Yahoo Sports basketball blogger Jeff Eisenberg wrote one of those feel-good anti-Islamophobia articles titled “Why an AAU team chose to name itself the Motor City Muslims.” The team was organized by a suburban Muslim Unity Center youth counselor named Ali Altimimy, “a former high school and community college basketball player whose love for hoops is only exceeded by his passion for his religion.”
Other outlets like the international New York Times picked it up with summaries like “An all-Muslim basketball team in Michigan consisting of 16-year-old boys decided to name itself Motor City Muslims to fight Islamophobia and dispel stereotypes.”
Coach Clarence Archibald, himself a Muslim, pushed the team to show pride in its faith.
"Some of them were a little hesitant, but I pushed pretty hard," Archibald said. "We all know Islam often is unfortunately portrayed in a negative way in the media. I wanted to be sure we were easily identifiable as an all-Muslim team because it gave us an opportunity to change people's mindsets by showing them we're as American as home runs and apple pie."
In an era when young Muslim Americans sometimes try to avoid detection by removing any outward signs of Islam in public and by going by names like "Mo" instead of "Mohammed," Archibald's players boldly chose to wear their identities across their chests. They named their team the Motor City Muslims and emblazoned a custom-made logo on the front of their jerseys featuring a basketball player clad in a traditional Islamic robe and turban.
Such an unconventional choice made it difficult for the Motor City Muslims to keep a low profile at the tournaments they attended in Michigan this year.
Strangers often gawked or whispered when the team prayed together between games or broke its huddles by shouting in unison "bismillah," the Arabic word for "in the name of God." Other teams also tended not to take the Motor City Muslims as seriously as they would have opponents of a different culture or skin tone.
"Some teams looked at us and thought, 'Oh this is an easy win. What are they even doing here?'" said starting point guard Zeeshan Tariq, a rising sophomore at Harrison High School. "When I'd turn around during warmups, they'd just be fooling around on the side like they didn't even need to warm up to beat us because it would be such an easy win."
Eisenberg discussed “the vital task of preparing the team for the challenge of wearing ‘Muslim’ on their chest at a time when that word still can inspire fear and distrust.”
"What I told them was that they were representing Islam," Altimimy said. "If we can show people that we're ballers and we can hoop but that we're also regular young people, that would be big."
The importance of debunking the negative image of Islam isn't lost on the Motor City Muslims, but many of them were more eager to discredit another unflattering stereotype. They wanted to show that an all-Muslim team could be more formidable on the basketball floor than many opponents expected.
But Eisenberg wasn’t going to ruin the happy image of the story by producing a fact like a win-loss record.
