Elections 2010: Up at the Grassroots
By Dr Ghulam M. Haniff
St Cloud , Minnesota
Yet another national election is over though Muslims were not overly successful in this exercise. The two standard-bearing Muslim incumbents were re-elected to the US House of Representatives and three or four incumbents to the state legislatures. No new faces emerged at the national level in any other position.
Perhaps thanks to the cudgel of Islamophobia Muslims were more active in the elections this go-around than in previous years. They organized and attended fundraisers in several states and actively campaigned for candidates as well. Unlike in the past they donated funds and closely assisted those running for political offices.
It seems that Muslims are beginning to understand the political system though they still have some distance to travel. For the most part they kept away from making such foolish statements as “2010 candidates for the year 2010” without really understanding what such declarations mean. On the whole Muslims are on the road to maturity.
Muslims have also finally gotten the message that their political home really is in the Democratic camp. One of the reasons for this is the relentless Republican assault on Islam and their incessant peddling of Islamophobia. The Tea Party has been particularly active in denigrating Islam through their organized efforts to derail mosque projects in Tennessee, Long Island, Wisconsin and, of course, New York where the plans for the Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither) has been placed temporarily on the shelf.
Several Islam-hating representatives, Sue Meyrick of North Carolina for example, have been elected to the Congress to say nothing of high-profiled Michele Bachman from Sixth District of Minnesota.
Despite its relatively small Muslim population several followers of Islam in Minnesota contested the elections and two were able to make it. One of them was Keith Ellison who received the highest margin of votes of all those running for the US Congress and the other, Hussein Samatar, a Somali immigrant, who ran for the Minneapolis Public School Board for the first time and won.
At least three running for various offices were eliminated in the primaries. Two first timers, Tanveer Janjua and Ikram-ul-Haq, ran for City Council positions but were not successful though they received respectable number of votes. One person, a Muslim woman named Farheen Hakeem, who habitually wears a hijab, ran for the Governorship under the Green Party label, but was not successful.
Fortunately for Hussein Samatar, running for the school board, there were no opponents. He
evidently had studied the political process well and realized that one of the ways to be successful in elections was to run unopposed.
The well-known Keith Ellison, from the Minnesota Fifth Congressional District, was successful in obtaining 68 percent of the votes in his district. He had come under continuous attacks for being Muslim and for supporting the Palestinians. One of the founders of the Tea Party factions had loudly claimed on the national media that Keith Ellison was disqualified to run for a political office because he was a Muslim.
Keith also had studied the system well, understood it, and acquired sufficient political experience from the time he served in the Minnesota state legislature. He also reached out to the people in his district and visited just about every neighborhood in his constituency.
Unfortunately, many Muslims who stand for political offices neither understand the system well nor have the skills to reach-out to the voters. They hardly have much sensitivity to the nature of the constituency which they wish to represent. On top of that they want to become a candidate under some obscure or ideological party label or a party-counter to the voters’ preference in district.
Nevertheless, Muslims have come a long way from the time when the community was just starting out fifty years ago. In a few years they should be able to travel a few more steps forward.
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