Abdullah H. Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Mich., was chatting with residents on Tuesday morning when a group of children approached him, including a boy no older than 7.
“He looked at me,” Mr. Hammoud recalled, “and he asked if the quote-unquote crusaders were going to kill him.”
That evening, Dearborn, which is majority Arab American, would once again play reluctant host to a protest by Jake Lang, the self-proclaimed Christian crusader who calls Muslims “insidious parasites” and wants them all to leave the United States.
He has been to Dearborn — a city of 110,000 people — at least four times in recent months. His events come at a time when some conservative leaders are promoting the idea that Islam is incompatible with American values.
Mr. Lang hyped his Tuesday night “Christian Crusade” rally online as a “pig roast.” There were hundreds of supporters and counterprotesters, in a scene that seemed to teeter on the brink of violence.
Trump-supporting Christian preachers barked out demands that Muslims accept Jesus as their savior. Young Muslim men barked back. A group of neo-Nazis showed up with a swastika flag. A few men wandered around with assault rifles.
Police in riot gear blocked off the city library named for Henry Ford, Dearborn’s great auto baron, where the City Council was holding a meeting. Mr. Lang, wearing a bulletproof vest, eventually spoke before the Council.
“The Muslims have not come here to assimilate,” he said. “They have come here to steal the wealth of this land, to rape our women!”
Anti-Muslim protesters have targeted Dearborn in years past. But as war continues in the Middle East and the rhetoric from leading conservatives intensifies, many Dearborn residents are again asking whether America will ever fully accept them.
“What we’re having a debate about is, you know, whose America are we talking about?” said Mr. Hammoud, 36, who is the son of Lebanese immigrants.
“You have the folks who believe this is a Christian nation,” he said, “that if your family is not from this set of European nations, that you should not be welcomed here.”
The mainstreaming of that sentiment in conservative circles has been helped along by the late right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, who once declared, “Islam is not compatible with western civilization,” and by President Trump, who once said, “I think Islam hates us.”
Mr. Lang took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and was indicted on charges of assaulting police officers with a bat, among other things. He was released from federal custody last year after the president issued sweeping clemency to all Jan. 6 participants. Since then, he has shown up in Minneapolis, where he said he had hoped to burn a Quran to protest Somali immigrants, and in New York City, where his protest outside Gracie Mansion attracted a number of counterprotesters, including one who threw a homemade bomb that failed to detonate.
In November, he visited Dearborn, where, according to a local student newspaper, he tried to burn a Quran but was thwarted by counterprotesters. He returned in May and succeeded in burning a copy of the Muslim holy book, according to The Arab American News, a local paper. During a third visit earlier this month, he was punched in the face and had rocks thrown at him. Local police arrested three men after the attacks, including an Iraqi man who was detained by immigration authorities.
Dearborn, home to Ford Motor Company’s global headquarters, is a city of wide avenues and a preponderance of car dealerships befitting one of the world’s great auto industry hubs. It saw an early wave of Arab workers come to staff the assembly lines in the 1920s.
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But in recent decades the Arab community has swelled, as immigrants from Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Yemen fled war and instability. Now there are halal meat markets, shawarma shops and coffeehouses scented with cardamom. The Great Commoner, an upscale lunch spot, sells B.L.T.s, but only with turkey or beef bacon.
Many residents — Muslim, Christian and otherwise — describe a city that has generally weathered the demographic changes gracefully. Some Muslim and non-Muslim locals have taken to wearing a T-shirt that says, “I follow shawarma law,” a nod to the city’s vibrant restaurant scene, and a play on right-wing fears that the city has been overtaken by Muslim religious rules known as Shariah.
Mike Spaulding, 70, a retired nurse reading a book on Tuesday in a Yemeni coffee house, said he was comfortable with it all.
“They’re actually good neighbors,” he said.
Among the speakers at Tuesday’s council meeting was Alabas Farhat, a Democratic state representative, who described Dearborn in all-American terms.
“We grew up with the Lions on Sunday and the Tigers when they played,” he said, adding, “We love America.”
But the Middle East wars have stirred powerful emotions among many in Dearborn, particularly after Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
In February 2024, a Wall Street Journal opinion writer described Dearborn as “America’s Jihad Capital.” He pointed out support among some Muslims for the Hamas attack and a local Islamic institute that celebrated as “martyrs” two men on the U.S. list of designated terrorists.
In March, a man who worked in the adjacent city of Dearborn Heights rammed a truck into a nearby synagogue and was killed while exchanging gunfire with security guards. Authorities described it as a deliberate antisemitic attack.
Mayor Hammoud, in an interview, denied that his community had an extremism problem.
But Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, said that “every community has a problem with extremists.” He insisted, however, that their ideas were not shared by a majority.
“If the majority in America looks like Jake Lang, do they believe the exact same things that Jake Lang is saying?” he asked.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump visited the Great Commoner restaurant and promised to bring peace to the Middle East. He won Dearborn with the help of Muslim voters like Mike Hacham, a 32-year-old businessman.
This week, Mr. Hacham said he blamed Mr. Trump for bringing more war to the Middle East and springing Mr. Lang from federal custody.
“I worked hard to get votes for him,” Mr. Hacham said of Mr. Trump. “Now he shoots us in the foot like this.”
On Tuesday night, Mr. Hacham joined a group who donned clown suits and went to Mr. Lang’s rally to mock him.
After the rally, there was a feeling, among city leaders, that tragedy had been averted. Officials reported no injuries but said that 22 people had been arrested on charges including breach of peace and disorderly conduct.
Mayor Hammoud said that Mr. Lang was almost certain to be back in town in September to appear in court over a drug possession charge, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Lang’s lawyer did not return calls for comment. And at the council meeting, Mr. Lang also declined to comment, chewing up a reporter’s business card.
But when would it end, and how?
Some in Dearborn think that the trouble might fade after the November elections. In Michigan, there are already tensions around Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat, who is vying to be the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.
In the meantime, Mr. Siblani, the publisher, said the Muslims of Dearborn were not going anywhere.
“We know the Constitution is more powerful than anything else,” he said, “and it will protect us.”
The post Targeted by an Islamophobic Provocateur, a City’s Muslims Are on Edge appeared first on New York Times.
