MB Civic

By H.D.S. Greenway | August 1, 2006 | The Boston Globe

LEWISTON, Maine AFTER HIS ARREST, Brent Matthews, a 33-year-old trouble maker, said that rolling a pig’s head into a mosque full of worshipers here last month was meant as a joke. However, this old mill town’s 2,000 Somali Muslims — out of a total population of 36,000 — did not see the humor in it.

Besides the obviously hostile gesture of desecration, the Somali minority had to wonder: “If a pig’s head could be thrown into our mosque, what might be thrown next, a bomb?” asked Abdi Sheikh, a Somali resident and local leader.

Refugees from Somalia started coming here in numbers only about five years ago, and their integration into what is Maine’s second-largest city has not been as smooth as it might have been. Somali refugees first came to Maine because that was where some were assigned. They chose Lewiston because housing was cheap and, in the words of one Somali mother, “it seemed like a good place to bring up kids.”

Lewiston grabbed national attention in 2002 when then-mayor Larry Raymond wrote an open letter to his Somali community asking them not to send for their relatives because Lewiston was “maxed out, financially, physically, and emotionally.”

Some cried racism, while a white supremacist group, World Church of the Creator, said it would descend on Lewiston to hold an anti-Somali immigrant rally early in 2003. That threat, in turn, spawned a local Lewiston group to promote tolerance called Many In One, which managed to attract 4,500 people while only 32 showed up for the white supremacist rally. Many In One held another rally earlier this month following the pig’s head incident to support its Muslim neighbors. Some Somalis told the Maine Sunday Telegram that there had been other incidents such as acid dripped onto cars, tires slashed, and racial epithets hurled. But some of the incidents were part of general vandalism rather than directly targeted toward Somalis, according to town officials.

This old industrial town is reminiscent of Bradford, England, in that the textile industry that made it important has long fled, leaving magnificent old 19th- and early-20th-century mills empty with conversions and “for sale” signs everywhere. And, as in Bradford, or the Kreuzberg section of Berlin, or the sad suburbs of Paris, Lewiston’s Muslims have the highest unemployment rates — “70 to 80 percent” in Lewiston’s case, according to Town Administrator Jim Bennett.

Lewiston is largely a town of French Canadians, who made many of the Union Army’s uniforms during the Civil War. The impressive Saints Peter and Paul Church on Ash Street attests to the town’s French heritage. A sign says “Welcome, Bienvenue” to the “Parish, Paroisse.” In contrast, the mosque is in a storefront on Lisbon Street, next to the Caveman tattoo parlor, with a “for sale” sign in the window and a notice advising “brothers and sisters” to buckle their safety belts. The mosque is for sale because the community has out grown it, according to Abdi Sheikh.

The brothers and sisters have the Red Sea Restaurant to remind them of home cooking, and although the Cleopatra is closed for remodeling, it promises an African buffet soon with all you can eat for $6.99.

I met Abdi Sheikh in his Catholic Charities office in City Hall. He said that Catholic Charities helps everyone, and that it had been particularly helpful to Somalis trying to adjust to their new environment. For all his community’s troubles, Abdi Sheikh gives the FBI, state, and local authorities high marks for the way they have handled the pig’s head incident. He said that Lewiston, Maine, and America had been good for Muslims. Unlike Europe, it was easy to have a mosque with a minimum of red tape, and girls could wear head scarves to school, “unlike France.” He pointed out that discrimination was not as bad as it had been for the French Canadians who came to Lewiston in the 19th century and were forbidden to speak French in schools. Somalis were of a “different religion, different color, and a different culture,” Abdi Sheikh said, “about as different as you can get.”

It is easy to forget that Roman Catholics were once considered the un-absorbable minority in America, as immigration expert Jose Casanova has pointed out, and easy to forget that a Catholic church was once burned to the ground by bigots in Lewiston. Although prejudice still remains, the pig’s head incident is not going to be as damaging to community relations as I am sure Brent Matthews hoped.