When Amal Mohamed was 14, she left her home of Alexandria, Egypt, and immigrated to the U.S. to live with her mother in metro Detroit.
Knowing little English, Mohamed arrived in Michigan in July 2009, set to live with a woman she had only seen four times — at ages 3, 6, 9 and 11.
“I remember just being in the airport eating French fries and drinking Coke. I was really out of it. It didn’t really hit me until I was here. I went to sleep, and I woke up: ‘Oh, this is not a dream. I’m really here,’” Mohamed said.
It was different. It looked different. It felt different.
Like any new arrival, Mohamed faced her fair share of adjustments, but the biggest one would come eight months later, when she was removed from her mother’s home and placed in foster care. She would become one of an unknown number of Muslim children caught in the custody of the state with a dearth of Muslim families to foster them.
The State of Michigan does not formally track how many Muslim children are in the foster care system, but Muslim community leaders say there are dozens, at least 85 in southeast Michigan alone, and not enough families to keep up.
For a state that has one of the largest Muslim-American populations in the country at about 275,000, there are few Muslim foster families in Michigan.
Most Muslim children end up in the care of relatives, but those invisible few who are left have little options.
The problem is exacerbated by religious debates surrounding Islamic law and rules that govern moral relations between foster and biological family members.
The need for more Muslim families has fueled efforts within the community to break down those barriers and raise awareness of the needs of these children.
Otherwise, cases like Mohamed’s will remain common.
Afraid of losing identity
When Mohamed’s mother asked her to come live with her in Michigan, Mohamed said she couldn’t say no. She wanted to be a good daughter and to do the right thing.
“I had to give her a chance, in a way,” Mohamed said. “And again, I loved her, and was looking forward to live with her.”
But after suffering what Mohamed’s lawyer, Jessica Martin, described as “severely extreme” abuse, Mohamed, 15 at the time, was removed from her mother’s home in March 2010 and was placed in foster care. There was no criminal case against her mother, said Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Maria Miller.
A June 2010 fact-finding report filed in Wayne Circuit Court stated it was contrary to Mohamed’s welfare for her to remain in the mother’s home.
Mohamed, who is 22 now and lives in Kalamazoo, said the first option was to join a relative’s home from her mother’s side in the U.S., but Mohamed said she was not comfortable with that.
In Michigan, the state gives preference to the child’s relatives after the Amer Act became law in 2010. The law is named after a Muslim couple, Rehab and Ahmed Amer, who lost custody of their three children due to the death of a child, and the children were then placed in a Pentecostal foster home and converted to Christianity.
The next option, Mohamed said, was to send her back to her family in Egypt. But there was one problem: Her father in Egypt wasn’t her biological father. She said she learned this news during the foster care process.
Mohamed became ward of the state, and without a legal parent in Egypt, she could not be sent back there, said Martin, who was Mohamed’s attorney until she aged out of the system in 2014.
Mohamed ended up spending about a year and a half between the Davenport shelter in Detroit and Guiding Harbor group home, then known as Girlstown Foundation, in Belleville. Two non-Muslim families were interested in adopting her, but she wanted to join a Muslim home and refused.
Court documents from August 2010 indicate that the Michigan Department of Human Services was “diligently trying to find a Muslim foster home” for Mohamed.
“I was just afraid of letting go of my identity as a Muslim, more than as an Egyptian, because I was open to any Muslim family,” she said.
Muslim parents unite
Before Ranya Shbeib of Bloomfield Hills even received her foster care license in the mail in 2015, she was told by her licensing worker at Samaritas that there was a Muslim refugee girl from Somalia who had been in the system for one year and was adamant about joining a Muslim family.
Other than Shbeib, 37, and her husband, Anas Obeid, 38, there were no Muslim families licensed for refugee care through Samaritas at the time. So Shbeib and Obeid took her in.
And ever since, Samaritas has added 11 more Muslim homes — 10 were added in the past year alone— according to Amanda Blasius, who is Shbeib’s refugee licensing specialist at the agency.
Blasius said the increase is due to the outreach efforts of Shbeib and Sameena Zahoor, a foster mother from Canton. The two met while seeking out a support system for Muslim foster families like their own, and eventually they formed the very thing they were looking for: the Muslim Foster Care Association.
The Bloomfied Hills-based group started in 2016 and spreads awareness and educates the Muslim community about foster care.
“These are sort of like invisible children in our community,” Zahoor said. “There was really not an awareness that there even were Muslim children in the foster care system.”
The lack of Muslim foster parents in Michigan is part of a larger problem in a system where children outnumber families by more than 2-1.
There are currently over 13,000 youth in foster care and 5,984 licensed foster families across the state, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Bob Wheaton said.
Nationwide, there were 427,910 foster care children in 2015, according to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of the U.S. government’s Children’s Bureau.
There is no clear figure for how many Muslim foster children and foster parents there are across the state. But that hasn’t stopped Shbeib and Zahoor from trying to gain a better idea themselves.
During a Ramadan and Eid gift drive for foster children this year, they were able to estimate that there are at least 85 Muslim foster children in southeast Michigan alone.
Wheaton said in an e-mail that in some cases the state records religious preferences, but there is no reliable data because it is an optional field.
Wheaton said state foster care recruitment staff have “met with Muslim faith leaders and plan to continue to have conversations with them.” He highlighted the MDHHS’s Community and Faith-Based Initiative partnership with local faith-based groups to find foster families as an example.
Khalid Iqbal of Muslim Family Services in Detroit — a division of the Islamic Circle of North America Relief USA — said the need for families is across the board in the U.S. and Canada.
But he remains optimistic.
Muslims in America are the “new kid on the block” and slowly maturing, Iqbal said.
The 1960s-80s were mainly about building mosques. The ‘80s and ‘90s about building schools. And now, he said, Muslims are getting into other areas, and foster care is one of them.
Iqbal has introduced a proposal to his board to look into gaining accreditation as a licensed placement agency. But the idea is just a dream at this point, Iqbal said.
“I think we owe it to the society that if there is a child of other culture or religion, or whatnot, that’s in need, we should be willing to take them and let them grow in their own religion,” Iqbal said.
‘Would you adopt Muhammad?’
The debate over foster care and adoption is critical in Islam, a religion whose prophet, Muhammad, was an orphan and an adopted son himself.
The prophet’s father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was a child. He was raised in the care of his uncle, Abu Talib.
Most people don’t make the connection between Muhammad being an orphan and the religious obligation to towards them, said Zahoor, who gave a panel presentation titled “Would you adopt Muhammad” at the 2014 Islamic Society of North America conference in Detroit.
“In a sense, they are orphans,” Zahoor said of foster children. “A lot of times people think of orphans as children that both parents have died. Really, in reality, foster children are children without parents.”
The Quran is rich in verses about the rights of orphans and society’s obligations toward them, but there is a divergence of opinion on how they fit within familial relations.
The issue comes down to moral propriety, and it is one of the factors accounting for low foster care participation among Muslims.
For example, there’s the question of whether a foster mother can remove her hijab in front of a foster son, or what the nature of the relationships should be between biological and foster siblings.
Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights said that a relationship between mahram — or kin off-limits to marriage — and non-mahram individuals cannot be considered like that of immediate family.
From the point of view of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, Elahi said that according to the Quran, an adoptive parent becomes like a sponsor for the child, but the child doesn’t become like a biological kid, but that they should still be treated equally.
The Quran, in Surah Al-Ahzab, says that God “has not made your adopted sons your (true) sons,” and believers are to “call them by (the names of) their fathers.”
At the same time, Elahi said, Islam wants the kids to “feel that they are treated the same way that the other biological kids are treated in the same family.”
For Iqbal, a child’s age when entering a foster home makes a difference and said the child should treated as mahram, if raised there since childhood.
This is mentioned specifically in the Quran with regard to infant males nursed by “milk mothers.”
Lonely days
Because of the lack of Muslim foster families, Muslim children in the system often end up in non-Muslim homes.
In the case of Yuu, 18, a foster child from Afghanistan, anything was better than the short-term group home he lived in after arriving in Michigan in 2016.
Yuu, who requested an alias to protect himself and his family back home, came to Michigan by way of Indonesia and was placed by Samaritas for about three months in a group home in Charlotte, Mich., with other refugee children from South America, Mexico and Guatemala.
He left Afghanistan for Indonesia in 2014 and received refugee status from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. His father died in 2013, and his mother and three sisters remain in Afghanistan. Yuu said he left Afghanistan because his life was in danger, and that he didn’t have enough money to bring the rest of his family with him to Indonesia.
Far away in the U.S., those early days in Michigan could get lonely for Yuu.
“It was so hard to be, like alone, nobody talking at all with you, and you just stay on your own,” Yuu said. “I was trying to go out for a walk, but there wasn’t anybody to walk with me.”
Yuu said he would have liked to live with a Muslim family, and that some of his Afghan friends who arrived in Michigan from Indonesia a month after he did were placed with a Muslim family.
By January, Yuu found someone to walk with.
He had just turned 18 and was placed with Judi Harris, 52, a foster mother in Okemos, who he said encouraged him to go to the mosque if he liked for Eid or Ramadan.
“She likes the way that you are,” Yuu said about Harris. “She likes telling you to continue the way you are, the way you do believe.”
Harris, who works in refugee resettlement, has two other Muslim children, a daughter and son from Afghanistan, and a daughter from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was raised Pentecostal.
She’s hosted nine refugee foster children since becoming a foster parent in 2008, including children of Hindu and Baptist and other Christian backgrounds.
Harris, a Presbyterian, said she sometimes finds she has more differences in faith with her Christian kids than her Muslim kids.
“But we do as much as possible to, you know, help people celebrate their faith and be part of their faith. And it just depends on what they want to do,” Harris said.
The food accommodations, she said, are probably the most complicated part. Harris, a vegetarian, said she makes sure to buy halal meat for her Afghan Muslim daughter and certain kinds of breads she likes.
“There was a time I had Burmese kids and then my Afghan and Indian kids. You know, we had three different kinds of rice in my house. It was crazy.”
A success story
After more than a year in the foster care system without a home, Amal Mohamed finally found a Muslim home in Canton in July 2011.
Before that, she was scheduled to move in with a non-Muslim family, but Jessica Martin, Mohamed’s lawyer, said that the family decided they no longer wanted to plan for her because Mohamed wanted to stay in contact with her family. The foster family also expressed a desire to Americanize Mohamed and change her accent, Martin said via a text statement.
“I don’t think I would still be a Muslim,” Mohamed said about plans to place her with the non-Muslim family. “Not because I don’t love Islam. Or not because Christianity is better, in my opinion. But because the sense of fitting in, or what is my environment.”
Third Circuit referee judge Mona Youssef said that Mohamed’s lawyer approached her and asked if there were any Muslim foster homes that would be willing to take in Mohamed.
Youssef called on about 50 people and finally one of her friends, Sumreen Ahmad, 42, agreed to take her in.
Ahmad said that Mohamed was craving religion, and that Mohamed would accompany her to halaqas, or religious study groups.
“What we did is we created an environment for her to flourish,” Ahmad said. “And when I look at how far she’s come and everything she’s doing now, that is why it’s a success story. Because all we have to do is give these kids a jumpstart on life.”
Mohamed recently graduated from Western Michigan University with a degree in social work and is entering a master’s program in the same field at WMU. She plans to use her degree to help other children who have been through hard times.
She said that during her time in the foster care system, she never had a Muslim foster care worker, and that her experience inspired her to go into social care.
“I felt that I needed that, but I did not have an option to find someone I can relate or who can give me advice, or who can understand where I’m coming from, without explaining too much,” Mohamed said.