Author: Leah Fabel

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.

On a warm Friday evening, most of the lights were out at the Coffman Union bookstore on the U of M campus. In the back, though (the place is the size of a department store), a hundred chairs were set up and people milled about, greeting one another and conversing in English, Arabic, and Somali. Some of the women were covered; most, however, weren’t. In typical Arab fashion, the scheduled program started a little bit late.

Kathryn Haddad eventually stepped to the podium. “Welcome, everybody, to the release of the eighteenth edition of Mizna, the United States’ only Arab-American literary journal.”

Mizna began in Minneapolis in 1999 as the brainchild of Haddad, a playwright who is also the journal’s director. These days, it’s in libraries and universities all over the country and the world, and has received honors from the Utne Reader and Pushcart Press.
Between the program’s opening, a moment of silence for the wars in the Middle East, its closing, coffee and sweets, and a peaceful Minnesota evening, there were readings from Mizna’s new issue. The inspiration for the material fell between those disparate worlds, too.

The crowd members’ diversity, shared equally among Arab-Americans, African-Americans, and European-Americans, was rather unique for a literary event in Minnesota. The third of these groups was primarily middle-aged and seemed mostly indifferent to fashion, favoring instead practical clothing, canvas bags, and pins with messages. At least three pre-program discussions were fueled by loathing for the current administration. The Arab-Americans and the African-Americans, who were mostly Somali, appeared, in general, more professional in their style and less overtly liberal.

The first reader, Ahmed Yusuf, was Somali, which seemed slightly incongruous given Mizna’s focus. “We struggled with that for a while,” said Haddad after the event, “but we eventually decided to include anyone who can speak to the Arab-American community.” Yusuf’s sing-song delivery of a story about an underdog soccer team from a blighted Somali town addressed sport, rivalries, and war-induced poverty—subjects that would surely have resonated in most Middle Eastern countries. Yusuf rolled his r’s just like an Arab, so delicately that even if he had spoken about raids, interrogations, and external rendition, the inattentive would easily have been lulled into thinking his words were almost sweet. They’re not, of course, and politics were understandably at the heart of many of the other featured readings.

The subject matter wasn’t all the expected politics, however; the readings didn’t always begin and end with a pro-Palestine stance and anti-Bush rants. Poet and playwright Ismail Khalidi was born in Lebanon but grew up in Chicago. In the two poems he read, he directed the same vitriol toward “Chicago’s finest” as he did toward the occupiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While the first arrested him on the way to sunrise prayers and barked ignorant orders, the second “stripped Gaza of their pride and ego.” Khalidi questioned the motivations of the police with as much heartache as he questioned Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, about a proper response in the face of Israeli occupation.

Brooke Anthony, a volunteer at KFAI radio, read two poems inspired by news coverage of the war in Iraq. She looked every bit the longtime activist behind the podium, a woman opposed to war on general peace-loving principle. As a native-English speaker, she didn’t quite pronounce the names in her poem correctly—the kh in Khayat sounded like a straight hard k, not a soft, gentle, throat-clearing sort of kh. And the r in Ibrahim didn’t roll as charmingly as Ahmed Yusuf’s r’s. In a way, through her imperfect language, Anthony showed that the American cultural struggle to blend aspects of ourselves isn’t restricted to newcomers.

Amid all the strife and difference, this blending, as individuals and as Americans, is at its sweetest when there is a recognizable common ground. Mazen Halabi, who was born in Syria and now works as a software consultant in Fridley, approached the podium with the humble grin of someone who more often reads to his children than to a crowd. His voice gaining in confidence, he told a story of his childhood in Damascus. With the tale’s adolescent humor and grumpy sandwich vendors, Halabi painted a picture that didn’t sound much different from that of a Minnesotan childhood’s—until a friend was taken away by secret police working for the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. But then, grieving mothers are common to stories from all over, too.

Amid Somali soccer matches, the Chicago police, the anti-war movement, and the secret police, the topic of a poem by P.A. Pashubin, a Polish-American, stood out. She compared the plant purslane to Republicans. While it’s considered a garden weed in this country, several pairs of Arab eyes lit up as she passed around samples of the leafy culprit. “I know this,” one man said. “This is baqli, we use it in fatoush.” The traditional salad of Lebanon, fatoush is served at every important meal. What is viewed as pernicious here is regarded as delicious in a country somewhere else in the world, and as the purslane made the rounds, that typically contradictory notion was not so much reconciled as recognized.