RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Imam Arrests Show Shift In Muslim Outreach Effort,” by Dina Temple-Raston for NPR, July 19 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

[…] To understand the events that unfolded two months ago in Miami, you need to know that one of the most volatile things that can happen in a Muslim-American community is the arrest of a religious leader, the imam. Back in May, the FBI’s Miami field office ended up arresting two of them: Imam Hafiz Khan and his son, Izhar Khan. They were charged along with several other members of the Khan family with financing terrorism in Pakistan.Hafiz Khan is the leader of the Miami Mosque in west Miami — the oldest mosque in South Florida. His son runs the Masjid Jamaat al-Mumineen Mosque in Margate, Fla., just outside Miami. What makes these particular arrests unusual is the way the local Muslim community reacted to them: The arrests didn’t spark outrage or demonstrations. Instead, the way they were handled is being lauded as a model for the way law enforcement and communities should work together. […]

“At 6 o’clock in the morning, we have the first prayer of the morning, and it was a little before 6 o’clock, like five minutes before,” says Sayeed Shamin Akhtar, standing outside the Miami Mosque. He was there the morning the elder Khan was arrested. “After the prayer started, then someone banged on the door like ‘boom, boom, boom.’ FBI-style of course, you can understand.”

Akhtar was on his knees in the very first row of the prayer hall. “We were all sitting down and standing up and thinking of God and God was looking at us and we were just praying,” he said.

While the people inside were praying, more than a dozen agents in their FBI windbreakers had surrounded the mosque. Local police had pitched in. They cordoned off a two-block area in the neighborhood. The Miami Mosque is an ordinary-looking, one-story stucco house in the middle of a quiet, residential neighborhood. Without knowing it was a mosque, one would drive right by it. That Saturday, once the prayers had finished, an agent and a translator approached the imam.

“[The agent] came into the masjid with his shoes off. And he went straight to the imam. He grabbed his hand, and he said, ‘You’re coming with me,’ in Pashto,” Akhtar said. (Khan’s native language is Pashto.)

The people in the mosque that morning were stunned. “Like a bolt of lightning had happened,” Akhtar said.

Gillies, the FBI agent in charge, had been standing outside, and he watched as officers put Khan into a squad car and drove away. Then he picked up his cellphone and started dialing up leaders in the community. One of the people he phoned was Mohammad Shakir, who works for the Office of Community Advocacy in Miami-Dade County.

“The FBI was decent enough that they called us before they called the press,” Shakir said. “On the phone, he said, ‘Look, this has taken place. I personally was there. I supervised it. I made sure that everything goes by the book. No violation. No rudeness. No discrimination. Not to violate the mosque sanctity.’ So we immediately called a meeting and got together and developed a strategy how to respond.”

This may all sound like common sense, but these kinds of arrests rarely happen this way. The Muslim community is usually left to sort through rumor and innuendo. It is caught flat-footed when the media call for comment. The worst-case scenarios are often embraced as fact, and it often takes weeks to sort fact from fiction.

In the Miami case, there was a lot of attention to detail. The FBI waited for the morning prayers to end. The agent took off his shoes before entering the mosque. The FBI didn’t arrest or handcuff the imam inside the mosque. The leaders in the Muslim community were kept informed. In fact, they saw a copy of the indictment before the media did, and Gillies called them just minutes after the arrest….