ibps clerk 3rd shift 5 Oct 2025 english parajumble
On a recent Sunday afternoon at Shatila Bakery in Dearborn, Michigan, a line of customers were crowded around display cases filled with flaky baklava, mounds of meshabek (Egyptian funnel cake) and golden-brown Lebanese-style macarons. As employees rushed to fill orders, locals excitedly spoke to each other in a mixture of Arabic and English, with one quipping to a friend, “There go my plans for eating healthy!”
In many ways, Shatila is a microcosm of Dearborn. Started by a Lebanese immigrant in the 1970s, the 45-year-old bakery is surrounded by dozens of Arab American-owned restaurants, businesses, markets, halal butcher shops, hair salons and mosques. Signs in both Arabic and English line Dearborn’s two biggest throughfares – Warren Avenue and Michigan Avenue – and over the past century this city located just outside of Detroit that has long been synonymous with Ford Motor Company auto manufacturing has blossomed into arguably the most Arab place in America.
In 2023, Dearborn became the first Arab-majority city in the US. The 110,000-person city is home to both the Arab American National Museum and the largest mosque in North America. It’s one of the few US cities whose mayor is both Muslim and Arab, the first US city to make Eid a paid holiday for city employees and one of only a handful of places in the country where the Islamic adhan (call to prayer) is allowed to be broadcast from a mosque’s loudspeakers. It is, as one local told me, “the motherland away from the motherland”.