:sl:
Woooooo, this is my masjid! We're totally famous :D Plus, today at Jummah, a reporter from London came in to take pictures for a piece on Br. Keith! I'm going out to buy a print edition of the Economist this weekend!
http://www.economist.com/world/na/di...ory_id=7946252
Finding a voice
Sep 21st 2006 | MINNEAPOLIS
From The Economist print edition
Coming soon, the first minaret and the first congressman
ON SEPTEMBER 8th ground was broken for the new Masjid An-Nur mosque in north Minneapolis, from which the first minaret seen in Minnesota will pierce the prairie sky. A few days later one of the mosque's more famous worshipers, Keith Ellison, won the state's Democratic primary in the deeply Democratic 5th District. In so doing, Mr Ellison will almost certainly become America's first Muslim congressman, as well as the first black to represent anywhere in Minnesota.
In this once lily-white Lutheran state, these two events point to deep changes. More immigrants arrived in Minnesota in 2005 than in any of the past 25 years. Immigrants from Muslim countries, especially Somalia and Ethiopia, have made up a sizeable part of this wave. Estimates of the number of Muslims in Minnesota range from 40,000 to more than 100,000 and perhaps as many as 150,000.
These are big numbers for a state that had a tiny Muslim population just ten years ago. All the same, one might think that another state with a larger concentration of Muslims—Michigan, perhaps—would have produced a Muslim member of Congress sooner. Four Muslims ran for seats in 2004, two for the Senate and two for the House, but none made it out of the primaries.
The difference in Minnesota seemed to be a sophisticated grassroots campaign, which turned out thousands of new immigrants who had never before voted, or done anything in politics, on a day normally dominated by hard-core party insiders. That machine is the political legacy of Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in 2002. Within a month of his death his supporters established Wellstone Action, which has more than 100,000 members and has trained almost 11,000 people in grassroots campaigning methods and progressive political action.
New immigrants, many of whom were Muslims, seem to have accounted for thousands of the voters who turned up on primary night to support Mr Ellison. Without those votes, he might well not have prevailed over his closest opponent, Mike Erlandson, the former chairman of the Democratic Farmer-Labour Party (DFL).
Those Muslim connections, of course, are also fodder for his rivals. Mr Ellison is a former criminal defence lawyer and state representative who converted from Catholicism to Islam when he was 19. In 1995 he helped to organise the Million Man March—a gathering of blacks in Washington to proclaim unity and responsibility—and thus found himself in the orbit of Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, who is notorious for his anti-Semitic rantings.
Mr Ellison says he has never met Mr Farrakhan. Nonetheless, his Republican opponents and a cadre of conservative bloggers are making merry with his past associations. The Republican Party recently dubbed the DFL “the party of Ellison.” That may be close to the truth. Progressives welcome him as a refreshing change from the party stalwarts who, in recent years, have tended to lose races.
Muslim Democrats see in Mr Ellison someone who can stick up for them as they face suspicion and intimidation. Many of them supported him quietly, for fear of a backlash. But his victory may bring them out into the open—not only in Minnesota, but across the country.