City of Residence:
South Minneapolis, MN
Occupation:
Vice President of Special Assets Group of US Bank
Excerpt:
“My grandparents on both sides actually are American… have American citizenships. They had come to this country, you know many, many years ago. My grandfather on my father’s side was an orphan and came here when he was a teenager. Sort of a typical boat ride, you know, to Ellis Island, kind of story. As the story goes, he was an orphan, he had a brother, they were both orphans. Then his brother died very young, as a teenager. So he, my grandfather, sold… he was kind of a watchman at an olive grove, and he had a donkey. He sold the donkey and bought passage on a ship and came to the United States as a teenager. [He] basically became a traveling salesman. He would travel around the country, basically… you know, what at the time would probably be called a “carpet bagger,” and sell things and trinkets, and assorted things to people door to door. My grandfather on my mother’s side also came to the United States and worked at the Wonderbread bread factory in the Chicago area for many years. My mother and father met in Palestine. My father was in the US Navy during Vietnam as a medical officer operating on wounded soldiers from Vietnam. My father was a surgeon at Saint Francis in Shakopee and became the chief of surgery there. Which is interesting because you have a Muslim chief of surgery at a Catholic hospital where the nurses are nuns.
The fact that growing up in Chaska, at that time was a town of about 7,000 people, so there were no other minorities there. There was nobody else with an ethnic name, or had relations that are in some other foreign country or anything like that. People got to know us, me, my brothers and sisters, and we made more and more friends. Such that I was eventually elected Winterfest King in my senior year, which is essentially a popularity contest; which I think is funny when I look back on where I was in elementary school and middle school, that kind of thing.
I feel that a lot of my being plugged in to the Muslim community has changed actually and it’s more in terms of the challenges faced by the Muslim community here, and in some ways that started in 2001. In many ways that is how I feel plugged in with the Muslim community, because it seems a community that’s under assault by the larger forces in society. It needs people to stand up for it. It needs people to work for its benefit within the context of our government here and our political process, and being involved, and being involved with your neighbors, and your PTA, and your school, and everything.”
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