Big ups to my man Sarmad Ali, for this fascinating blog post about Iraqi communities in Michigan.
WSJ:
As we drove through Detroit’s suburbs, we passed movie theaters and subdivisions, large strip-malls and sleepy neighborhoods. We stopped at Ryan Palace, a restaurant named after the street it is on in the city of Warren. The entrance was painted light blue with glazed bulls and dragons to make it look like Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. Arabic tabloids were stacked near the door. Inside, the spacious restaurant was packed with men playing cards, smoking cigarettes and water pipes and drinking Heinekens and vodka. The tables were large, as if designed for big parties.
There was a ubiquitous presence of alcoholic beverages, which are strictly prohibited in Islam, which led me to assume that the non-Chaldean drinkers were secular Muslims. Not wanting to seem awkward, even Mustafa, who at first was reluctant to drink, finally succumbed to others’ wishes and had a few glasses of vodka mixed with juice.
Aside from the two waitresses, one Iraqi-American Chaldean and the other Greek, there were no other women in the restaurant; all of the customers were male and most of them were Iraqis, mostly Chaldeans. It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a woman in Iraq a few weeks ago, a doctor who said that despite the relative safety of where she lived in southern Iraq, she couldn’t go out to eat in a restaurant in the city with her female friends because tradition left them mostly male spaces. “We can go to a family restaurant, but we can’t just walk into regular restaurants,” she told me. ” Our customs forbid such a thing.”
