Excerpt:
The sale of Eagle Elementary School should be a fait accompli, a $1.1 million real estate deal that closed more than a year ago, creating a new home for the Islamic Cultural Association and a funding bonus for the Farmington School District.
Instead, the 2011 sale has spawned a prolonged and explosive controversy over the Islamic group's plans for a new mosque and minaret and rattled West Bloomfield's sense of itself as a tolerant and diverse community.
Long home to the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit and the Chaldean Cultural Center, dozens of churches and synagogues, a vibrant and growing African-American population and other minorities, this was a community where cultures melded.