On the night of January 27, three men entered Mohammad Ismail’s Blaine Dairy store as he was closing shop and threw flaming glass bottles at the walls, destroying everything in the store. Ismail escaped through the smoke-filled store with minor cuts and burns. A strong expletive directed at the word “Arab” was founded spray painted on the side door that same night. The FBI is investigating the possibility of a hate crime.

Exactly two months later, on March 27, roughly 75 community leaders and concerned citizens gathered at Anoka Technical School to talk about what they were going to do about hate crime in their community. The crowd looked small in the auditorium, but the conversation was constructive, with many speakers stressing the need to forgive those who cause harm, educate the public, and get to know one’s neighbors. As an example of the meeting’s overall goals of unity, the event was cosponsored by the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Lake Harriet United Methodist Church, the Anoka Technical Student College Senate, and the NAACP.

“This city won’t tolerate hate crimes,” Blaine Mayor Tom Ryan stated, declaring that he had only seen two hate crimes in Blaine during his 22 years as an elected official, and those were both solved within a week.

Mohammad Ismail’s case has been open for two months. Much of the early investigation focused on Ismail himself, including searching his home and requiring him to take a polygraph test, which he passed. The store was his family’s only source of income, and Mohammad Ismail’s insurance will not accept a claim until a final police report has been filed. Lt. Chris Olson, who was present at the meeting, stated that the police department was committed to following all leads and would not make a final report until they had considered all the options.

It seems, stated Nathaniel Khalik of the St. Paul branch of the NAACP, that investigations move slower when African-Americans or Muslims are involved. Ismail was in the store when the attackers entered, and that makes the case attempted murder. The NAACP is adding $500 to information that leads to the arrest of the attackers. The total reward now stands at $4000. Anyone with information is asked to call the Blaine Police Department at (763) 785-6168.

Muslim citizens who spoke of peace and education at the event were familiar with Muslim-focused crimes throughout the metro area.

Zafar Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Resource Group, told the audience that his wife was nearly run off the road on the anniversary of 9/11 by a person shouting racial epithets. She was driving their four children home from school.

The garage of the chairwoman of CAIR was vandalized by a paintball gun while they were out doing errands on March 25, two days before the town meeting. It was the second time in several months that this had happened, said her husband, who spoke of their emphasis on getting to know their neighbors.

Zafar Siddiqui, whose car was scraped but whose family was unhurt, stressed that these hateful actions are based on misunderstandings. Both Muslim and non-Muslim attendees suggested that Muslims volunteer in schools, meet their neighbors, and take part in neighborhood crime-watch groups. The goal, speakers agreed, was to combat media-induced fear with personal relationships.
One speaker, a white man who identified himself as Christian, said he drives daily past the Blaine Dairy but had not known until recently that the fire had been due to arson. He apologized to the crowd that someone who might have looked like him could have committed such a hateful crime.

Admitting that he knew little about Islam, he told the crowd he always avoided eye contact with Muslim women so as not to offend them. A young African-American woman wearing a scarf politely explained that Muslim men and women were allowed to talk but not to mingle or touch. Event mediator Chris Schumacher of CAIR acknowledged the courage it takes to admit when you don’t know something.

A member of Judson Memorial Baptist Church in southwest Minneapolis presented a check to help Mohammad Ismail’s family. The Lake Harriet United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, which helped sponsor the event, will also be taking an offering for the family. Ismail has three young children ranging from two to seven. Ismail’s extended family and friends have been helping them survive.
For information about the Islamic Resource Group or to schedule an informational presentation about Islam, visit www.irgmn.org or call (612) 676-0165.

–Emily K. Bright is a creative writing MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota and works as the Scribe for Human Rights, writing articles on human rights themes. She was involved in putting on Thursday night’s meeting.

This article originally appeared in our partner publication the Twin Cities Daily Planet and is reposted with permission.

It’s not the first time you’ve been a victim of a hate crime, nor is it the last. It’s 8:30 on a winter evening, and you’re closing up your store. The entrance door is locked, half the lights are off, and you’re mopping at the far end of the room when three men barge in the exit door as though they mean to rob you. Two of the men have their hooded backs to you. One of them you can see. He’s over six feet tall, with short reddish blonde hair and a goatee. You observe this in the moment before he stands and hurls a glass bottle directly at you. You duck. It slams into the wall and explodes into flames. All around you, you hear the sound of glass exploding. The store fills with smoke in seconds. You can’t tell if the men are still there and if they’re waiting for you, but you have to get out. You race through your burning store and out to the road. You wave your arms until a woman stops and calls 911 for you.

The emergency response is quick and the firefighters get the fire out, but your store is ruined. It is your family’s sole source of income, and you have three small children at home. For the next four or five hours, you talk with inspector after inspector. Did you know there was graffiti on your side door? One inspector asks. He leads you over to the door, where you see “Fuck you” and your ethnicity sprawled across the fire door. It was not there before tonight.

You offer to work with a sketch artist to describe the attacker you saw, but you are told “Maybe later.” Each inspector asks you if you were the one who set your store on fire. They ask you to take a polygraph test to prove you are telling the truth, and you do, and pass it. Over the next few days, they get a warrant and search your home for evidence. A woman says she saw the men and can describe them, but she is turned aside as a secondhand witness. There is no media coverage of the event. After two weeks, you call the story in to the neighborhood newspaper. It spreads from there, but it doesn’t get a lot of attention.

Two months later, the police have not filed a final report, which means you cannot make a claim from insurance. You have no work, and there are no leads coming. Everyone in your family is afraid.

Knowing all this happens in Minnesota, and that it happened to Mohammad Ismail in Blaine on January 27, 2008, what are you, reading this now, going to do about it?

What You Can Do

Please come to a town hall meeting for Minnesotans to address this and other hate crimes on Thursday, March 27, at 7 p.m. Location: Anoka Technical College Auditorium, 1335 West Highway 10, Anoka, MN 55303. (Get a map.)

The event is cosponsored by CAIR, Lake Harriet United Methodist Church, Anoka Technical College Student Senate, and the NAACP.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in

By Emily Bright, Engage Minnesota
Also: Local Muslim Talks with Audience about His Experiences

When I arrive at the History Theater in downtown St. Paul, a school bus is parked in front of the door. It’s the perfect audience for Jeffrey Stetson’s play The Meeting, which imagines a meeting between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965 Harlem. Not that this is a children’s play, per se. But the discussion between two great leaders of the Civil Rights movement over the power of violence vs nonviolence definitely strikes a relevant note, and I’m glad people are having a chance to see it in school. Today’s show is set at 10 a.m. on a weekday, as most of the shows have been, and the audience has come entirely on school buses.

The setting is a Harlem hotel precisely 43 years ago today—Valentine’s Day, 1965. Set on the evening of the bombing of Malcolm X’s home and a week before he was assassinated, Malcolm X takes center stage through nearly all the show. Dr. King has accepted a visit to Harlem, and the two men spend their visit in an impassioned debate over, as the program states, whether revolutions are “won by hands clenched into fists or clasped in prayer.”

Who Will Win?

I find myself rooting for each man in turn. Malcolm X, performed by Penumbra Theater’s Terry E. Bellamy, is passionately connected to the struggles of his people in Harlem and other cities. He places himself on the side of the “living dead,” on the side of the hopeless young men and women on the streets whose rage he wants to direct somewhere useful. Dr. King, played by Darien Johnson, appears a bit out-of-place outside of the south, and his insistence in the power of love to overcome all hatred—Malcolm X rather disdainfully reads a piece of one of his speeches—appears stubborn in the face of Malcolm’s passion.

The script itself focuses heavily on Malcolm X, on the expanse of his hope for his suffering people. “If you really were for unity,” he moans of the nonviolent movement, “you’d be singing ‘we shall come over’” and stay over until no more black women have reason to be afraid. Later, he argues that white people gave King’s movement “concessions” and King an award because the other option in black leadership was Malcolm himself, and he knew he scared authority. (Which led me to think about what I’d learned of Malcolm X in school, before I read his memoirs in college. I knew he was violent, urban, and Muslim, in that order of importance. One of the sometimes unsettling points the play makes.)

Bellamy’s delivery of Malcolm X subtle and stirring, demonstrating the range of his emotions. Johnson’s Dr. King has a composed thoughtfulness to his demeanor, but he delivers most of his lines in a shout that moves between anger and sadness does little else to show the depth of his character. Indeed, most of what we are able to feel for his character is pity that he is so constantly on the defensive. Twice, moved with anger, the two arm-wrestle over the chess table, desperate to find a winner some way between their two opposing sides. Each man wins once—they are tied.

But.

The play takes a pleasant turn toward the end when Dr. King, preparing to leave after a frustrating meeting, mentions that the brown paper bag he’d brought and left was a gift. It is a doll, which draws laughter from the audience. The gift is from Martin’s daughter to Malcolm’s daughter. “It’s her favorite doll,” Martin explains; his daughter saw the bombing of Malcolm’s house on TV and, worried that all their things had been destroyed, sent the doll to Malcolm’s daughter to comfort her. The mood changes entirely. Suddenly, with one moment of compassion, they are no longer two men with irreconcilable approaches to justice. They are family men, deeply committed to helping their people each in the way they seem right. They have given and will continue to give all that they have to the cause, and both are mightily aware that their lives will likely end early.

Play Never Pits Christian vs. Muslim

As opposed as the two men seem to be throughout the meeting, the play never becomes Christian vs. Muslim. That they are both men of faith is one of their commonalities. Indeed, at one point, Dr. King says with exasperation, “I would have thought your trip to Mecca would have expanded your compassion.” Reconciled at the end, they recite lines of prayer together—after they’d arm-wrestled once again and, didactically, tied. “Imagine what these hands could do if they pushed in the same direction,” Dr. King says. Their opposed approaches aside, they are working for the same goals of unity and opportunity for all black people in America.

The play ends its run Friday, February 15, and I would recommend keeping an eye out for it if another production comes around.

Local Muslim Talks with Audience about His Experiences

I would be remiss to end my review here, though, without mentioning the 20-minute discussion afterward. Each day of the performance, different Minnesotan Muslims have volunteered to tell a five-minute version of their story and take questions from the audience.

Today’s speaker was a local pharmacist, Tamim Saidi, who came as a refugee from Afghanistan seventeen years ago. The student audience shuffled and come slowly back to the auditorium after their short intermission, but Tamim (also a contributor to EngageMN.com) held the students’ attention well. Upbeat, he elicited responses and shows of hands. Perhaps a dozen students in the audience had come as immigrants themselves; two dozen raised their hands to show that their parents had come as immigrants; and half the hands in the room went up when he got to grandparents. When it came time for questions, there was, to my surprise, a ready show of hands. Most of the questions focused on his coming-to-America experience rather than on Islam. They wanted to know what was the hardest thing, what he missed, how he felt coming without his parents, and whether he got teased here in high school. “That,” said a Somali girl behind me as we left, “was more interesting than the play.”

–Emily Bright is completing a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at the University of Minnesota. She also works as the Creative Writing Department’s Scribe for Human Rights, researching and writing on such topics as Darfur and the Save Yar Campaign.