The Most Powerful Community Organizer you've Never Heard Of
Building power for Minnesota's Somali community
It was not yet time for dawn prayers at the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, when a massive explosion shattered the quiet. Cement walls cracked, the windows of the imam’s office splintered, and the sanctuary filled with smoke. Mohamed Omar, the mosque’s executive director, was napping in his office next door. “I know what to expect from a war zone country,” says Omar, a Somali refugee. “I don’t know what could happen in the state of Minnesota, the most peaceful place in the world.”
No one knew what had caused the detonation. Nor could anyone guess that the explosion would propel Omar from Islamic functionary to political activist, transforming politics in this Midwestern state.
Mohamed Omar can talk for hours in four different languages. “In our culture,” he tells me with a huge smile, “a conversation of 90 minutes takes eight hours.” 46 years old, bearded, wearing a skullcap, he translates rapidly between American and Somali cultures. Since the explosion five years ago, he has deployed his skills to launch a political vehicle for Minnesota Muslims in a state that is overwhelmingly white, Christian, and suspicious of immigrants.
The state was in demographic transition when Omar arrived in 2005. People of color, a scant 3.4% of the population in 1980, today account for 22.5%, according to the US Census Bureau. Refugees like Omar have been a significant factor in Minnesota’s growing diversity. The state now has the world’s largest Somali diaspora community – about 100,000 people.
But change hasn’t been easy. Black and brown residents have encountered discrimination and hostility, and Muslims face particular scrutiny. In 2016, someone put pig intestines on the door handle of a Muslim grocery store in St. Cloud grocery store. Two men were shot in a racially motivated attack on five young Somali men in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis. In 2017, a Minneapolis resident bit and stabbed a Somali man, screaming "I hate Muslims!"
For years, Omar and his community of Somali immigrants tried to ignore the rise of hate crimes and anti-Muslim bias incidents. “Our culture is to kind of hide – not to bother,” he says.
After all, the world they came from presented more obvious threats. Omar fled war-torn Somalia at age 14 and spent his teens in Kenyan refugee camps. “Being a refugee was my high school and my college,” he says. His classes were finding food, avoiding violence, and watching relatives die. Along the way, he became a master problem-solver. He organized tenants of a five-story apartment building to purchase a pump so they could have running water. He rigged up a battery-powered amplification system for his mosque so prayers could continue when the power went out.
In Minnesota, Omar continued his improvisational approach to life: he assisted a bookkeeper, refueled airplanes, ran a bookstore, worked as liaison between the Somali community and a local public school, and taught Koran as both paid teacher and volunteer.
In 2011, his mosque purchased an old school in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. Omar was excited at the new site’s potential; he didn’t reckon with his new neighbors’ Islamophobia.
Locals complained about the mosque’s impact on parking, dog walkers, and basketball. Neighbor Sally Ness created a neighborhood group, “Friends of Smith Park,” started a blog, and tried to block the mosque’s purchase of the school. Sitting in her car, she observed the congregation, took photos, videoed children as they attended classes. A website warned Bloomington that “Muslims are in control – literally turning the area into a Third World zone.” The Dar Al-Farooq congregation was unaware of the trouble swirling around them. “We invited her to our mosque,” says Omar. “We gave her sambusa and baklava.”
When the city strictly limited the mosque’s operations, it dawned on the Somali community that this wasn’t just one cranky lady. “This woman had a playbook,” Omar says, “a white nationalist manual – how to block Muslims from coming to your neighborhood.”
The playbook was no metaphor. There is a manual you can buy on Amazon: Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight, which warns about shariah law and cultural victories won by Islamists and says, “it is the responsibility of alert local citizens to plant ‘the land of the free, home of the brave’ flag and then fiercely hold the ground.”
On August 5th, 2017, Omar was blasted awake by the explosion next door to his office. (Fortunately, no one was hurt.) The firefighters showed up, then the police, FBI, ATF, bomb squad, and media.
Looking for support, Omar called Imams, friends, and a Muslim advocacy organization. Nobody answered the phone. “Everybody is scared and they don’t know what happened,” Omar says. “Everyone is saying something exploded in the Imam’s office. [We] have all been accused many times of terrorism.” He called his family to say farewell, wondering if he was about to be locked up for a crime in which he was the victim.
A colleague with experience in interfaith organizing helped Omar organize a press conference, at which rabbis, priests, ministers, and the state’s archbishop denounced the attack. “And from that moment,” says Omar, “the media coverage changed from ‘something exploded at the mosque’ to ‘a pipe bomb was thrown’.” (The culprits turned out to be a trio of white supremacists from Illinois, part of a militia called “The White Rabbit.”)
For Omar, the bombing was a signal it was time to stop hiding. “Let the world get to know who we are.” He hosted a public solidarity event, expecting a few dozen attendees. 1,500 people showed up, including U.S. Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, CNN, and MSNBC. “That was the day we were born again.”
After the bombing, Dar Al-Farooq became the object of white nationalist attention. “Random people showed up on our doorsteps wanting to take pictures wearing military style outfits,” says Omar. A group called Third Rail began publishing propaganda linking the mosque to ISIS. Frightened Muslim parents withdrew their children from the religious school. Omar’s wife and six children moved to Egypt, convinced Minnesota was too dangerous.
But Omar wouldn’t give up. In partnership with a Christian community organizing group, he founded the Muslim Coalition of ISAIAH, began registering voters, and built a list of 120,000 Muslim voters. Creating the new group required permission from Somali elders, so Omar obtained a “fatwa,” a ruling on Islamic law, allowing mosques to collaborate with churches and secular organizations.
The coalition Omar created rapidly became the largest Islamic organizing platform in the Midwest, with 45 member mosques, 25 teams of grassroots leaders meeting monthly across Minnesota. Every spring, 500 people attend “Muslim Day at the Capitol,” where they bring their concerns directly to lawmakers. With over 100,000 Minnesota Muslims in the Coalition’s voter file, Muslim voters have begun to provide the margin of victory in local elections.
Without Omar’s negotiating skills, the coalition might have fizzled. “The stuff we have dealt with in organizing [the Coalition],” says Doran Schrantz, executive director of ISAIAH, the Muslim Coalition’s institutional home, “most white people would faint. It’s knives out. It is raw. You use every tool in the toolbox. But Mohamed is better at it than they are. He knows where every body is buried.”
So far, the Coalition’s policy accomplishments have been modest. In St. Cloud, the group persuaded the city to repave the street where many Somalis live, which had deteriorated for decades. In St. Paul, Muslim Coalition members successfully campaigned for a ballot initiative restoring municipal trash collection.
But the experience of power has been enormous: for the first time, Minnesota Muslims have a public voice and a way to participate in civic life. “Politicians cannot represent us,” Omar says. “Our community voice has to come from our community.”
Somali Muslims embody every target of right-wing animosity: Black, Muslim, immigrants. But thanks to Mohamed Omar’s leadership, they have started to explode stereotypes and claim their place in public life.