But Bukhari aims to make sure people in his community know that they don't have to talk. In fact, he highly recommends they don't.
That's one message he delivered in a presentation at the Abu-Bakr Islamic Center after prayers one recent Friday night. The mosque is housed in a squat former casino on Tukwila International Boulevard, next to a Pawn X-Change. Bukhari was invited to give a presentation there by the recently formed Somali coalition.
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Halima Dahir speaks at a forum for Somalis.
Nina Shapiro
Ubax Gardheere hands out snacks at an after-school tutoring program.
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He addressed various kinds of discrimination Muslims may face, as well as how to handle questioning by law enforcement.
"We at least want people to know their basic rights," said Dahir, a coalition leader who organized the event. A willowy Harborview Medical Center nurse attired in a black headscarf and dress, Dahir moved around an enclosed chamber of the mosque reserved for women, handing out CAIR pamphlets and trying to drum up attention. It was a challenge because the 30 or so women sitting on a plush, patterned carpet—the only furnishing in the big, white-walled room—couldn't see Bukhari through the darkened windows that look out onto the men's chambers. They read prayer books or listened listlessly.
But a few visibly perked up when Bukhari got to the point about what to do if police or the FBI came knocking. "You never have to let law enforcement into your home unless they have a warrant," Bukhari says. "Otherwise, you can simply say 'I don't want to talk to you, please leave.'
"There's nothing to gain from talking to law enforcement," he continues. "There are too many things happening to Muslims recently.
"I can't emphasize enough," he repeats, "you have the right to remain silent, so please practice it."
The motivations of Isse, and others like him, remain obscure. Ayan Musse, another organizer of the new Somali coalition, notes that most of the men who returned to Somalia were in their 20s—too young to remember much about the country they left after it dissolved into civil war in the early '90s. She concludes that the flight of these young men says more about their life here than their loyalty to any particular Somali cause. "You have to be out of hope in order to go to a country you can barely remember," she says.
The poverty rate for East African families in metropolitan Seattle is 32 percent—four times the rate for families as a whole.
While many Somalis work as taxi drivers or day-care and home health-care workers, they often rely on subsidized housing. It's hard to walk through Rainier Vista and NewHolly—Seattle Housing Authority complexes in the Rainier Valley—without seeing Somalis, the women particularly recognizable by their flowing headscarves and ankle-length skirts, or by the more conservative billowing cloaks known as jalabib. There's even a little Somali grocery store fronting Rainier Vista—one of numerous such stores and cafes that dot Rainier Avenue South, Martin Luther King Way, and Tukwila International Boulevard, where imports like moong beans, powdered ginger, dried figs, and huge bags of basmati rice sit side by side with American staples such as Corn Flakes, Cream of Wheat, Pampers, and baby formula.
Those who work with Somali kids say they face steep challenges to succeed in school. Ubax Gardheere, who runs an after-school tutoring program funded by a Massachusetts nonprofit and located at the Matt Griffin YMCA in SeaTac, says that some of the children she encounters occupy a linguistic no-man's land. Often growing up in refugee camps outside their homeland, they are less than fluent in Somali; new to this country, their English isn't great either. Naturally, they don't just have trouble speaking, but reading and writing as well.
At a tutoring session one day, between handing out test-prep worksheets and after-school snacks, the 29-year-old Gardheere explains that parents, often poorly educated and coping with large families, may not be able to help with homework. She points to a 12-year-old working industriously at one table, whom she notes is the oldest of six born to a mother not yet 30.
News accounts of the 20 men lured back to Somalia reveal that some were indeed struggling here. They include a community-college dropout and a one-time gang member.
Yet immigrants of all nationalities struggle, and few turn to terrorism, or even retreat to the land they left. For all their hardships, most say they are better off here, and Somalis are no exception. Collecting her third-grader one day at Gardheere's tutoring program, Fatumo Ali tells of the day a gang of gun-wielding teens walked into her Mogadishu house. "They say 'Go, go, go, or else we're going to kill you,'" the 42-year-old, draped in a black headscarf and dress, recounts.
Ali grabbed her three kids and ran, joining a flood of refugees attempting to leave the country, some by way of the Indian Ocean along which Mogadishu lies. She found a small boat going to neighboring Kenya, but there wasn't enough room for her entire family. She sent her kids off with relatives.
On the journey to Kenya, the boat capsized. Her six-year-old daughter died.
