Hippocrates In San Diego

Minnesota’s Muslim MP

I heard about the newly elected rep from Minnesota, Keith Ellison, yesterday while wading through the election results online. Apparently there’s been a big dirty campaign to discredit Ellison, who converted to Islam at age 19 (originally Nation of Islam, which is Louis Farrakhan’s group, then converted to Sunni Islam later in life). While he was loosely affiliated with the NOI (he denies ever having been an enrolled member), he apparently helped organize Minnesota’s contingent for the Million Man March, and wrote some incendiary pieces in his college paper trying to defend Farrakhan (who at the time was under scrutiny for an anti-Semitic comment). He later disavowed his NOI involvement as youthful indiscretions (he was in college through most of this) and has done well to distance himself from a brand of Islam that is considered by most Muslims to be heretical because of their belief that their founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad, was the “Mahdi,” or Messiah.

While a member of the Minnesota legislature, he has represented the north end of Minneapolis since 2002, with most of the bills he authored focusing on voter disenfranchisement, improving living conditions in poor areas (such as mandating pollution controls in areas with older buildings, increasing penalties for prostitution and solicitation, and providing screening for children with lead exposure), benefits for National Guard members called into active duty, and a resolution to impeach Bush.

The campaign this year seemed to have focused on his financial and political ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The organization, which is the most visible national organization of Muslims in the country, has often been charged with ties to terrorism, but without any substantiation by law enforcement inquiries. Minnesotans seem to have risen above the fracas to break a barrier and elect the first Muslim, and the first Black Minnesotan, to Congress.