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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
I live blocks away from the Brooklyn mosque accused of funding al-Qaida, where angry Muslim men rage against John Ashcroft, blame 9/11 on the Jews, and ask me out for coffee.
Mar 7, 2003 | On Tuesday, Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress that Muhammad Ali Hassan al-Mouyad, a Yemeni cleric, raised $20 million for al-Qaida at the Al-Farooq mosque in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, less than three miles from the World Trade Center site. To many who've paid attention to the mosque over the years, the charges weren't entirely surprising: Al-Farooq is famous for its extremism and has been tied to radical Islamist activity since the late 1980s.
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the one-eyed cleric currently imprisoned for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing, was imam at the Brooklyn mosque for two months in 1990. A Chicago Tribune article from Dec. 11, 2001, reports that Al-Farooq served as a base for Ali Mohammed, a "top military trainer" for Osama bin Laden who played a role in the 1998 African embassy bombings. According to the New York Times, the mosque raised money for Osama bin Laden until 1994.
Yet Al-Farooq's Muslim neighbors and worshippers furiously dismiss Ashcroft's allegations as the latest salvo in a government war against Islam, and as the charges against their mosque mount, so too does their rage at the United States. "This is a mosque for prayer, for prayer," says the mosque's president Amin Awad, a squat, jolly-looking man in a well-cut suit and trench coat. "We had nothing to do with Sheik Abdel Rahman -- I kicked him out. We have nothing to do with al-Qaida -- I never paid them one penny." He opens his jacket and says, "Here, search me. We will be more than happy if Ashcroft stops his incitement against Muslims."
In a neighborhood that's seen itself as under siege since Sept. 11, people seem to feel victimized by Ashcroft's charges, even as a few young hotheads express sympathy with the goals of al-Qaida. Conspiracy theories multiply in the growing alienation. Accusations against the mosque are "Jewish propaganda, from the Jewish media," says Ahmed Abed, a 48-year-old from Algeria who works in a neighboring Islamic store. "Anyone goes to the bathroom and shits, they say, 'The Muslims did it.'"
In the last year, such talk has grown common on the section of Atlantic Avenue surrounding Al-Farooq. It's a fairly forlorn area right on the edge of gentrification. Instead of the rows of inviting Middle Eastern restaurants that line the Avenue farther west, there's just a diner and a greasy kabob house. Though most of the shops are filled with Islamic books and clothes for men and women, as well as heaps of incense and fragrant soaps and oils, there's also a video store run by Sudanese immigrants well-stocked with porn and slasher flicks.
I ask Timothy Hicks, a 37-year-old follower of Louis Farrakhan, why everyone was so convinced that Jews were behind Ashcroft's allegations. "People around here are more in tune with what's going on," he says. "Abraham Foxman" -- the president of the Anti-Defamation League -- "is a real evil, demonic person. He's part of a cabal of Zionism that wants to rule the world."
Such sentiments are largely limited to the blocks right around the mosque. A few blocks west is an older, more prosperous Middle Eastern neighborhood where anti-Semitism is almost unheard of. The area around Al-Farooq, by contrast, is a mix mainly of newer immigrants from North Africa and black Muslims, and a sense of dispossession fuels a hothouse of persecution fantasies. "Before, people feel good in America, the country of democracy, of justice," says Adbul Mandi, the soft-spoken 40-year-old clerk at Al Quaraween Islamic books. "Now they feel like they are marginalized." On those few blocks, a chasm seems to have opened between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors.
I'm one of those neighbors. My apartment is a 10-minute walk from Al-Farooq. My Jewish mother-in-law lives a block and a half away from the mosque; you can hear the muezzin's call to prayer from her backyard. My sister-in-law's coffee shop is a block away, and on Wednesday it was buzzing with gossip about the street's rumored terrorist underground.
Still, the street remains friendly and welcoming, and it can be hard to reconcile how comfortable it is with the mounting paranoia I hear whenever talk turns to politics. People don't become hostile when I tell them I'm Jewish; it's as if they hate Jews not as individuals but as some mystical oppressive force responsible for all their dissatisfactions. The mosque itself is a symbol of that cognitive dissonance. It's both a neighborhood fixture, so familiar I hardly notice it, and, if the government is right, a haven for those who would happily see me killed.
