Sultan Knish
Walk along Church Avenue past Beverly Road and turn east onto McDonald
Avenue and you will see where the old standards of working class
Brooklyn, aging homes with faded American flags and loose siding
flapping in the wind, surly bars tucked into the shadows of street
corners and the last video stores hanging on to a dying industry give
way to mosques and grocery stores selling goat meat.
Mosques
grow like mushrooms in basements and above stores offering halal
patties, pizza and fried chicken. Newspapers with strange characters
peer through the broken glass of red vending machines. Old men glare at
interlopers, especially if they are infidel women, and old women finger
the fringes of colorful shawls behind the dirty windows of
hole-in-the-wall stores.
This is where Mohammed Siddiquee settled a dispute the old-fashioned way by beheading his landlord.
Mohammed
beheaded Mahuddin Mahmud making it a case of Mohammed on Mohammed
violence almost in time for the original Mohammed's birthday. Mohammed
wasn't the first man in Brooklyn to use violence to settle a rental
dispute, but beheadings are more traditional in his native Bangladesh
than in Brooklyn.
Four years ago in Bangladesh, a bricklayer was
murdered and his severed head burned in a kiln because a fortune teller
had told the owners that this was the way to make the malfunctioning
kiln produce red bricks. Over in Brooklyn's neighboring borough Queens,
Ashrafuzzaman Khan, Bangladesh's most wanted war criminal, heads up the
local Islamic Circle of North America, whose Islamist thugs beheaded
poets and buried professors in mass graves.
But beheadings are still unusual on Avenue C even if there is a mosque near Old New Utrecht Road.
Here
in Kensington, where the alphabet streets that march across Brooklyn
down to the ocean in Coney Island begin, the streets are dusty and the
bars retreat along with the alphabet from those areas marked by the
green and the crescent, by the alien newspaper and the angry glare. And
there is another one like it at the other end of the alphabet where the
Atlantic Ocean terminates the letters at Avenue Z bookending the
Brooklyn alphabet with angry old men and phone cards for Bangladesh.
These
spots are not quite no-go zones yet. There aren't enough young men with
too much welfare and too much time on their hands who have learned that
the police will back off when they burn enough things and councilmen
will visit to get their side of the story.
For now first
generation immigrants who look decades older than they are and their
young children walk the streets. That generation will grow up being
neither one thing nor the other, neither American nor Bangladeshi,
ricocheting from American pop culture to the Koran, from parties with
the infidels to mosque study sessions until they explode from the
pressure of the contradictions the way that the Tsarnaevs who huffed pot
and the Koran in equal proportions did.
It isn't the old men
who plant bombs near 8-year-olds. And it's not the prematurely aged
first generation immigrants who work at construction sites and send
money back home. They may keep quiet when they hear such plans being
discussed at their local mosque, but they are too tired and too
uncertain of this strange country to venture them on their own.
It
isn't the old women in black waiting in line for goat or the young
women laughing with their friends outside a pizza parlor, knowing that
in a year or two it will be time for them to go back home for an
arranged marriage. It is the young men who have too much time and energy
on their hands, the pampered princes of the old women who call
themselves Freddy or Mo at the local high school or community college,
who drink and do drugs and who all their American friends swear aren't
serious about religion, until they suddenly become fatally serious about
their religion.
But all that is still in the future. Avenue C
hasn't given birth to its first suicide bomber yet. The Bangladeshi
settlements in Brooklyn are quiet places. The mosques rise in gray
cement and the tenements and shops close off the streets into small
private worlds with their own justice systems, feuds and secrets.
Overhead
may be the same washed out Brooklyn sky, but here and there are
miniature slices of Bangladesh, Pakistan or Egypt where the air has a
stale smell and the atmosphere is threatening.
Immigration
has cut these places off from America and attached them surgically to
countries that are thousands of miles away. Immigrants step off a plane
from Bangladesh at JFK airport, get into a taxi driven by a Bangladeshi
playing Bengali pop tapes and step out into a small slice of Bangladesh
on McDonald Avenue.
And when the infidels of Brooklyn wander into their territory, they are glared at as the foreign intruders that they are.
After
Mohammed beheaded Mahmud, he rushed to JFK to catch a flight. It was
natural for him to think that having settled matters in the brutal style
of the Muslim east, that he could fly away as easily as he had arrived
here without considering what lay in the intervening spaces of the
American Dar al-Harb between the Dar al-Islam of Avenue C and the Dar
al-Islam of Bangladesh.
For the Mohammeds of Brooklyn, the
infidels are the space between the stars, the empty air between the
rungs of a ladder that their foot passes through without noticing. In
the Little Bangladesh and the Little Mogadishu and in Dearbornistan and a
thousand other places like them, the non-Muslim is regarded as the
minority by a majority whose worldwide numbers are too great to view
itself as a minority. Its supremacism is founded on a long history of
conquests.
They are little aware of the other Brooklyn that they
are pushing aside, the great stretches of the working middle class, the
little homes where police officers and firefighters once lived together
with teachers and clerks, where plumbers walked to work and bus drivers
got on, where the thousands of small businesses from diners to
pharmacies turned the grassy stretches of land into neighborhoods.
Bugs
Bunny was born here with his Flatbush accent along with a million real
workers, soldiers, sailors, inventors, engineers, bums and salesmen who
won wars, broke cases, sobbed in bars and brought dinner home to their
families. And now, like so much of the urban working class, they are
being slowly swept away by time and tide, not from the familiar shores
of Coney Island, but by the murkier waters of the Karnaphuli River and
the strange world that its tides bring to Brooklyn.
Neighborhoods
are defined by the people who live in them, not by the lines on a map
in the basement of a municipal building. The city has always had its
micro communities; Chinatown at the bottom of Manhattan and Little Tokyo
near NYU, Little Brazil off Times Square and Koreatown a block up from
the Empire State Building. The Russians have their stretch of Brighton
Beach with its tea rooms and fur coats and Little Italy's butcher shops,
bakeries and rows of restaurants are still hanging on.
The micro
communities have their own micro communities. Chinatown is split over a
conflict between the mutually incomprehensible Hong Kong Cantonese
speaking Chinese and the Fujianese speaking immigrants of Red China. The
Chassidic neighborhoods break down by a hundred religious movements
whose names are derived from Eastern European towns. The Mexicans are
shouldering out the Puerto Ricans in neighborhoods that city planners
refer to generically as Latino.
But Muslim enclaves are
different. They are not outposts, they are settlements. They aren't
adapting to the city, the city is adapting to them as many cities around
the world do. Islam is not just a culture and the cultures who carry
its baggage with them to the old worlds and the new are not toting it
along like another ethnic food, a dialect or a national holiday.
In
Chinatown, Buddhist temples and protestant churches sit side by side
and in Latino neighborhoods, Adventist storefront churches and massive
Catholic edifices co-exist; along with them can be found synagogues,
Hindu and Zoroastrian temples and the whole dizzying array of religious
diversity of a port city defined by its swells and tides of immigrants.
Bangladesh
is more than 90 percent Muslim. Hindus are being attacked in the
streets of its cities by Islamist mobs because Islam does not co-exist,
it does not blend in and add its unique flavors to the multicultural
stew pot. The other religions of the city do not demand that everyone
join them or acknowledge their supremacy and pay them protection money
for the right to exist. Islam does.
Its immigration is also a
Jihad, a form of supremacist manifest destiny to colonize the Dar
al-Harb and subdue it to the will of a dead prophet with sheer numbers
or sheer force.
The number of Bangladeshis in New York has
increased by 20 percent in only four years to an estimated 74,000. And
those numbers are an undercounting. They don't take into account the
unofficial Mohammeds living in basements while nursing their grudges
against their cousins and the whole country. It is a glancing sort of
number that shows the accelerated growth of immigrants from a culture
with a high birth rate and aggressive immigration strategies.
“I
feel like I’m living in my own country,” the editor of one of the
Bangladeshi newspapers in New York, and there is more than one, is
quoted as saying. “You don’t have to learn English to live here. That’s a
great thing!”
And you don't. The curlicues of the Bengali script
are showing up more often on the Rosetta Stones of government
communications, already swollen with a dozen alphabets. The Bangladeshi
immigration lawyers whose mustachioed faces show up on advertisements
will eventually go into politics and become city councilmen, state
senators and congressmen. Money will flow to their community centers
which will bring in the new generation of hip Saudi-trained clerics as
speakers, adept at referencing pop culture while preaching the endless
holy war of Islam against the world.
Jamaica, Queens is becoming the center of the Bangladeshi presence in New York. Another
Mohammed,
Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, lived here on the second floor of a
typical low rise development, indistinguishable buildings crammed
together with no back yards or front yards, the bricks studded with
satellite dishes so the dwellers could watch the television programs of
their home countries, and plotted the mass murder of Americans.
“We
will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,” this Mohammed said
in a video recorded before his planned terrorist attack. His modest
goal, in his own words, was to "destroy America" and quoted "Sheikh
Osama" to justify the killing of American women and children.
Mohammed
described the United States as the Dar al-Harb, the realm of war, the
territory yet to be conquered by the armies of Islam, and said that the
only permissible reason for a Muslim to move to the United States was to
conquer it by missionary work or by armed terror.
"I just want
something big. Something very big," Mohammed said, "make one step ahead,
for the Muslims . . . that will make us one step closer to run the
whole world."
That Mohammed is in jail, but there are others like
him, with the same humble dream. Some impatiently plot to do it with
bombs and others come and live and spread until a minority becomes a
majority and the black and white banners of Jihad wave over another
formerly free land.
At this hour no one in Little Korea, Little
Italy, Little Brazil, Brighton Beach or Koreatown is plotting to destroy
America so that his religion can rule the world. That is what sets the
Little Bangladeshes, Little Pakistans, Little Mogadishus and Little
Egypts apart from every other immigrant group whose dreams for the
future are not overshadowed by the iron dream of Islam.
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