The hunks of lead pipe that were hurled through the windows of the modest third-floor mosque over the weekend didn’t really worry Ahmet Moustafa.
He expected that much after the news about the bombing in New York City.
What troubles Moustafa, who belongs to the same mosque as Mohammed Salameh, a suspect in the World Trade Center bombing, is a premonition of far more serious violence against the mosque and Muslims like himself.
“We just want to be treated fairly,” said the Egyptian-born businessman, whose small office sits a floor below the mosque. “The news media just wants to show that Moslem people are bad people who want to destroy the United States.”
Much to Moustafa’s frustration, the investigation into the bombing continued to swirl Sunday around the mosque, where prayer services are also offered by Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a 54-year-old blind imam, who is a leader of Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt.
Police were prepared for any problems during a brief vigil by Jewish protesters outside the mosque, and investigators reportedly were trying to talk with Sheik Abdel-Rahman, who lives in Jersey City.
Meanwhile, explosives experts at the World Trade Center inched down the sides of the bomb crater, scanning the concrete edges of damaged floors for evidence.
Dogs sniffed through the sub-basement debris looking for evidence of a missing building employee and any other victims who may have been killed in the blast that shook the nation’s second tallest building and took the lives of five people on Feb. 26.
Investigators have yet to minutely examine the lowest level containing much of the debris.
New York Mayor David Dinkins also denied published reports on Sunday of tension among federal and city investigators, asserting that relations were good between the FBI and New York police.
He also urged people not to strike out at Arabs and Muslims and blame them for the bombing.
Standing outside the mosque on Jersey City’s bustling Kennedy Boulevard, the Jewish demonstrators insisted that they were not accusing all Muslims. But they made clear their feelings that the mosque is a danger.
“We are here to condemn this place and this mosque,” declared Rabbi Avi Weiss, who also said in a statement that the mosque “could well be ground zero of Islamic extremist terror in the New York area.
“We are warning America that this extremist terror has to be rooted out at its source.”
The rabbi described himself as an activist leader of the Coalition of Jewish Concerns.
Besides Salameh and Sheik Abdel-Rahman, he said the mosque was home for El-Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian now in prison on weapons charges related to the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a militant Israeli activist.
As Weiss argued that the U.S. government should have heeded Israeli intelligence warnings of Arab terrorism coming to the U.S., his followers held up signs and one of them read, “Tel Aviv yesterday. New York today. USA tomorrow.”
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Drawn by the flag-carrying protesters, a crowd of Arabs from the surrounding Arab community gathered on the warm, sunlit street. They told reporters that they felt they were being stereotyped by the news media as a result of the bombing, and wrongly blamed for one man’s possible actions.
Asked about Sheik Abdel-Rahman, most of them defended him, but Moustafa Abdel Adem, who came to the U.S. six years ago from Egypt, strongly disagreed. “He is a bad man,” he said in Arabic, and a furious argument followed with several men and women in the crowd.
To the members of the Al Salam mosque, which is no more than a small room with walls painted green, Sheik Omar, as they call the cleric, is not an extremist, but a man who preaches strict adherence to the Koran, Islam’s holy text.
“He never, ever encourages violence against anyone,” said Mohammed Naguib. In the mornings, when the sheik usually takes part in prayers, the religious leader talks only about the Koran, Naguib said.
The sheik is described by Naguib and others with awe. He is a good man, an innocent man, they say. The Arab rulers who oppose him, and do not abide by Islamic teachings, are the bad ones, they say.
In the case of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by fundamentalists, Sheik Abdel-Rahman’s followers say the cleric, who was charged but not convicted for having a role in the murder, preached that “Sadat was a bad man, and not a good Moslem.”
“But he never planned to kill Sadat,” said Naguib, 50, a real estate salesman. “Now with the Egyptian government, they don’t get along and that is why the government is after this man,” he explained.
As if to underscore the point, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa said Sunday that Sheik Abdel-Rahman would face unspecified criminal charges if he returned home. The cleric is seeking political asylum in the U.S., but the government is trying to deport him.
The members of the 10-year-old Jersey City mosque are both longtime residents like Naguib, who has been in the U.S. for 20 years, and recent immigrants. Some are people who believe, like one recent young arrival, that there is no such thing as fundamentalism in Islam, but rather living strictly by its rules.
For some this means it is wrong for a woman to work outside of her home, not to be dressed conservatively or to pray beside men at the mosque.
Many of them came to the Jersey City area in the footsteps of other Egyptians, most of them Christians, who settled in the somewhat rundown, blue-collar community.
They settled into a working-class city that had once been predominantly Irish and Italian and is now painted with store signs for Filipino, Korean, Indian, Pakistani, and Arab shoppers.
To Ahmet Moustafa, the mosque existed quietly among its neighbors until Nosair’s arrest several years ago in the Kahane slaying. “Since then, anything that happens, they come to this mosque,” Moustafa said. “If someone prays here, we can’t be responsible for them.”
Yet there are others who say the problems began in 1990 with the arrival of Sheik Abdel-Rahman on a tourist visa. “He has a few followers here, maybe 10 or 15, but it is not a big thing,” said Fakher Fahmy, who was a geologist in Egypt and runs a coffeehouse.
But then Fahmy, who is a Christian, paused and said he wasn’t happy having the sheik so close because of the hostilities in recent years in Egypt between Christians and fundamentalists.
“We left Egypt for money problems, and he has made it harder,” he said. “Harder because he causes bloodshed over there.”
While the men lingering in the coffeehouse and the mosque’s leaders were sure they will face a wave of vengeance because of the New York bombing, Mohammed Salem, an electronics engineer, who has been in the U.S. since 1983, said he had no worries.
“We are not afraid. If I were in Egypt I would be afraid. But not here,” he said as he paused from his shopping at a grocery store. “We came from the Arab world where there are no human rights and here we found a different system.”