Unrivaled by even the demographic upheavals seen during the Great Migrations of earlier eras, almost overnight the tiny Muslim minority of Chicago exploded to constitute 99.9% of the city's population.
To now walk through its neighborhoods, their street signs all in Arabic except for those historic plaques dinged with mini bullet craters, is to walk through an amalgam of the streets of Dubai, Mecca, Baghdad and Kuala Lampur. Slick, hyper-consumerist modernity side by side with hyper-religiosity; bustling and heady amidst the charred remains of sectarian armageddons.
But you can't walk around Hyde Park, as the entire neighborhood is now the private walled compound of Louis Farrakhan, his Domus Aurea of sorts. The University of Chicago there has been converted into the largest madrasah in the world.
Converted as well are the churches, synagogues, temples and every other places of worships; into mosques as expected. None of them could ever rival the Hagia Sofia, so the Gene Summer-designed, Mies van der Rohe-inflected McCormick Place was consecrated into the Jama Masjid of Chicago.
At night, vacationing Saudi Arabian princes and bored local youths cruise the inner boroughs American Graffiti-style and then drag race all along Lake Shore Drive, whose beaches are filled during the day by women frolicking in their own segregated venue of abandon, in burkinis. The most reckless and self-destructive men and boys, the so-called drifters, they make deep runs into the militia-infested Christian outer boroughs.
Despite the occasional car crashes and border skirmishes, and also the mass public funeral of a much revered ayatollah, the city is a quiet place. Most Muslims you talk to would love to live here, and in fact, due to its liberal immigration policy, autonomous from that of the federal, it's the most popular destination for refugees, asylum seekers and others violently displaced from Muslim countries. Thus, exiled political figures fighting for reforms in their home countries often mingle with oil executives, their companies' world headquarters relocated to here in a Halliburton-style attempt to curry favor with Arab sheiks, Iranian clerics and Iraqi MPs.
So many immigrate that the city's population doubles every decade. And every decade, one Dubai is built.
Unrivaled by even the demographic upheavals seen during the Great Migrations of earlier eras, almost overnight the tiny Muslim minority of Chicago exploded to constitute 99.9% of the city's population.
