When Abdullah Hammoud was elected mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, he became the city’s first ever Muslim and Arab American leader. Now he's making history again—by making Dearborn the first U.S. city to offer Eid al-Fitr as a paid holiday for city workers
, they are still very much in the minority. For Muslim community advocates, extending the right to observe the holiday to municipal employees is an important next step. “No other U.S. city has been able to accomplish this,” says Nour Ali, a director at the Council on American Islamic Relations in Michigan. As a Dearborn native, Ali says that this kind of representation has been “a long time coming for us as a city.” Her hope is that what has started in Dearborn doesn’t end there.
Dearborn is adding a new tradition to that mix this week. “For the first time in the city’s history, we’re hosting a free Eid brunch for the community,” Hammoud says. In another first, the city put on a weekend “” food market this year, where tens of thousands of residents gathered over the course of the month.
While Hammoud concedes that governments can’t feasibly make every religious celebration a public holiday, he does believe that it’s in the power of local leaders to tailor what they can do for communities and to ensure that they achieve the most good for the most people. “What we’re doing is bringing equity into the equation,” says Hammoud. “And this is what it looks like. Everybody feels welcomed and represented. And I think it only adds to the culture of the city.
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