The Stranger continues its serialized coverage of the James Ujaama trial.
The day after leading a protest at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac to get his older brother out of solitary confinement, 34-year-old Mustafa Ujaama is sipping a Vimto soda at Abdul's Fast Food & Deli on Graham Street and MLK Jr. Way in South Seattle.
(Five days later, on October 1, Mustafa's brother James Ujaama, indicted on August 28 for giving "material support" to al Qaeda, appeared in Seattle Federal Court for an already twice-delayed detention hearing. Federal prosecutors argued that James needs to stay in detention as a national security risk, while James' attorneys argued James should be released to house arrest under his grandmother's custody. U.S. Magistrate Judge John Weinberg ruled to keep James in federal custody.
Mustafa, wearing a sleek leather jacket and a pair of trendy jeans so dark blue they glimmer like bike reflectors, sits at a table between the soda cooler and the counter menu board.
Mustafa gleefully calls out, "Assalamu alaikum!" to the young black guys and women in colorful burqas dashing in for a deep-fried sambosa or orders of halal meat. (The storefront deli, boxed in by Payday Loans and located across the street from a McDonald's, specializes in "Middle East, Indian, and Pakistan groceries and spices.")
Two of Mustafa's friends walk in. His old pals--a huge man Mustafa calls "Big Boy" and a floppy, bearded guy named Hakim--greet him with playful hellos.
Hakim wants to know where Mustafa, visiting from Denver, is staying. "Are you at your mom's?"
Mustafa smiles: "Not really. Not officially. Well, officially, but not necessarily really."
Mustafa is cagey these days. The FBI is following him, he says. (Mustafa believes the feds tapped his phone and e-mail and tailed him before his brother's September 9 hearing.)
Weirdly, though, despite being the founder and imam of the Dar-us-Salaam mosque--a focus of the FBI's investigation of James--Mustafa is one of the only former members who hasn't been subpoenaed. The feds questioned his comrades about a ranch in Bly, Oregon, where mosque members supposedly met "emissaries" of radical London cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri to discuss building a terrorist camp there.
Subpoenaed or not, Mustafa has a lot to say about his brother's case.
First, he disputes press accounts that the Union Street mosque, founded in 1993, was violent. "This idea of us running around beating people in the heads--'Stop being a prostitute!'--that didn't happen," Mustafa says. "There was an effort to secure the masjid [mosque] and the neighboring businesses. We had volunteers at night making sure everything was safe. We'd say, 'Listen man, you can't sell dope here.' Those cats knew about Muslims. We didn't have to do much. They'd go across the street."
Mustafa explains that he started the mosque because there wasn't one in the Central District. The first year, says Mustafa, he converted 52 people by doing da'wah (or proselytizing) in the neighborhood. He proudly says the mosque was open 24 hours, helped people with rent (even if the mosque couldn't make its own), and jumpstarted several African-American businesses.
If there was controversy, Mustafa says, it was from the mosque's alignment with the Atlanta-based Islamic movement of former '60s radical H. Rap Brown, A.K.A. Jamil Al-Amin. "The FBI had been on us since '95, when we hooked up with Imam Jamil [Al-Amin]."
Mustafa says James wasn't a Dar-us-Salaam member. Indeed, James didn't even convert--take shahadah--until 1996, when the brothers were "rolling down Pac Highway," as Mustafa puts it, and James just told Mustafa he wanted to be Muslim. They went to a mosque in SeaTac and that was it. "At first I thought he was kidding, but he had always identified with the teachings of Nation of Islam," Mustafa says. "It was just a matter of time." (Mustafa converted to Islam himself in January 1990, after his close reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X while attending SCCC in the late '80s, where he founded the black student union.)
According to Mustafa, James moved to London in 1997 to try publishing a novel--a story about a drug dealer and a black businessman. After that, Mustafa says, James traveled; he would call from China while buying Sony PlayStation gear, or e-mail about supporting Afghani orphans. "He would send pictures of children to solicit donations. 'Adopt these kids for $20 a month.'"
Mustafa says there were no plans to start a terrorist training camp in Oregon. "That sounds like a Hollywood script," he laughs. The land in Oregon was a place to live a pure Muslim life in America: "In this culture, the reality is very different from the theory of Islamic living. That's why Semi Osman [one mosque leader] moved there. He wanted to go to the country to create his own reality. To live a quiet life."
Mustafa also says James wasn't in cahoots with the co-conspirators listed in the federal indictment as "emissaries" of London cleric Hamza who came to Seattle and Bly to organize a jihad cell. (One co-conspirator allegedly claimed to be a hit man for Osama bin Laden.)
"My brother wasn't down with those guys," Mustafa says. "They didn't get along." Indeed, Mustafa says that when the co-conspirators tried to speak at the Bly ranch, James shouted them down. "He called them liars, criminals."
That story doesn't exactly undermine the feds' case, though. In fact, it could help it. Mustafa explains that James disliked the "emissaries" because they claimed to represent Hamza. James believed they were phonies, and that he was closer to Hamza. (Hamza's London mosque--seen as an al Qaeda recruitment center--figures prominently in the case against James.)
"My brother really admired and respected [Hamza]. [Hamza taught James] to be concerned about Muslims in a global sense."
Mustafa explains that James was involved in a London-based effort known as the Hijrah project--an effort to send Muslims to Afghanistan after the Taliban took over. (Hijrah means migration.)
Mustafa also acknowledges James was "part of Supporters of Shariah"--Hamza's website. The indictment accuses James of designing and participating in the "Supporters of Shariah website, which [Hamza] used... to advocate violent jihad against the United States...."
"I'm not making apologies," Mustafa says about his brother's connection to the website. "Obviously, it's not illegal [to work on a website]."
