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Democrat Poised to Become First Muslim in Congress

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

MINNEAPOLIS ? Keith Ellison, the Democratic candidate for Congress here, strode among the stalls of exotically printed fabric, telephone cards and sweet tea at a Somali mall, shaking hands with his fellow Muslims.

?The community showed up big!? Mr. Ellison, 43, said, dispensing hugs as he thanked the many immigrant Somalis whose votes had helped him beat six other candidates in a primary race in September.

Mr. Ellison, a stocky criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam in college, is expected by experts to make history on Election Day by becoming the first Muslim elected to Congress, as well as the first black representative from Minnesota.

?If he wins, he will take the oath of office on a Koran,? Ali Ahmed, a social services worker, said as he wandered through the Karmel Square mall, a popular shopping and social destination for Somali immigrants.

?Our main concern is that Muslims are treated differently from Christians,? Mr. Ahmed said. ?So he can show that we are all the same people.?

The Fifth Congressional District is a Democratic citadel. The last Republican to represent it lost re-election in 1962.

Mr. Ellison?s Republican opponent, Alan Fine, has made a concerted effort to discredit him for previous ties to the Nation of Islam, the radical group founded by Louis Farrakhan, but experts do not expect Mr. Fine to pose a serious challenge.

Though Mr. Ellison usually mentions his faith on the campaign trail only when asked, his candidacy has amounted to something of a political awakening among Muslims tired of being vilified since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

?They were resistant to voting because a lot of them thought it wouldn?t make a difference,? said Abdisalam Adam, the director of a Somali cultural center who helped send scores of volunteers door to door to bring out voters in the primary. ?This is the first time we saw people get excited and identify with the issues.?

Mr. Ellison?s progressive positions, including support for universal health coverage, raising the minimum wage and withdrawing the troops from Iraq, cemented his appeal among a broad swath of Democrats in this liberal district.

But political analysts and community organizers say African-Americans and Muslim immigrants here secured Mr. Ellison?s 7,000-vote margin on Sept. 12.

?This is the way we build political power,? Mr. Ellison told supporters. ?They can?t ignore us anymore when we show up to vote.?

There are far larger communities of Muslims in the United States, with the overall population estimates ranging from three million to more than six million American Muslims. But few other Congressional districts have such a high concentration.

Somalis started arriving here in 1993 as refugees fleeing the civil war in their country. Their number has grown to 120,000, with one-fourth in the Fifth District, Mr. Adam said. He estimated that 80 percent of the Somalis who voted in the primary cast ballots for the first time. ?The Somali community is probably the least educated and the least organized in terms of having any experience with democracy,? he said.

Mr. Ellison brushes off the idea that he was motivated to run for Congress to become the first Muslim or first black from Minnesota. Rather it was to change policy, he said, to fight in the manner of the beloved Senator Paul Wellstone against a Republican administration that marginalized the poor and minorities.

Energizing black Muslims or immigrants, Mr. Ellison said, is a side benefit. ?I?ve never sat down and said, ?Gee I?m going to be the first,? ? he said, ?It holds no magic for me.?

He does concede a certain element of breaking ground.

?Any ethnic or religious group that is new to American politics is going to go through trouble,? he said, reaching next to his office desk to open a book called ?Jews in American Politics.?

He read aloud a passage about how Jews were vilified and blocked from political office until their expertise in various fields proved crucial to the New Deal.

?It?s going to be the same way for Muslims,? he said. ?It is just going to take a while.?

The campaign has been an indication of the hurdles ahead. The primary turned nasty in May, after Mr. Ellison won the endorsement from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democrats are known here.

The press and Republican blogs like MinnesotaDemocratsExposed.com unearthed problems from Mr. Ellison?s past. They included late filings of income taxes and campaign finance reports, plus a raft of unpaid moving violations and parking tickets that led to a suspended driver?s license.

Most damaging were newspaper columns that he wrote under the pen name Keith E. Hakim in 1989 and 1990, when Mr. Ellison was a law student at the University of Minnesota. One explosive column defended Mr. Farrakhan against accusations of racism. Conservatives accused Mr. Ellison of having been a local leader for the radical group.

Mr. Ellison quickly apologized for past mistakes. He said repeatedly, including in a local synagogue, that he was distantly affiliated with the Nation of Islam for 18 months while helping to organize the Minnesota delegation to the Million Man March in Washington in 1995.

He said he saw the march as a way to promote personal responsibility and economic development but said he later found it pointless.

He also sent a letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council in Minneapolis, repudiating Mr. Farrakhan and his supporters as anti-Semitic.

Mr. Ellison prevailed in the primary despite the controversy because ?he had intense, loyal supporters who are not going to be chased off,? said Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.

Mr. Fine, the Republican candidate, has reignited the fight.

?I?m extremely concerned about Keith Ellison, Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison, Keith Ellison Muhammad,? Mr. Fine said at a news conference after Mr. Ellison?s victory in the primary, mocking pseudonyms that Mr. Ellison used in college.

Mr. Fine has repeatedly accused Mr. Ellison of being a follower of Mr. Farrakhan and of being backed by a Muslim lobbying organization that Mr. Fine said supported terrorism.

?I?m personally offended as a Jew that we have a candidate like this running for U.S. Congress,? Mr. Fine said at the news conference.

Some Jews applauded Mr. Fine. Others said they were appalled by what they heard as inflammatory remarks. An older brother of Mr. Fine, Robert Fine, a lawyer, called Mr. Ellison to disassociate himself from the attack.

The Republican, a 44-year-old management lecturer at the Carleton School of Management, has been trying to clarify his remarks.

?This has nothing to do with his being a Muslim, this has nothing to do with his being black,? Mr. Fine said in an interview in a coffee shop that serves as his campaign headquarters. ?This is about someone who supports people who hate. That is why he is unqualified for Congress.?

Mr. Ellison was raised a Roman Catholic in Detroit, converting to Islam as a 19-year-old sophomore at Wayne State University. He refuses to discuss publicly his reasons, stating in snippets of interviews between campaign stops: ?I don?t remember any grand epiphany. I saw no vision, no lightning on the road to Damascus.?

He lives in north Minneapolis, one of the highest crime areas in the city, with his wife, Kim, a high school mathematics teacher, and their four children.

He said he had never met Mr. Farrakhan, but conceded that as a young man he was more taken with the message of social empowerment and figured that the accusations of anti-Semitism were just the usual slur against any black leader.

?It?s amazing,? Mr. Ellison said, ?that people naturally assume that there would not be a measure of anger and frustration in the black community? over their history of exploitation here.