Brothers' Keeper
By Kevin Featherly
Photo by Jonathan Chapman
(page 3 of 3)
Regardless, since 70 percent of the airport’s 900 cab drivers are Muslim, the fatwa created a huge problem. Hesham Hussein, MAS Minnesota’s president, says a compromise was arranged. Drivers declining to carry alcohol-carrying passengers would place special top lights on their taxis to discreetly signal airport employees not to flag them down. Those riders would be directed to other cabs. Hogan says the airports commission at first agreed to test the program, then begged off.
“There was no way it was going to succeed,” Hogan says. “Overwhelmingly, people said they would not take cabs with those top lights, or they wouldn’t take a cab at the airport at all because they didn’t approve of our accommodation.”
“From our perspective that was a win-win-win situation,” says Hussein. “But some people in the media managed to scare people off of this.”
That was followed by a highly publicized incident last November. Six imams leaving Minnesota after attending a Bloomington convention of the North American Imams Association were kicked off a plane bound for Arizona. A fellow passenger had complained after the group was seen praying together loudly at the boarding gate, boisterously discussing the death sentence of Saddam Hussein, and otherwise acting suspiciously—at least, in the view of witnesses and the air crew.
The clerics were taken off the plane and interrogated at the airport for five hours until an attorney interceded. But even after background checks turned up nothing, US Airways refused to honor the clerics’ tickets. Northwest Airlines eventually flew them home.
View from the Right
The events took place against a backdrop of deteriorating relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in America. Last year, a Washington Post poll indicated that nearly half of Americans (46 percent) had unfavorable views of Islam—7 percentage points higher than in the tense months immediately after 9/11. “The complaints of harassment and anti-Muslim bigotry across the country are on a tremendous rise,” Zaman says. “This is caused by irresponsible politicians and a few irresponsible people in the media.”Conservative commentators in particular have had a field day with the airport episodes. Bloggers at Minneapolis-based Powerline.com wrote that the top-light compromise would have allowed Muslims to impose Islamic law on American citizens. Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten accused MAS of being an American front for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization long linked to violence and terrorism. In fact, Kersten has published a series of columns that seem to depict the imams incident as the product of an intricate conspiracy, apparently aimed at whipping up a liberal media firestorm and stoking Islamist sympathies.
“In my opinion,” Zaman says, “the conservative press is attempting to generate or maintain a frenzy of concern. They need to divert attention from the fact that Americans are coming home in body bags, and the commander in chief is responsible for it and the thumpin’ they took at the polls. Distractions help.”
Ahmed I. Samatar, dean of the Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College, takes the concerns seriously. He believes Muslim immigrants are obliged under Islam to obey the laws of the countries in which they choose to live. Anyone wishing to produce social change must go through the legislative process, not simply issue a self-styled fatwa. Even if members were only seeking a fair compromise, the taxicab flap was a serious misstep for MAS, Samatar says: “They have played into the hands of people who want to turn them into some kind of extremist group.”
Zaman says that by working with the airports commission—a quasi-government public corporation—MAS did properly work through the system. Nevertheless, even he admits that the controversies have hurt. “We’ve lost some people who might have been otherwise more sympathetic,” he says. (Indeed, airport officials now have recommended stiff penalties—up to two years’ suspension of a cab driver’s airport permit—for refusing to carry passengers on religious grounds.)
Inevitable Friction
Such controversies are frustrating, Zaman says, but perhaps inevitable in the current climate. He says he remains committed to fostering relations between two communities that must learn to understand and accept one another. And he acknowledges that Muslims have as much to learn about tolerance as anyone.“When we look at democracy, we find some elements that are good. We accept those,” Zaman tells worshippers at the mosque. “Some elements of Western democracy are bad: rich people have more power—we reject that. This would be the correct understanding of the Muslim.” It is halal—permissible—to vote for non-Muslims, he assured the crowd, as long as the choice is positive and conscientious. It does not matter which party’s candidates are chosen. What matters, he counsels, is to make the choice, to participate.
“For any Muslim who has the right to vote and does not vote,” he tells his audience, “that is a very sad situation.”
Zaman’s decision is made, and it is irrevocable. “I am an American,” he says. “America is my home. I intend to die and be buried in this country. At the same time—and see, to me, I don’t have to say ‘at the same time’—I am a Muslim. I am proud of being Muslim. I am not going to compromise on my Islam. And I don’t think these two things are contradictory.”
Kevin Featherly wrote about the Center of the American Experiment in the September issue of Minnesota Monthly.
