Somalis in Minnesota

Misguided Religious Passion

the Somalis    51 battle groomed and toughened up, ready to take their fights to the streets. Erin Carlyle, writing for City Pages, described the shift: “As the clique grew, some of the new members . . . started getting into trouble—stealing cars or committing robberies. Before long the community began to regard them as a gang.” Then they “became a state-­ documented gang after five of them were involved with the robbing and killing of a Somali woman.” It is not surprising that the newly formed Somali street gangs soon turned on each other, vying for turf, recognition, and respect among their peers. And, as some of these young men aged with few skills other than fighting, the gangs took a criminal turn. One group is alleged to have developed into a prostitution ring, eventually spreading across state lines. Thirty suspects were indicted, bringing nationwide media attention to Minnesota. And though the federal investigation has been ongoing since 2007, so far only ten suspects have been brought to trial, with three proven guilty and seven released. The rest of the matter remains unresolved, but the community has been engulfed in a cloud of suspicion.51 Misguided Religious Passion Cultural and religious misunderstandings were problematic for the adult Somali community at the same time that their children were struggling. One example hit the news in the summer of 2006, when a few ill-informed Somali airport taxi drivers, ignorant of both their religious obligations and the laws of the community, were accused of refusing to transport blind passengers and their guide dogs as well as passengers carrying alcohol. At these reports, Minnesota’s Somalis engaged in lively debate: what did their religion dictate about staying away from both dogs and alcohol, and what did the law dictate about not allowing discrimination based on disability? Moderate groups 52    people of minnesota spoke out against the drivers, as did Muslim clerics, while all concerned sought to appease and educate people both inside and outside the community.52 Then, shattering news shocked Minnesota’s Somalis when, in October 2008, they woke to learn that one of their own, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had earned the dubious distinction of being the first American suicide bomber in Somalia. Shirwa Ahmed took his own life and the lives of thirty others in northwestern Somalia, in an area sometimes known as Somaliland. It soon followed that about twenty other young, impressionable, and vulnerable Somali males, all from the Minneapolis area, were either missing or known to already be in terrorist training camps or in the trenches with al-Shabaab, a radical al-Qaeda–­ affiliated Somali terror group. Al-Shabaab has come to be known for its brutality, stoning to death girls accused of adultery, chopping the hands of others accused of theft, and strapping young boys into suicide vests and sending them off to commit mayhem and mass murder. Most of the young men were lured by the radical group after Ethiopia’s army had marched through the Somali capi­ tal, Mogadishu, for the first time in the two countries’ history. These men were either quite young when they had left Somalia or were raised in refugee camps or in America and did not remember much about what they and their families had run away from. Somalis and Ethiopians have been archenemies throughout their history, though in many ways the two peoples and countries are culturally similar. Now that Ethiopians had invaded Somalia under the pretext of fighting terrorists of what was then called the Islamic Courts—composed of religious groups, some of which later turned out to be al-Shabaab, which had taken control of most of southern Somalia in 2006—the group had a cause to call to arms: “liberating the nation.” And these young men from Minnesota, facing some difficulties the Somalis    53 in their new home but also assured of a promising future, fell into the trap and ended up in al-Shabaab death camps. The news caught the Somali community by surprise. Once again, clouds of suspicion brought questions about how some of their young men could have been approached by al-Shabaab and who financed their recruitment and travel. Underscoring that the community was feeling heated pressure from the FBI, the Minnesota chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations spoke out loudly. Professors Cawo Abdi and Abdi Samatar at the University of Minnesota also expressed their alarm and charged that...