In many ways, Shatila is a microcosm of Dearborn. Founded by a Lebanese immigrant in the 1970s, the 45-year-old bakery is surrounded by dozens of restaurants, stores, markets, halal butchers, hairdressers and mosques, all run by Arab-Americans.

Signs in Arabic and English guide people on Dearborn's two major traffic corridors - Warren Avenue and Michigan Avenue. The city neighbors Detroit, which has long been synonymous with the Ford Motor Company and the automobile industry.

And over the last century, Dearborn has certainly flourished as the place with the greatest Arab influence in the United States.

"Homeland away from homeland"
Dearborn became the first Arab-majority city in the United States in 2023. With 110,000 inhabitants, it is home to the Arab American National Museum and the largest mosque in North America.

The city is governed by one of the few Arab and Muslim mayors in the United States. Dearborn was also the first American city to make Eid al-Fitr (the end of the Ramadan fast) an official holiday for municipal employees - and is one of the few places in the country where a mosque has been authorized to broadcast the Islamic adhan (the call to prayer) over its loudspeakers.

For one local resident, the city is the "homeland away from the homeland".

For all these reasons, Dearborn offers visitors a tantalizing opportunity to travel to the Middle East without leaving the United States, exploring how Arab Americans formed the city - and the country.

According to the curator of the Dearborn Historical Museum, Jack Tate, the city was little more than sparsely populated farmland until the early 20th century.

But everything changed in the 1920s, when car manufacturer and future business tycoon Henry Ford (1863-1947) moved the headquarters of his company - the Ford Motor Company - from Highland Park, 10 miles away, to Dearborn.

"At that time, it was a small, dull community," explains Tate, "and when the [new] plant opened, people came from all over the United States, from all over the world, to work for Ford. It was the great beginning of the migration here from the Middle East."

When Ford created his famous Model T cars in 1908, he needed people to build them.

The entrepreneur was known for his racist hiring policies against African-Americans and his anti-Semitism. And in his search for labor, Ford found newly arrived immigrants from the Middle East in the Detroit area.

Waves of workers from places that today belong to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories soon began arriving in the Detroit area in search of new jobs and high wages.

The move transformed the quiet village of 2,400 inhabitants into the headquarters of the world's largest industrial plant. What's more, it has enabled Dearborn to become home to the largest concentration of Arab-Americans in the United States.

In the 2020 Census, 54.5% of the city's approximately 110,000 inhabitants declared that they were from the Middle East or North Africa.

According to the director of the Center for Arab Narratives, Matthew Jaber Stiffler, with more and more Arabs and Arab-Americans moving to Dearborn over the decades, a community network emerged that encouraged the arrival of more people from the region.

"Doctors' offices, restaurants, grocery stores started popping up - until an enclave was formed," he says.

"And unfortunately, in the countries of origin - especially Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and Iraq - there were permanent upheavals (civil wars, American military invasions) [which] forced people to emigrate. That's why Dearborn kept receiving new migrants, because [there] were already people [from those countries] here."

Conquering through the stomach
Today, the strong Arab-American presence in Dearborn is perhaps most expressive in the food sector. Food lovers come from all over the American Midwest to visit its grocery stores, cafés and restaurants specializing in Middle Eastern cuisine.

"Dearborn itself is a food adventure," says Amanda Saab, a Lebanese-American chef born and raised in the city. And she points out some of her favorite places.

Middle Eastern culture may take over your stomach in Dearborn, but there's also plenty to see.

In 2005, the Islamic Center of America opened an 11,100 square meter mosque on Ford Road, just 3.2 km from the Ford Motor Company headquarters.

In addition to being the largest mosque in North America (with seating for 1,000 people at prayer time), it is also the oldest Shiite mosque in the United States.

The mosque welcomes people of all religions. Tourists can visit it and admire its golden domes, its immense 33-meter-high minarets and the elaborate Islamic calligraphy inside.

On the southern edge of Dearborn, the Muslim American Society is also open to visitors and offers tours for everyone.

Built in 1937 and expanded over the years to include an auditorium that hosts guest speakers on weekends, it was the first mosque in the United States authorized to broadcast the adhan by loudspeaker.

Religion is a central part of life for many of Dearborn's Arab-American residents. But its history is much more diverse - and that's what the Arab American National Museum aims to showcase.

In addition to its central galleries and annual events (such as the Arab Film Festival), the museum also opened its Al-Hadiqa Arab American Heritage Garden in 2023.

On the museum's terrace, one of its community historians, Shatha Najim, shows plants in various stages of growth, from the structures that support developing grapevines to the strong, freshly harvested Egyptian onions.

She says that the garden opens for the season on June 8th. It was created as a result of the material she herself collected for the museum's oral history collection. Many of these stories describe the experiences of people who have left their homeland.

"I think one of the best ways to really connect with your homeland is through plants," she says. "Planting food and herbs from the homeland here is like forming a new home, a new environment that you feel is familiar."

Najim says that these oral histories form a more complete picture of life in the United States. For Arab-Americans, "sometimes a lot of the narrative is told to us and not by us".

But Dearborn is different. "Here we live with people who are familiar to us, from our culture," he says. "Maybe not from the same country, but who share many similarities."

"All this creates a new sense of homeland, which exists in a new place and forms a beautiful new home. Perhaps not everyone intended to end up here [but we did the best we could]."

"Hence [the expression] 'Arab-American'. We feel connected to both."