Spice Road

Though Minneapolis is seven thousand miles from Mecca, the heart of Islam, that holy place is not far from many hearts that live and work along Central Avenue. This street, which begins in Northeast Minneapolis and runs north into Fridley, is the center of the Twin Cities’ Muslim population, which numbers about seventy-five thousand, according to the Islamic Institute of Minnesota. Over the past twenty years, immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as India and the Hindu Kush region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, have been settling here. The blocks of Central Avenue running between Sixteenth and Twenty-sixth Streets Northeast are one of the few places locally where signs feature Arabic script and people speak Urdu, Somali, Arabic, Dari, and Pashtu.
At the Crescent Moon Bakery on Central and Twenty-fourth Street, where Afghan pizza is more popular than doughnuts, Abdul Kohistan walks freely between the kitchen and the dining room. He doesn’t own the establishment, but he treats it like home. It takes just one question to send the fifty-two-year-old back to his old life in Afghanistan—and into a history lesson.
“We had many problems before the revolution,” he says, referring to the 1979 overthrow of the Afghan monarchy. “There was poverty and corruption, no jobs. The revolution changed that, but because the Soviets were involved, the United States thought we were communists.” In 1985, in the midst of a war between Soviet forces and the U.S.-government-supported Islamist rebels, Kohistan’s boss told him he deserved a day off. He took it, and then walked with his family for eight days through the mountains into Pakistan, where they found a flight to Minneapolis. “It is the American government that has been a problem for Afghanistan,” he says, “not America itself.”
Across the street from the bakery, at Hafiz Inc. Travel and Tourism, Motaz Orsod looks remarkably fresh for someone who flew in from Sudan the day before. His face is clean-shaven; his orange shirt is pressed; he is as neat as the office he manages. “We arrange trips mostly to Africa and the Middle East,” he says after some hesitation, “but business has been slow lately.” Then he trails off. “I don’t know anything,” he says. “All I do is work, go home, work, go home.” Though he now calls the United States home, his distrust of inquisitive strangers is clear.
North of the travel agency stands the Islamic Cultural and Community Center, together with the Al-Huda Mosque. Their three-story, two-tone brown brick building is a boxy, nondescript place except for its sign with distinctive Arabic script in green, the color of Islam.
Farok Hamod is the director of the center and one of seven imams of his rank in the Twin Cities. He appears a dignified and peaceful figure in his tan robe and black skullcap. On the walls of his book-filled office hang gilded Koranic posters and an oil painting of the Kaaba, the sacred, black-shrouded edifice that Muslims circumambulate when they make the Hajj, a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. He describes the daily work of helping his followers balance their Muslim backgrounds with American culture and law, and asks rhetorically, speaking through a translator, “Are there problems in the community? Outside the center, yes; but inside, no.” He mentions the needling problem of a next-door neighbor: Central Avenue Liquors. Islam prohibits alcohol, and Hamod sees the store as a blight. “I would like to see it closed,” he says. “The neighborhood would be cleaner without it.”
Brian Erickson works at the liquor store and lives nearby. A twenty-nine-year-old with a six-inch goatee, he swings his tall frame as he stacks six-packs of Milwaukee’s Best to the ceiling. “This store has been here a long, long time,” he says. “It’s been here long before [the Muslim community] ever came, and too long to be forced out because they don’t like it.”
“They own the whole block,” he adds erroneously, “but they don’t act like they’re a part of the community.”
Several blocks away, Waheed Khan stands behind the register at Khan’s Super Meat Market. With his soft brown skin and full head of black hair, he looks younger than forty-one years. His shop carries goat meat, chicken, beef, and Indonesian frozen fish. To the side, shelves display an impressive range of boxed spices: Nihara curry, paya curry for hooves, spice for chicken liver, and dozens of others.
Khan came to Minneapolis five years ago from Hyderabad, a largely Muslim city in central India. Like Orsod at Hafiz Travel, he is skeptical and soft-spoken. At the last minute, though, sensing perhaps the benefits of publicity, he speaks up: “My shop is Khan’s Meat Market,” he specifies. “1835 Central Avenue.” His speech is accented and he’s holding a halal cut of meat, butchered according to Islamic regulations. But he speaks with the pride of a local.