Negotiating alliances: Muslims,gay rights and the Christian right in a Polish‐American city (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Muslim involvement in debates over municipal gay rights legislation became a hotly contested issue in Hamtramck, Michigan, during the summer of 2008. The article analyzes how faith‐based and other kinds of alliance building that took place in the context of these debates impacted processes of boundary formation among Muslim, Christian and secular‐humanist groups. In Hamtramck, debate over the Human Rights Ordinance served as a rich and generative nexus point for the proliferation and exchange of ideas about the incorporation of Muslim values and sentiments in the public sphere. A study of these debates offers us a window into understanding the politicization of Islam as a minority religion, the symbolic space it occupies, and its engagement with the institutionalization of secularism in the US at the current time.