A Fragile Melting Pot

Today’s New York Times has an article entitled “A Call To Jihad, Answered in America”–see it here.  I found it to be inexpressibly sad. 

In essence it details the recruitment of young Somali men (all students) from Minneapolis to join an Islamist organization in Somalia.  While none of them ever expressed a desire to harm America or Americans, the FBI is rightly concerned their training and indoctrination will lead them to that step, especially since Al-Queda allegedly actively recruits Muslims with American passports. 

I have a personal story to go along with this.  In January of 1997, I was sent to St. Louis by the company I worked for at the time to take over a large operation with around 100 employees, temporarily as it turned out.  Of those 100 employees, I’d say 20% were American, and of those, the majority were African-American.  The other 80% were about equally divided between Serbians and Somalis.  All the Serbians and Somalis were Muslim, and it was my first ever personal contact with Muslims in the real world.  All 100 of the employees were male.  (You can perhaps sense a looming problem here.) 

All the Serbians were white, and all the Somalis were black.  I therefore expected the Somalis to identify with the majority African-American employees.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  There was a deep resentment, if not hatred, on the part of the Somalis toward the African-Americans, some of whom held supervisory positions.  In time, I was told that a perceived superiority on the part of the African-Americans was to blame.  It was like, “I was born here, you weren’t”.  Skin color was not enough to unite them.  What was left was religion, which united the white Serbians and the black Somalis more than skin color divided them, even though they did not speak the same language.  And in fact with the exception of one Serbian and one Somali, none of them spoke English either.  It’s hard to grasp that kind of isolation.

One day the the Somali  English-speaker came to me and said, more or less, Begging your pardon, but the men are not going to do anything you ask, because it is against our beliefs to take orders from women.  So I could have been stupid and railed about how they were in America now and had to play by America’s rules.  But I’m not that stupid.  I had a job to do.  So I sized up the situation and said, “If I ask you, will you ask them?”  He grinned and said, “Yes”.  He wasn’t stupid either.

As I previously mentioned, it was January in St. Louis.  The temperature was below freezing every day, all day long, and the wind was brutal.  Much our jobs took place outside in the weather.  That particular year, the month of January was also the month of Ramadan.  Ramadan is a month of fasting, followed by the feast of Eid-al-Fitr.  It’s the second holiest day in the Islamic religion.  So these men were working in bitter cold, performing fairly physical labor, without even the relief of something to eat or drink (you can’t even drink water during Ramadan except after sunset and before sunrise).  I developed a deep admiration for them as a result of this and one other thing. 

I’m not religious, and I think the rituals associated with religion are basically superstitious in nature.  However, having said that–I respect people who try to live their religion and live a good life, and if the rituals reinforce that, then they’re okay with me.  So the Muslims in our workforce brought their prayer rugs to work every day, or kept them in their lockers, and at the appointed time, they would pray.  The prayers are short, but in spite of that there were some grumblings among the non-Muslim employees when a task of some urgency needed to be carried out and the Muslims were unavailable to help. 

I was only there for 3 weeks, and it’s been 12 years, but I wonder what happened to them.  Did some of them become terrorists, in this age of terrorism?  I hope not.

By cellphone, instant messaging, and on Facebook, the young men who left kept in touch with their friends in the U.S.  An especially poignant quote from the article:  “They missed movies and basketball, deodorant and boxer shorts, they told friends back home. One of the men, who suffered from heartburn, asked if anyone could send him a box of Tums by DHL.”  In another quote:  

“Even among the world’s jihadists, the young men from Minneapolis are something of an exception: in their instant messages and cellphone calls, they seem caught between inner-city America and the badlands of Africa, pining for Starbucks one day, extolling the virtues of camel’s milk and Islamic fundamentalism the next.”

They were torn between the promise of America and the demands of family and clan on the other.  They were sending money to relatives in Somalia they had never even met, out of their meager wages in menial jobs.  They had the proverbial dilemma–one foot in one country, the other foot in a second country–and never quite felt they belonged in either. 

Even the Imam of their mosque could not dissuade them from going to Somalia.  Stay, he said.  Here you can help your people by becoming a doctor or an engineer.  Over there, you will be just another dead body in the street.  Who knows what psychological factors cause some of these young men to throw away their lives, when others stick it out in spite of the barriers and hardships?  Today at least two of the young men who answered the “call” to Somalia are dead.  One, at the age of 26, blew himself up in Somalia last October. 

This causes me to ask the question, How welcoming are we?  “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free”.  Right.  Whatever happened to that?