Dearborn is a Blessed Place

By Ahmed Al-Hilali, TMO

People never know the true value of things until they are gone. What is valuable in our eyes? Money, power, success, family, and sports are a couple things that pop into mind. But what else do we take for granted? Considering the fact that we live in Dearborn, there’s one thing our community has to offer that others are a little short on: Muslims. Dearborn has the largest Muslim population in the United States, but sadly, we aren’t doing a good job of representing the name of Islam to other communities for a number of reasons. For one, we aren’t active in our community. There is currently only one youth group in Dearborn; which is run by Hussein Charara, one of the founders of WISE and Camp Taha. That is very shameful considering the fact that we have over 30,000 Muslims living in or around Dearborn. This brother has done so many things for the Dearborn community, it is unbelievable. He has a full time job, and afterschool program, and the youth program on Saturdays and Sundays. These two programs are designed to have a huge impact on the participant’s lives. The main purpose is to develop a family within the youth, so that when they are older and need assistance, they have each other to back them up.

If everybody in Dearborn would take a step up and help out around the community, our youth wouldn’t get caught up in the negative side of Dearborn, rather the positive side. People here are taking everything they have for granted. Where I’m from, we didn’t have Arabic as a language for school, or cousins who lived right around the corner, or even halal meat at school! Everything we have here is extremely hard to find anywhere else.

Normally when people have an abundance of something, they take advantage and waste, because of the reason “we have more than enough,” well then, if that’s true, considering you’re a Muslim shouldn’t you be sharing your wealth with people who are less fortunate if you “have more than enough”?

Even though Dearborn is known for being America’s Muslim capital, we still have a lot to learn.

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