The Orange Tree

by Martin Ganzglass

  Jama and Abdulkadir arrived, just before noon, at the Profile Event Center, a privately owned building for meetings and social events, near the University of Minnesota campus. The local Somalis simply called it University Hall. A room had been set aside for the marriage ceremony. There were no chairs. Instead it was luxuriously decorated with richly covered rugs laid on top of the room’s regular carpeting. Jama and Abdulkadir were seated cross legged to the right of the Imam along with two of the bride’s uncles. Osman, the understandably nervous groom, his father, two brothers and his uncle were to the Imam’s left. The Imam sat in front of a wooden stand, inlaid with mother of pearl in a diamond design, the Holy Koran opened before him.

  After the Imam recited an opening prayer, he asked who was giving the bride away. Abdulkadir named Jama who stated the girl’s bride price. The Imam asked Osman if he accepted the girl as his wife and agreed to the price and conditions, Osman answered, “Yes before the witnesses present,” and the Imam acknowledged the groom’s agreement. He then gave a speech about marriage, how the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, extolled four attributes of a bride: religion, family, beauty and wealth. The Imam emphasized the faith of Abdulkadir’s daughter, that she was a good Muslim, had studied the Holy Koran and adhered to the Five Pillars of Islam although she was too young to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca; he spoke of the integrity of Abdulkadir and the good Muslim household he had maintained for his wife and children; he confessed that although he had not met the bride, her reputation as a woman of unblemished beauty had preceded her and finally, he noted that she was well educated and brought to the marriage a good job, which of course he knew she would relinquish when children were born. He concluded by reading a few verses from the Holy Koran, emphasizing the importance of piety, the obligations of Osman to provide for his wife and her family and her obligations to be modest and to raise their children in a good Moslem household and teach them to respect their father and to follow the faith.

  Jama was disappointed by the generality of the sermon. Except for naming Abdulkadir, Osman or the bride, it could have been a generic statement for any young Muslim couple. It was unfortunate, he thought, that this Imam had been brought in at the last moment. The Imam who knew both families had unexpectedly been called out of town. From what Abdulkadir had said, Jama assumed that the regular Imam would not have declared only the man could work to provide for his family. Some of Jama’s more conservative friends were troubled when their daughter-in-laws continued working. For them, it reflected poorly on their son’s ability to earn enough to support his family. They also thought it was unseemly for a woman to work and be near other men. Even if she dressed modestly. Jama was not bothered by such changes. What was traditional in Somalia, was not the way in the U.S. Jama knew he and Medina would be happy if their son, Mohamed, married an educated woman who had her own career. The woman would be happier and more fulfilled as a person and it would make them a stronger couple. First, Mohamed will go to college he thought and get his degree. Time enough for marriage after he graduated.

  Lunch was a much more lively affair with about 75 male relatives and friends of Abdulkadir and the groom’s family grouped at round tables of 14. Jama found himself listening to a discussion of the difficulties of sending remittances back to relatives in Somalia.

  “My mother can’t travel away from her village. She is afraid of these bandits and militias. Young kids with guns who steal everything, even from old people,” said a middle aged lean man, seated across from Jama. “She cannot engage in trade as she used to and earns next to nothing. It pains my heart to know she is suffering. Before 9/11, I was sending her $100 a month. After 9/11 the Americans saw every dollar sent abroad as financing terrorists. I was besides myself with worry,” he said pulling on his dark beard to emphasize the anxiety he had felt before turning his attention to the large piece of roast beef on his plate.

  “Ah, Musa, you are from Ohio,” the man next to him responded, as if that State was a place one was condemned to live in as punishment. “You Somalis from there are disorganized. Here in Minnesota we forgot our tribal differences and united. We went to our representatives. We even met with Senator Coleman. All of us from different tribes. We explained Hawadlah transfers, how our money is sent to banks in the middle east used by merchants in Somalia.

  They pay our relatives the amounts we send and the merchants use our transferred monies to purchase goods for their businesses. The Senator knew it has nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”

  “So what happened?” Musa asked, waving his fork in the air. “It is still difficult for me. I have to work through out of state banks and the fees I pay are higher.”

  “You need to think outside your tribe. Act for all Somalis” his neighbor reprimanded him. “We did. Senator Coleman’s staff arranged for a meeting with the U.S. Treasury. Then with some State Legislators. We now work through Minnesota banks, right here in the Twin Cities and they have been assured by the U.S. Treasury what we are doing complies with the money provisions of that anti-terrorist law they passed. Our community sends almost $1 million a month to families all over Somalia.”

  Jama had been taught, as a Police Officer, to think nationally instead of tribally. It was natural for him, in the Virginia Somali community, because of his training, to be a strong advocate of Somali unity. But he had failed to bring the others along. In northern Virginia, Somalis were fragmented along the same tribal lines as if they were living in Mogadishu, killing each other with random mortar attacks on residential areas and at strategic checkpoints throughout the city. Each sub-clan was suspicious of the others, each one jockeying for positions of influence with Virginia county and city officials who were clueless about the underlying tribal antagonisms. Jama was disgusted that they would not even cooperate with each other to try and resolve the problems all Somalis faced in the U.S.: difficulties in transferring money back home, bureaucratic delays with immigration and political asylum applications and lack of translators in dealing with local government offices and schools.

  The only event that had brought all the Somalis in northern Virginia together was the vandalizing of the Dar al Noor mosque, the House of Light, a few weeks after 9/11. It had been built in 1990, one block off the commercial strip of Leesburg Pike in Arlington County, on the edge of a residential area. They had worshipped there without incident for almost ten years. The Congregation, mainly Somalis, with some Iraqis, Sudanese, Egyptians and Malians, had grown with the immigrant population of Arlington and nearby Alexandria. They had just completed a new day care center, a one story building with wide windows and a patio play area surrounding three quarters of the center.

  The mosque’s custodian had called the President of the Board early one Monday morning. The word had spread quickly throughout their congregation. Jama had arrived by midmorning and found a crowd, mostly of young unemployed Somali men yelling at no one in particular but voicing their anger at the desecration.

  Jama surveyed the mosque and grounds with the eye of a professional policeman at a crime scene. The walls of the mosque and the beautiful high dark wooden doors with the long brass handles had been painted with slogans, showing little imagination and judging by the length of the dripping from the ugly black letters, a heavy index finger on the spray cans’ nozzles. “Arabs go home. Moslum pigs. Fucking arab pigs. Fuck you. We’ll kill you. Kill all Arabs,” and “USA kicks fucking ass.” The last insult was too long for the remaining space on the pale yellow wall and curved down toward the sidewalk in descending smaller letters with the word “ass” ending just above the pavement.

  They had taken the picnic tables on the day center patio and thrown them through the windows and rampaged inside sweeping children’s books off the shelves, knocking over cabinets and smashing the small chairs and desks where the children usually sat.

  The crowd in the parking lot had increased, mostly men from the congregation but a few curious people from the neighborhood, who stood out as white faces in a sea of black. Jama sensed
that the young Somalis needed direction before they erupted and took their rage out on those who had nothing to do with the desecration.

  He approached the Board members and spoke quietly to them. They knew his police background and agreed that he should take charge.

  He quickly sent some of the stronger, younger men, with the custodian, to Home Depot to buy paint remover and cleaning supplies, plywood and tarpaulins for the broken windows of the day care center and large plastic containers for the shattered furniture and trash. He instructed the custodian to form work crews and put the young men’s energy to good use. He organized others, under the direction of one of the Board members, to set up a schedule for guarding the mosque in four hour shifts, starting that evening. He convinced the President of the Board to drive to the County Council Building and demand police protection. He asked another Board member, who like himself was a former Somali Police Officer, to come up with a plan for temporary security around the mosque’s grounds. He went into the mosque office and called his wife. He asked her to contact the women and organize them to make food for the work crews and the guard patrols.

  Later that afternoon, he met with the Arlington County police who were both cooperative and surprisingly sympathetic. Jama explained that members of the congregation would be on the grounds 24 hours a day, armed only with cell phones. The police gave him the telephone number of the nearest station as the first number to call before 911 and promised that patrol cars would swing by every few hours after dark. The sergeant was not optimistic they would make any arrests. He suggested Jama report it to the FBI as a hate crime, something Jama hadn’t thought of. He immediately saw the merit of having the federal government involved.

  That evening, the Board and the Imam held an urgent special meeting in the mosque’s conference room. Jama suggested that a delegation meet with the County Council and County Supervisor and with their Congressman, all of whom, he pointed out, were up for reelection in early November. No one in their Somali community had ever been involved in political action before. Normally, his idea would have been rejected. The other Somalis would have viewed it as a scheme by Jama to further his own clan ahead of the interests of others. But, the shock of the attack on their mosque overcame their usual narrow tribal prejudices. They agreed. Finally, he suggested that the Iman reach out to the Rabbi of the Temple on the other side of Leesburg Pike. In the past, their only contact with the Temple had been asking for permission to use its lot for the mosque’s overflow parking on Fridays during Ramadan.

  “Why do we need the help of Jews,?” Mohamoud Haji Hassan asked, screwing up his mouth in distaste at the idea. He was a bulky man with large square shoulders, giving him the appearance of having no neck. Although he was seated, he still managed to look down on Jama when he spoke. His tone indicated that Jama’s idea was not even worth considering.

  Jama was not intimidated. “You are as ignorant now as when you served in Siad Barre’s government,” Jama said, playing up to the resentment of other Board members that Mohamoud had been a Deputy Minister in the dictator’s employ, while the rest of them had been in exile. “I do not care whether they are Jews or Christians. We need the help of other religious leaders to condemn the desecration of our place of worship and to pressure the authorities to protect our mosque.”

  The Imam noted helpfully that the Holy Koran directs Moslems to bring the Message to the People of the Book and in Allah’s sight they are all His servants. Slyly, with a slight smile, he stated that one cannot bring the Message if one cannot talk to them. The other Board members nodded their heads in agreement.

  So the Imam spoke to the Rabbi, who brought the Imam to an interfaith meeting of religious leaders in Northern Virginia. That network used its established media connections, and the doors of the Somali community’s elected officials were opened and letters were sent from the halls of Congress to the FBI Director’s Office. The end result was the media wrote sympathetic stories about tolerance and a few people became more educated about Islam and recognized that the Moslems living among them were not terrorists. No one was ever apprehended for the vandalism. But no more acts of desecration occurred at the Dar al Noor Mosque or at any other mosque in northern Virginia.

  Jama had tried, unsuccessfully, to build on this one instance of unity, when they had taken political action as Somalis and not as clan representatives. No one had wanted a political action committee they could not control for their own clan’s advantage. The terrible curse of Somali tribalism prevailed in their adopted country. In Minnesota they had achieved something with the Hawadlah legislation. In Northern Virginia, further efforts of uniting the Somali community for the greater good had foundered.

  Jama looked around at the men at the wedding reception. The younger men, the ones in their twenties, were clustered at the back the hall, their jacket collars still turned up, having come in after a quick smoke outside. Which of them, he wondered, after having been uprooted from Somalia by war, would make the most of being refugees in the US and seize the opportunities a good education offered them. And which ones, adrift and consumed by the daily irritation of perceived insults to family and religion, their anger eating away at them like a cancer, aching to avenge the slights to their honor, would join gangs or soak up the poison of radical Islamic web sites and begin a new cycle of violence. They were orphans- neither Somalis nor Americans, and highly susceptible to the seductive message of radicals which appealed to their duty as Moslems and men.

  Jama looked around the back of the room for his son but could not locate him. Nothing frightened Jama as much as when he saw Mohamed seething with uncontrollable anger. He knew which path Mohamed took was all in Allah’s hands. But still, Jama vowed as a father to do everything in his power to prevent Mohamed from acting impulsively and irretrievably destroying his own life. Analytically, he knew he criticized his son too much and was overly strict.

  That he acted out of love for Mohamed, only spoke to his motivation not the consequences of alienating him.

  As for the elderly men in the room, Jama knew many would never live to return to Somalia. They also recognized it in their hearts. Yet, they blindly continued to promote the same divisiveness that made it impossible for them to return. They congregated at Starbucks throughout cities in the United States, frequented only by members of their own subclans. In the apartment buildings of Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland and Toronto, and the suburban townhouses of Seattle and northern Virginia, they isolated themselves by clan in separate buildings, or even on separate floors. They carried their tribal disputes, based on the fighting in Mogadishu last week, to the malls and neighborhoods of the U.S., where all they did was talk and plot endlessly about how their tribe could gain dominance in whatever government was in charge in Somalia at the time. There were no nationalists in the Somali diaspora, Jama thought. No George Washingtons. No Nelson Mandelas. No unifying figure to end Somalia’s suffering. Someday, Jama would return with Medina and the children, to a unified and peaceful Somalia. He muttered Inshallah, God willing, softly under his breath, hoping God would also protect his son and give Mohamed inner peace as well.

  That evening it was the women’s turn. There were more of them than had been at the men’s luncheon. This was a dinner party and dance. All the female relatives and the bride’s friends were there. Some of them, the elderly and more conservative, would not attend the mixed party on Saturday night. But tonight, everyone was in high spirits.

  They had arrived at University Hall, bundled up against the wind and driving snow in long, bulky winter coats, their heads covered with heavy scarves to protect their hair, their hands gloved and their feet booted. They flocked upstairs to the Diamond Hall. At the cloak room, they shed their drab winter outer plumage, discarding the coats, gloves and boots and emerged like tropical birds of paradise in brilliant greens, iridescent blues, scarlet over pink and red, bright yellow clashing with pale orange, their gold bracelets, necklaces, rings and earrings sparkling in the light, defying the dark of t
he foreign northern winter.

  Amina was intoxicated with the chatter of so many Somali women, the combined smells of perfume and incense, the sights of the flame orange, mustard yellow and deep blue traditional Benadir cloth draped over the Hall’s sofas, the green and gold stitched cushions with the intricate Arabic circular patterns, and the tall, wide woven baskets encased with leather and decorated with horizontal bands of cowry shells, serving as planters. She abandoned herself with unrestrained joy to her culture, her people, her sisterhood, motherhood and community, the feeling of inclusiveness and familiarity and comfort and uninhibited safety of being among women. Her wedding to Earl had been nothing like this. It couldn’t have been. She hadn’t realized what a significant part of herself she had rejected by marrying Earl. She flung herself into this dinner as if it was her own wedding, her own dance of happiness among her relatives and friends.

  Following dinner, it was time for the Buraanbur, dancing and the poem about the groom and his family. The women formed a loose circle around a rug that had been placed on the wood parquet floor, and began clapping rhythmically to the drum being beaten by the bride’s sister. The bride’s aunt, a woman renowned for her poetry, held a hand mike and began chanting the poem she had written for her niece’s wedding. Amina listened with delight, as the aunt first extolled the well known dancing abilities of the men of the groom’s family, how they were lean and jumped high like impalas, marveling at the cleverness of the aunt, each line beginning, as required by traditional Somali poetry, with the same sound and, laughing along with the others, as each verse ended with the phrase- waa dega weyn wahay, - but he has big ears.