Bartamaha (Sandiego):- One foggy morning last week, more than 300 Somalis gathered on Colina Park’s basketball courts. They spread embroidered rugs over the hardtop, removed their shoes and lifted their prayers into the cool air.
They were celebrating Eid al-Adha, the end of the annual five-day pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Around the world, Muslims who cannot make that journey gather for worship, food and partying.
“It’s like another Christmas,” said Ahmed Malinomar, a property manager dressed in new white robes.
The festivities, though, were shadowed by disturbing news. Authorities often describe San Diego’s Somali population as patriotic as a Fourth of July parade. But in the past three months, this tightknit community has been rocked as five local Somalis — including Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, the imam (spiritual leader) of a mosque in City Heights — have been accused of terror-related crimes.
Many local Somalis fled their homeland to escape persecution from violent zealots. How could Mohamud, who preached a peaceful brand of Islam at Masjid Al-Ansar and supported a neighborhood charter school, back a terrorist band?
He didn’t, some insist. “Trust me, there is nothing wrong with him,” said Mohamed Mohamed, a student at Cuyamaca College. “The biggest thing for him was helping the kids.”
Others wonder.
“We don’t defend anybody who is a terrorist,” said Abdikadir Osman, owner of Minnehaha Food Market and the adjacent Safari Grill, one block from Masjid Al-Ansar. “The government says it has the evidence, but you hear from people who say these men are innocent.
“We have to wait and see.”
As they wait, bombshells continue to explode. On Thursday, Nima Ali Yusuf appeared before a federal magistrate, accused of conspiring to send money and recruits to al-Shabab, an Islamist militia battling for control of Somalia.
Earlier this month, Issa Doreh, Basaaly Saeed Moalin and Mohamud were charged with sending money to the same militia. Jehad Serwan Mostafa was indicted on similar charges in August.
Mostafa is thought to be in Somalia. The other four suspects are jailed in San Diego, where their compatriots watch and wonder.
DREAMS AND OBLIGATIONS
Somalia, a coastal nation that wraps around the Horn of Africa, has endured decades of civil war, invasions and piracy. A few hundred Somalis fled to San Diego in the 1980s. Friends and relatives followed in waves, as their homeland descended into chaos.
“Once a few families were here already, it became question of, ‘Is there a place with Somali shops?’ ‘Is there a Somali community building?’ and so on,” said Francis Nesbitt, an associate professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University.
Minneapolis-St. Paul has the United States’ largest concentration of Somalis, about 30,000. San Diego runs second: Abdi Mohamoud, executive director of the Horn of Africa social services agency, estimates a population of 15,000.
Some Somali immigrants can be found in North Park and Clairemont Mesa, but most live in and around City Heights, where markets sell halal frozen pizza, restaurants offer goat stew and shops peddle hijabs and other traditional garb.
This is also home to the Iftin Charter School. Director Abdulkadir Mohamed declined to speculate on whether imam Mohamud will retain his seat on the governing board — “That’s up to the board.” But he noted that the K-8 public school meets Sacramento’s curriculum requirements, that scores on state-mandated exams are climbing, that girls here aren’t teased about headscarves and that many aides and office assistants speak the parents’ native language.
“They find they are not strange here,” he said.
In fact, City Heights is home to newcomers from around the world. The neighborhood includes Mexican bakeries, Vietnamese pho shops, a Chinese Friendship Society and a Cambodian Buddhist temple.
“There are something like 50 languages spoken in this area,” said San Diego police Officer Dave Yu, who has worked here nine years. “It’s amazing.”
Somalis, like most immigrants to this region, struggle to maintain their culture while adapting to free-and-breezy Southern California. Children usually acquire the customs and language faster, but this can lead to family conflict. Parents sometimes suspect that household translators misinterpret situations, especially when it’s to the kids’ advantage.
“We’ve had to mediate some conflicts between parents and children,” said Sgt. Patti Clayton, who works out of a police storefront in City Heights.
Clayton also helps run the East African Youth Organization, which San Diego police founded to introduce young newcomers to certain American benefits (bowling, the beach, Disneyland). It took years for the officer to convince Somali parents that their daughters could participate without older family escorts.
“Our culture and our parents are strict,” said Farhiya Abdi, 17, a Scripps Ranch High student and a member of the youth group. “We can’t do things that other kids can do.”
Such as?
“Partying,” said Farhiya’s 14-year-old sister, Maryan.
For many Somali parents, though, American culture is less nerve-racking than the American economy. Most eke out a living with incomes at or below the poverty line, said Nesbitt at SDSU.
“Lots of people have been laid off because of the economy,” said Mohamoud, the Horn of Africa director. “And rents here are pretty expensive. You tend to see more people living together than before.”
You see crime, too. But burglaries, robberies and car thefts are no more common here than in other densely populated urban settings.
“They are very law-abiding,” Clayton said, “very happy to be free Americans.”
“We all want to live the American dream,” said Osman, the restaurateur and shopkeeper. “Here I can be a positive force in the community — not the Somali community, but the country that has accepted me. I have every obligation to pay back this country.”
TWO CAMPS
On the sidewalks outside the federal courthouse one day this month, about 50 Somalis waited. After an hour, the news came: imam Mohamud would be held without bail.
“There is no need for bail,” said Mohamud Magtayn. “We will all vouch for him. The imam, the man I know, he is not a terrorist. He is a great leader, he is a man of his community, helping people to succeed here and hereafter.”
Asad Mohamed, though, is waiting to see the evidence. “If there’s proof, there’s proof,” said this community service officer, who serves as a liaison between the Somali community and the police department.
If there is proof, how did an Islamist militia gain a foothold in this population?
Naive idealists are sometimes seduced by al-Shabab’s nationalistic rhetoric, said Yasmeen Maxamuud, an Encinitas resident whose “Nomad Diaries” is a 2009 novel about the Somali-American experience.
“Some have gone back to Somalia to fight for ‘freedom,’ but it’s not what they think,” she said. “They get there and e-mail back to their friends, ‘Where are the McDonald’s?’ ”
Ignorance abroad worries Maxamuud, but so does intolerance at home. She cited this summer’s uproar over the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site in New York, and the picketing of mosques in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and Temecula.
“I’ve been in San Diego for five years,” she said. “In all honesty, I’ve never been afraid to go out in my hijab. But recently, there seems to be more fear. I sense it even more than after 9/11.”
That fear echoed among Somalis praying in Colina Park this week.
“We feel like Somalis are being targeted,” said Hussein Haye Nur, a video producer. “The leaders who were arrested, we know them as good leaders.”
But Mohamed, the police liaison, expressed faith in the American judicial system: “Anti-Muslim feeling really scares the people, but it’s different when it’s the U.S. Attorney’s Office indicting someone. They are not going to be acting on some anti-Islamic feeling.”
On this foggy day, the conversation went back and forth, with no clear resolution.
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Source:- Signon Sandiego.
