged that police had investigated and found mosques in violation.

Several residents said they were reluctant to complain at all for fear of being branded Islamophobic — which is the real free-speech pressure worth documenting: not that the call to prayer exists, but that ordinary residents feel they cannot voice a routine noise complaint.

When critics are branded bigots

In September 2025, Mayor Abdullah Hammoud went viral for publicly berating Ted Barham, a Christian minister who had objected to renaming a street after a figure whom Barham said was tied to Islamic terror groups.

Hammoud called Barham a “bigot” and an “Islamophobe” and told him he was “not welcome here.”

Sharia and genital mutilation

The practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is mandated within some schools of Islam and is practiced in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Some, like former Muslim and conservative thinker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, trace such practices directly to Islamic teaching. She contends, “The suppression of female sexuality is a big theme with the imams.”

In 2017, two Detroit-based doctors, Jumana Nagarwala and Fakhruddin Attar, became the first in the US to be federally charged with performing FGM on young girls.

In their defense, the Muslim doctors defended the procedure of cutting the genitalia of young girls as a religious practice defended by the First Amendment. Ultimately, a federal judge ruled in their favor, declaring that a 1996 federal ban on the practice was unconstitutional.

It is impossible to know how widespread such occurrences are within Michigan, given that this instance took place within the small Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect from India.

But the reversal of charges against Nagarwala and Attar means that, in practice, there would likely be no legal repercussions for other doctors who performed FGM on Muslim girls.

And other disturbing incidents, such as the recent prosecution of Oakland County’s Dr. Oumair Aejaz, charged with photographing patients nude and abusing them, suggest that the sexual abuse of women could be a bigger issue within the state.

State influence

Beyond Hamtramck's all-Muslim city council, the clearest evidence that Islamists and the progressive Left are wielding real power sits in the state capitol and inside the Michigan Democratic Party.

National influence

A small but highly organized bloc of Muslims is doing more than influencing the political and cultural landscape of Michigan; they are extending Islamic radicalism and socialism to the federal government.

Since 2019, Rashida Tlaib has represented a district in the Detroit area. As the eldest of 14 children born to Palestinian immigrants, she embodies the transformation that immigration has brought to the state. On November 7, 2023, she was censured by the House of Representatives for repeatedly using Hamas’ genocidal slogan, “From the river to the sea.”

Michigan has emerged as a critical battleground in the Democratic Party cold war between the establishment and the rising Islamo-Socialist faction, who want to shift the party even further to the left.

The “uncommitted” campaign, launched in Michigan by Layla Elabed (a sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib) and Abbas Alawieh, converted roughly 100,000 Democratic primary protest votes into national leverage over the Biden administration's Gaza policy, then exported the model nationwide.

And in the 2024 presidential election, Michigan's most heavily Arab American and Muslim cities gave Kamala Harris at least 22,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden had won there in 2020, in a state Biden carried by only about 154,000 votes. A bloc concentrated in a handful of Wayne County cities now holds enough leverage to decide statewide and national contests, and both parties are openly courting it.

Michigan Muslim voters split 59 percent for Jill Stein, 22 percent for Donald Trump, and just 14 percent for Kamala Harris. The Trump campaign even opened an office in Hamtramck, and its Muslim mayor endorsed him.

Abdul El-Sayed, who first ran for governor in 2018, is supported by democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, and radical socialist streamer Hasan Piker.

El-Sayed previously praised the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign in Egypt. He has also openly campaigned with Piker, who claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.”

While El-Sayed is in contention to win the Democratic nomination, the real test will come this fall, when voters will decide if the type of radical politics promoted in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City is viable in one of the most critical swing states in the nation.

_AN AGENDA FOR DOMINANCE_

From their stronghold in the Detroit area, Islamists are inciting terror and establishing a new way of life, one that, in the opinion of those opposed, rejects the American tradition for third-world values.

For this Muslim cohort, the Michigan experiment represents a blueprint for Sharia-dominant societies already taking shape across New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Orlando, and Paterson, New Jersey.

For many Islamic leaders in Michigan, Marxists are useful (if temporary) allies who share their disdain for Western civilization, Constitutional liberties, and both Christianity and Judaism.

But the end goal, as articulated by Warren, Michigan, Imam Ameer Mustapha Elturk, remains total global domination: “Sending Muhammad was not only to establish justice in one small area of the globe, in Arabia. It was to make this system, Islam, prevail over the entire globe… Whether it is liberal democracy, whether it is communism, whether it is socialism…Allah’s way should prevail over that.”