Brothers' Keeper
By Kevin Featherly
Photo by Jonathan Chapman
(page 2 of 3)
Last September, an Atlantic Monthly cover story suggested that perhaps America had already won its “war on terror.” Author James Fallows quoted Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who helped coordinate the war in Afghanistan and who now works as an anti-terrorism consultant, as saying that the patriotism of the American-Muslim community has been grossly underreported.
“If you ask European Muslims whether they are European or Muslim,” Sageman tells Minnesota Monthly, “they will say they are just Muslim. Whereas most American Muslims will say they are American and Muslim. That contrast makes me think most Muslim Americans are pretty patriotic.”
“It’s the untold story,” agrees Salem al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. “The American public does not realize that al-Qaeda has not penetrated the American-Muslim community, even though it has tried. We go on with our business and regard that as an Islamic duty, to protect our country from any harm.”
Stuck in the Middle
In some ways, Zaman is the man in the middle. Some liberal Muslims consider him too “hard core,” he says. “I am a Koran thumper, and I am proud of that, but one group has a problem with that,” he says. “Then another group considers me to be too liberal, meaning, ‘You hang out with these Christians, you go to the interfaith dialogues, you shake hands with them, you say as-sal mu ‘alaykum.’ ” (The greeting is Arabic for “peace be upon you.”) Among the most conservative Wahabists, he says, “it is almost to the point where it is not clear to them whether I would go to heaven.”Attitudes and opinions within Islam are as diverse as those within Christianity. Zaman does not profess to represent all, or even most, people in his community. The former software engineer systematically breaks down the numbers. There are about 150,000 Muslims in Minnesota, he says, and he reckons 10,000 know who he is. He is in occasional contact with perhaps 5,000 of them and in regular contact with up to 1,500. “This is very busy. It is hard work,” he acknowledges. “But let us not be carried away, to say that this represents the community.”
Jonathan Chapman
Zaman doesn’t disagree with that assessment and even takes it further, suggesting that Muslims rarely agree on anything among themselves. “We have a saying that if you put three Muslims together you will have four parties—each will have his own party, and they will have another party among them,” he says. “There is also a saying of the Prophet that ‘differences and disagreements in my own mind are mostly from God.’ So we are taught that disagreements are good. The West does not understand this.”
In fact, it might be said that Zaman’s chief objective is to prevent a consensus from forming on one crucial issue. He is battling to keep Muslim immigrants from agreeing that they have no place in American culture. “If we fail to convince Muslims to take a share of ownership in the American experiment, they will become disaffected,” he says. “And 20 or 30 years from now, you will see ghettos and violence.”
Taxicabs, Fatwas and Flying Imams
Recent conflicts at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport demonstrate just how difficult assimilation might be.The first began in 2000, when a Muslim cab driver refused, on religious grounds, to carry a passenger toting bottles of alcohol. Others followed suit. Eventually there were about 77 taxi-ride refusals per month, according to Patrick Hogan, spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission. Passengers complained, and cab drivers, forced to drive to the end of the line and wait several hours for a new fare, claimed religious discrimination and lost wages. When the state Department of Human Rights recommended that MAS help mediate, the airports commission may have gotten more than it bargained for.
On June 6, 2006, a panel of imams issued a religious statement, or fatwa, on MAS letterhead informing cab drivers that “alcohol is the mother of all evils” and “it is not permissible for you to carry on working this job, because it involves cooperating in sin, according to Islam.” Zaman’s name is not among the document’s four signatories.
Zaman says airport officials already had a fatwa from another cleric saying the cab drivers were wrong, and MAS was asked if it had one with a countervailing viewpoint. Hogan denies this.
There is some dispute about the Koran’s edict against alcohol. As Farouq As-Samaraa’ i, imam of Al-Huda Mosque in Columbia Heights and a senior member of the Islamic Jurisprudence Council of Minnesota, told the Minnesota Monitor website, the key issue is intent. Since cab drivers conduct transactions intending to move passengers—not alcohol—transporting a rider toting a bottle of booze does not violate the Koran.
