Dar Al-Farooq Mosque bomb damage
Earlier this month, Mohamed Omar stood on a podium, his smile bright behind a trim beard. As his suit jacket strained a little over his middle-aged stomach and long, white cotton robe, he told a large crowd a story about a friend of his who had worn the same kind of outfit while visiting a small town in Alabama.
“An old woman walked up to him,” Omar said, “and asked him, ‘Where are you from? It’s interesting. I’ve never seen this outfit.’
And he said, ‘I’m from Minnesota.’
The woman persisted. ‘Yes, I know, but originally.’
He said, ‘Originally from Minnesota. This is how we dress in Minnesota.’”
Muhamed Omar and his son.
Omar's audience laughed in recognition. After all, earlier in the summer, crowds had converged on a German Festival wearing lederhosen and dirndls; the week after Omar spoke, gents swaggered kilts at the Irish Fest; and the weekend after that, men in pleated white skirts strutted their stuff at the local Greek celebration. Minnesota is filled with such festivals, brief events where we celebrate cultures we left behind: Hmong, Igbo, Karen, Svenskarnas Dag and Midwest Viking Festival, as well as those that celebrate cultures already here: Ojibwe Pow Wows and the Shakopee Mdewakantan Sioux Wacipi.
But the event at which Muhamed Omar spoke was not a festival. It was, instead, a gathering to show support for a shaken group barely recovering from a bomb thrown into the Dar Al-Farooq mosque and community center in Bloomington, MN, during morning prayers.
Minnesota, like the rest of the country, is mostly made up of immigrants and refugees, some fleeing potato famines, some religious persecution, or overcrowded farmlands back in Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Italy, Scandinavia. For the last thirty years, Minnesota has also been a government go-to location for resettling modern-day refugees from all over the world: Bosnians, Liberians, ethnic Cambodian Karens, Hmong, Vietnamese, Somali.
But the haters live among us, too. Well, they always have. German settlers were tarred and feathered as traitors during WWI. Immigrants were labeled “Dumb Swedes,” or “Bohunks,” or saw signs that said, “No Irish need apply.
Yet, the haters seem to be rising here, as they have across America—a surge of racism, emboldened by a President who coyly refuses to condemn bigotry, formally condemns it, then, on Twitter and in “rallies,” walks back that condemnation. A Swastika is carved into a desk, into a golf course’s grass. The same symbol is printed on a flier at the U of Minnesota, and spray-painted across a garage. A woman is punched for speaking Somali and a Muslim cemetery is vandalized. Recently, Neo-Nazis showed up to “guard” classical European work placed near an protest-themed exhibit with photos of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. And now, there are ten known hate groups here, ranging from the White Supremacists who hate all so-called “mud people,” (i.e. anyone who is not a white person of North-West-European ancestry, plus all Jews) to black separatist groups who hate anybody white—plus all Jews.
Five years almost to the day before we visited the Dar Al Farooq mosque, we took our children on a similar visit of support, to the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Society of Minnesota—also in Bloomington—, after a White Supremacist shot up a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, mistaking the inhabitants for Muslims. Then, as now, hundreds of Minnesotans streamed onto the grounds of a religious site to let a congregation know that hatred does not define us, just as Muslims in Minnesota were vocal and active in their support of the Jewish community during last spring’s series of bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers. Side by side, hijab and yarmulke, sun hat and koofiyad decorated thousands of heads, as Jews and Christians, Black Lives Matter supporters and neighbors of the mosque gathered with our children and our political and religious leaders to affirm that, as Mr. Omar said, we are all from Minnesota.
“As they say,” said Omar with a grin, “If you have an apple, [an] orange is different than apple, but they all fruit. The beautiful of fruit is the difference. if you don’t have the different fruit, it’s no good.”
And then, he ended the formal presentation. “Now we are serving Minnesota food, which is called Sambusa.” Through laughter, he added, “So it’s official.”
And while we feasted, a gaggle of children—the children of Somali immigrants and the great-grandchildren of blond-haired Norwegians—played a frantic game of soccer as the sun set on a perfect Minnesota day.
