IN BELL, CALIFORNIA SHI’ITE MUSLIMS ACTIVE IN CIVIC LIFE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704644404575482001778588866.html
In One City, an Islamic Center Unifies
California Town’s Muslims, Plunging Into Civic Life, Provide Home for Movement to Oust Officials Amid Salary Scandal
By TAMMY AUDI
BELL, Calif.—Infuriated residents of this small southern California city made a national name for themselves when they ousted three municipal officials after revelations of six-figure salaries. Lesser known is that Bell’s citizen revolution is being run from an Islamic community center.
Taxpayer outrage has washed away the wariness that once separated the working-class Roman Catholic and Protestant Latinos who make up Bell’s majority and a quietly flourishing minority of Shi’ite Muslims. The nascent unity in Bell—where 100 people meet regularly at the El-Hussein Center about the ongoing scandal—comes amid controversies in other U.S. cities over the construction or expansion of Islamic institutions.
David McNew for The Wall Street Journal
More than 100 residents met last week in Bell, Calif.’s El-Hussein center. The banner in back, in Arabic, proclaims love for and acceptance of God.
“We’re all victims here,” said Ali Saleh, a Muslim resident and member of the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse, which hosts the community meetings. “Sad to say, but that’s what’s bringing us together.”
A Pew Research report released last month showed 30% of Americans have a positive view of Islam, compared with 42% who held a positive view in 2005. Muslim-American leaders have urged Muslims to counter that image by becoming more visibly involved in political life, but with limited success. Bell has the potential to become the kind of turnaround Muslim-Americans are after as the nation debates their place in American society.
Bell’s former city manager, one of the officials forced out, took home nearly $800,000 a year in pay, and some part-time city council members earned $100,000. Alleging fraud and conspiracy, the state is suing current and former Bell officials.
Tightly packed across just two square miles, Bell is among several small cities tucked amid the sprawling industrial areas southeast of Los Angeles. It’s wedged between four freeways, commercial railway lines and a concrete-lined stretch of the Los Angeles River. In the 1950s and ’60s, Bell’s population exploded.
Longtime Bell residents say white residents began to leave Bell in the 1960s for more spacious suburbs in neighboring Orange County. Race riots in Los Angeles drove more whites away. By 2000, says the U.S. Census, 90% of Bell’s 37,000 population identified as Latino.
For most Bell residents, the community meetings that started at the Islamic center in early August are the first real contact they’ve had with a Muslim community that has been in the city for at least four decades.
“Since I was a little girl, I remember going to school with the Muslim children and they really kept to themselves,” said Cynthia Rodriguez, a 29-year-old mother and lifelong resident of Bell.
She was nervous the first day she walked into the El-Hussein Center, unsettled by the unfamiliar images and Arabic writing. But “disgust and fury” at city officials outweighed her fear.
Then someone offered her a chair. Now, she attends every meeting and is getting to know some of her Muslim neighbors for the first time.
Bell’s Muslims, numbering between 1,000 and 2,000, are Lebanese immigrants who fled civil war in their country in the 1970s and began arriving from the same village, called Yaroun.
They took jobs in the garment industry, bought homes, and built the mosque and community center. Some Lebanese immigrants opened clothing shops in the area and picked up Spanish to communicate with their largely Latino customer base.
Bell’s Muslims said they felt an affinity with their Latino neighbors, if not a closeness. Both groups are immigrants who worked at low-wage jobs or opened small businesses, and both groups sent money to family in their home countries. Even soccer connected them “They work hard, we work hard. Everybody is just working and taking care of their kids” said Mr. Saleh. Bell’s Muslims didn’t get involved with local politics because “we just concentrated on our families and work,” Mr. Saleh said.
But some began to feel it was time for a change in Bell. Last year, another local Muslim named Ali Saleh ran for city council. Then anonymous fliers appeared with images of the candidate’s head on the body of a radical Muslim cleric, with New York’s burning Twin Towers and a message: “Vote NO Muslims.” Mr. Saleh lost.
At a recent city council meeting, the 35-year-old Mr. Saleh, who was born and raised in Bell, stood in front of the city council and a packed house of rowdy Bell residents.
“You told me you were running to protect your people from people like me,” Mr. Saleh said, addressing Luis Artiga, a former opponent in the city council race who won the seat. “Let me tell you, these are all my people!” Mr. Saleh shouted to sustained cheering and applause. “Whether they’re Arab, whether they’re Mexican, whether they Salvadoran, Guatamalan, we are all one.” He then repeated his words in Spanish.
After attending the most recent meeting at the El-Hussein Center, Mr. Artiga, a local pastor of a Southern Baptist church, said he regretted what he said during the campaign and that he had nothing to do with the fliers portraying Mr. Saleh as a terrorist. He and Mr. Saleh shook hands.
The new unity in Bell may soon be tested, however. The community association faces some criticism for its political ties and motives.
But as they have opened up to Bell, Muslim community members said, the response has been mostly positive. Recently a local grocer that caters to Latinos called the Islamic center to ask about stocking Halal items— food that meets Islamic dietary standards.
Muslim leaders say no one has bothered them about their mosque or community center until recently, when they received a letter that read “All I need to know about Islam I learned from 9-11″—from an anonymous sender in Texas.
The meetings at the center are conducted in Spanish and English, with the doors to the center thrown open to the evening air. At a recent meeting, more than 150 residents filled rows of green plastic chairs. Their bored children fidgeted in the back of the room, munching on churros and sipping hot chocolate under stacks of the Quran.
Meanwhile, 76-year-old Robert Mackin, who has lived in Bell since 1941, angry that city council members hadn’t stepped down, shouted at the interim city attorney: “What about the crooks you still work for?”
Unsatisfied, Mr. Mackin walked toward a row of bearded Muslim men and shook their hands. “Good question, good question,” one of the men told him.
Mr. Mackin said he has learned a few things about Islam as he had attended the meetings at the community center. He said he wasn’t sure about one photograph on the wall until one young Muslim man told him it was Mecca. The same young man had asked him whether he was “Christian or Catholic.”
“Well I laughed and said ‘I’m Catholic but Catholics are Christians’,” recalled Mr. Mackin. “He was young, and I guess he didn’t know. Anyway, we’re all learning.”
Write to Tammy Audi at Tamara.Audi@wsj.com
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