MINNEAPOLIS MUSLIMS’ PRAYERS ANSWERED BY GUILTY VERDICT IN GEORGE FLOYD CASE
▶ Holy month coincides with renewed protests and calls for justice, writes Willy Lowry in Minnesota
Deonte Bryant stands at a small pulpit in a dimly lit basement mosque in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, and reads from an ornate Quran. In slightly American-accented Arabic, he recites verses that explain what happens when a believer kills another by mistake.
“Does it remind you of anything?” asks Mr Bryant, who also goes by the name Abu Bakr.
“Except what happened upstairs was not by mistake.”
He is referring to last year’s killing of George Floyd, only metres from the Namatul Islam Mosque in the basement of the Cup Foods grocery store.
Floyd, 46, died outside the shop on May 25 as Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Last month, Chauvin was convicted of three charges in the killing, including second-degree unintentional murder.
For months after Floyd’s death, protests raged around the world, with calls for racial justice and greater police accountability.
At the bottom of a dark stairwell leading into the Cup Foods basement, the local Muslim community comes to grieve and escape the pain and chaos of the past year.
“It’s pretty easy to shut out the whole world and just focus on praying and after you’re done, get back to work and the real world,” says Mahmoud Abumayyeleh, who owns the building housing the mosque and Cup Foods.
Mr Bryant, who serves as the imam for Friday prayers, says many of the mosque’s 15 worshippers are of Somali descent.
“I think it affected us a lot,” he tells The National.
For the city’s wider Muslim community, the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial came as a relief.
“Immediately, when the judge read the verdicts, you could hear the people screaming, celebrating, a big sigh of relief,” Mr Abumayyeleh says.
Some view the time of Chauvin’s conviction as especially meaningful – the jury made its decision in the second week of Ramadan.
“How fitting is it that it is in Ramadan that we’ve got a little bit of justice, because when we weren’t protesting, I think we were all praying and I think this verdict is definitely a prayer being answered,” says Ifrah Mansour, a Somali-American multimedia artist and teacher in Minneapolis.
The twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul are home to about 40,000 Somali-Americans, by far the largest concentration in the US, and the community has been actively involved in protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
“As a community of people of colour, when you see people like you that are constantly being killed, it really breaks your heart because that is your community that is being hurt,” Ms Mansour tells The National.
Across the US, police kill about three people a day, and people of colour are disproportionately affected.
Officers seldom face charges and convictions are rare.
In December, Somali-American Dolal Idd, 23, was shot and killed in an exchange of gunfire with Minneapolis police. His death was the city’s first police killing since Floyd’s murder, sparking another round of protests.
“You can’t imagine how many calls we’ve received from outside the United States, asking ‘Are you OK, are you safe? Are Muslims safe?’” says Imam Hassan Ali Muhammad of the Dawah Mosque in St Paul.
“Especially Somalis, because Somalis are black Muslims.”
On April 11, as Muslims across Minneapolis prepared to enter the holy month, the city was rocked by another police killing.
Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in a nearby suburb, setting off yet more protests.
For Ruhel Islam, whose restaurant Gandhi Mahal was burnt down in last summer’s protests after Floyd’s death, it has been a difficult 11 months.
“It was very traumatising when we had to see all these problems, the protests, the riots, the burning, and people not getting justice,” Mr Islam says.
The Bangladeshi-American went viral on social media last year when his daughter wrote a Facebook post recounting how she had heard her father say over the phone: “Let my building burn; justice needs to be served.”
The restaurant remains closed, but Mr Islam has opened a temporary location nearby.
He still feels the protests are more important than his restaurant.
“It looks like our voice has been heard,” he tells The National.
“We’ve got some justice coming. But we have more work to do.”
Mr Islam says he is determined to keep supporting protesters and the fight for racial justice.
On a cold evening just before breaking his fast, Mr Islam walks through his temporary restaurant.
He stops near the exit, where letters of appreciation for his support of the protest are preserved in three frames hanging on the wall.
“George Floyd brought a lot of people together,” he says as he looks at the letters. “His death opened up our moral responsibility. It woke us up.”
How fitting is it that it is in Ramadan that we’ve got a little bit of justice ... this verdict is definitely a prayer being answered
IFRAH MANSOUR
Minneapolis resident