Assalamu `alaykum,

I found this article in an older TIME magazine last night while I was chilling with my mom at the hospital. It’s about two months old, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Also, note the Daniel Pipes reference.

Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

Minnesota’s Teetotal Taxis

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

(above: Rasheed Gardaad, 29, a cab driver for the past five years, waits in a line at an airport in Minnesota, where Muslim cab drivers don’t want to carry alcohol in their cars.)

Even in religion, where the most insignificant act has cosmic implications, there are big stories and little stories. When an image of Mother Teresa turns up on a cruller, the call is easy. But when a disturbance occurs in the fraught, supersaturated relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, elephantiasis may occur. Witness the tale of Minnesota’s Muslim cabbies.

Starting in 2000, some of the 600-plus Somali Muslims who make up three-quarters of the fleet serving Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport stopped picking up passengers who were carrying duty-free liquor boxes or other obvious signs of booze, returning to the end of the cab line rather than disobey the Prophet Muhammad’s ban on bearing alcohol. Their Islamic jurisprudence might actually have been a little shaky: most varieties of Islam hold that while Muslims in a non-Muslim country may not drink alcohol, they may carry it, something cabbies in most American cities do without a qualm. Still, by last year the total number of refusals topped 5,000, with as many as 77 a month. Passengers spoke of being rebuffed by several cabs in a row. So the airport reached out to the drivers, and along with the local chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS), came up with a seemingly ingenious solution: equip alcohol-bearing cabs with a roof light in one color, dry cars with another, and have dispatchers steer passengers accordingly.

That’s when the matter began to take on a larger significance. Word got out, talk radio blabbed, and “at one point,” says airport spokesman Patrick Hogan, “we were getting a [negative] e-mail every 90 seconds.” Some were vile. Others posed good questions: What would keep dozens of other religious groups from demanding their own preferences, with chaos ensuing? Finally there was the full-dress clash-of-civilizations argument, spun by professional anti-Muslim watchdogs like Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum. The hacks’ demands, he wrote, posed “potentially major implications for the future of Islam in the United States.” Danish TV showed up. Al-Jazeera did a live feed.

The airport brass retreated. This month it called for a 30-day airport-license suspension for first-time nonpickups and two years for the second instance. Late last week, Hassan Mohamud, the MAS representative, was still talking feverishly about finding what he called “an alternative within both systems–the one they believe and the one they are living with.”

That may be tough. Immigrants to the U.S., and others, often think freedom of religion is absolute, but it is balanced against other rights or commercial concerns, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that “reasonable accommodation” of faith can be trumped by “undue hardship” to an employer. Courts have denied Muslims time off for Friday prayers during business hours. A Roman Catholic pharmacist lost his lawsuit last year against Wal-Mart, which fired him after he refused to fill or transfer orders for birth-control pills.

The Twin Cities taxi issue is thus a rite of passage for both the Muslim community and its neighbors. The cabbies may be wrong, but it takes a special sort of paranoia to turn their action into the kind of constitutional threat that caused Pipes, when he heard the airport’s new stance, to trumpet NO ISLAMIC LAW IN MINNESOTA.

A kind of Islamism does exist in Minneapolis: some Somalis demonstrated there recently in support of the brief Islamist takeover of their homeland. But Rasheed Garaad, 29, whom I talked to as he waited to join a terminal cab line, didn’t connect his pickup policy with a desire to change this country.

“I don’t practice Islam as much as back home,” he says. “I just go to Friday prayers. I try to enforce the laws that I think are very important, like praying five times and not drinking alcohol. There are, like, nine different things dealing with alcohol that are forbidden, and for me, I don’t want to do anything with it. This is how we were in Somalia.” As a result, he says, he has bypassed three fares in five years.

What if a judge ruled he had to drive customers with alcohol or find another job? “It would hurt my beliefs,” he says. “But there are rules in this country. If we want to impose our rules and our beliefs, we should stay where we came from. If the court finds that what we are doing is wrong, then it’s wrong. I could get another job.” That sounds both Islamic and realistic.

With reporting by Keri Pickett

Assalamu `alaykum,

President Bush did a 5-nation tour of Latin America recently. Here’s some of the warm welcoming he got:

From Uruguay to Argentina to Colombia, protesters made it pretty clear what they thought of President Bush.

I find it pretty interesting that even South American countries are critical of Bush. Some people on this campus tend to think that if you don’t like Bush, you are either a Democrat or a Muslim. Obviously this isn’t the case. In fact, I believe it was reported somewhere that the majority of the nations of the world don’t really like Bush. Don’t take my word on it, especially because I can’t find an source for it, but I do remember reading it somewhere.

I really wish our country would wisen up, though. It’s about time that President Bush takes a step back and actual evaluates the results of his actions rather than taking another vacation at his farmhouse. How is the demolition of Iraq and its citizens benefiting them or even us? America has pretty much already broken Iraq. So why is America not only senselessly inducing the murder of thousands of innocent civilians but also adding even more on the shoulders of its responsibilities? Through this war, our country continues to fall into greater and deeper debt. At the rate it is growing, I honestly don’t know how we will be able to pay it off. Not only will this burden fall onto our shoulders, but it will continue to fall on those of future generations, generations that have not even been born yet and were not able to voice their opinions on this subject. I mean, think about it. Through the horrific slaughters and the unnecessary presence in Iraq, we are harming both Iraqi citizens and ourselves. Even if one feels no moral obligations to stop this war, he should at least remember that any compensation needed to continue America’s presence there will fall on his shoulders.

Latin Americans luckily do not necessarily share this burden with American citizens, yet they do recognize “el imperialismo,” or the imperialistic attitude, of Bush. If they can comprehend this, why can’t we? If those who will not even be held accountable for this war can understand the problems it produces, why can’t those whom this directly effects make a stance against it?

AlhamdulilLah, it does appear that people are wisening up. There was a massive anti-war rally in L.A. today. Unfortunately, I was not able to make it, but I applaud the efforts and statement of those who represented there. However, as I have learned from others, I find it essential to remind all of us that the action cannot stop here. Insha’Allah we need to continue these actions, make them bigger and larger, widen their breadth of effect, and help others to do the same. Through this and through the unity of our actions, our statements will be bolder and will resound even greater through the country. Insha’Allah let us try to imitate some of the examples that have been given to us through these rallies in Latin America.

Wa `alaykum asalam, peace outttt.