CHAPTER 2
Ethnic America
A Death in the Community
In the early thirties, Mr. Omar made a personal friend of Mr. Dennis Sweeney, the proprietor of Sweeney's Funeral Home of Quincy, founded in 1917. In 1939, the accidental death of a member of the community, Joseph Hassan, was the first occasion for a Muslim to be buried in the traditional Islamic manner. Mr. Omar washed the body and read Qur'an.
The record of Hassan's death in Sweeney's Archives marks the beginning of a relationship between Sweeney's Funeral Home and the Muslim community which has lasted for three generations. Today, the grand-nephew of the original proprietor, Dennis Sweeney, provides the Muslim community with a special room for washing their dead. Mr. Sweeney estimates that he buries about thirteen Muslims a year and expects that number to increase as the community continues to grow.
Marriage Patterns
In Quincy, where the pool of marriageable Muslims was small, marrying outside the faith had to be tolerated. In the immigrant generation, two men of the seven married outside their ethnic and religious group (marrying American Christians). Two men went back to Lebanon to find a bride. One man was married before he left and later sent for his wife. The other two men married Muslim women they met in America.
As their children grew to a marriageable age, marriages were arranged from among the seven families. The Ameens married the Abrahams, the Abrahams married the Allies, the `Abduh Hassans married the Derbes, the El-Deebs married the Ismael Hassans, the `Abduh Hassans married the Omars, and in one case, an Omar married his second cousin from the family clan, the Awads.
Two Sunni and Shi i (in Lebanon Shi i are known as Metawila) mixed marriages were arranged. Because of their common ethnicity, the children of the immigrants never realized that there was any difference between them, until they became adults and learned for themselves that they were Shi i and Sunni Muslims. Many years later, to fulfil their father's last request, one Shi i family invited a Shi i Imam from Detroit, Michigan to bury their father in the traditional Shi i fashion.
In the second generation, interfaith marriages occurred more frequently. In the Ismael Hassans, only four out of nine married another Muslim; in the `Abduh Hassans, three out of five; in the Abrahams, three out of five; in the Allies, two out of seven; in the Omars, two out of five; in the Ameens, two out of eight; in the Derbes, one out of seven; and in the El Deebs, none out of eleven children married Muslims. In every family, conversions of American women who married Muslim men were common. American men also converted but with less frequency. For the sake of simplicity, the number of converts will not be counted in these statistics.
In the third generation, most members of the seven founding families married outside their religious and ethnic group. In addition, it is noted that the divorce rate is very high among members who married outside their faith, with at least one divorce in every family, and in some families more than one. In a minority of cases, divorces were noted in marriages between American born Muslims and immigrant Muslims. All those interviewed in this study cited the social importance of having a mosque where young people could meet and marry their own kind.
The Sons of Lebanon
The majority of Lebanese who settled in the Quincy Point neighborhood were Christians of the Melkite tradition. During the period between 1880 and 1925, almost ninety percent of the Arab immigrants to come to America were Christians from Mount Lebanon. One American born Lebanese Christian said that his father had emigrated from Mt. Lebanon in 1909 as a teenager because economic conditions were extremely bad. Najeem had relations in Boston who sponsored him. He found work and married a Lebanese Christian. He moved to Quincy for the "fresh country air."
All of the respondents in this study agreed that most of the Lebanese immigrants, Christian and Muslim, met for the first time in Quincy. Being a minority in America, they formed strong social ties along ethnic and linguistic lines, observing certain traditions of life in Lebanon. For example, no marriages between Christian Lebanese and Muslim Lebanese were known to have taken place. The Christians arranged marriages between families and tended to be as endogamous as the Muslims. The Lebanese neighbors also continued the tradition of joining in the celebration of each other's religious holidays. This tradition died out gradually in the 50's.
Social Integration
Lacking in skills and impeded by a language barrier, both groups of Lebanese immigrants made slow progress adjusting to American life. However, the religious orientation of the Lebanese Christians suggests that their integration into American society would be easier than the experience of the Muslims.
The Christians had two churches in Boston, Our Lady of the Cedars (Maronite) and Our Lady of the Annunciation (Melkite) (founded by 1910). Those living at Quincy Point accepted the local Roman Catholic church, St. Josephs, for their parish. The Muslims, on the other hand, had no institutions to help them assimilate, identify them, or support them in the process of social integration. They had an obscure religious history in America, represented by downtrodden slaves whose role in the building of America was never even acknowledged.
"The immigrant to North America... his identity, so long as his neighbor had any opinion at all, was shrouded in mystery. At times he was `Syrian,'at times, `Turk.'"
The term, "Judeo-Christian," as it is used (or misused) in the U.S., is perceived by Muslims as an exclusive definition of what it means to be American: "Whether this is intentional or not, it is noted in Muslim circles as a way of keeping them from participating in the formulation of the future of American society. They question whether or not it may in fact be serving notice that they do not belong at all."