The Ashes to Ashes mural painting on the wall of a south Williamsburg side street was produced in 2000 by Joe Matunis, a 53-year-old artist and a teacher at the El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice. At the end of each school year, Matunis gathers a group of his students and sets out to “redecorate” the “bleak” walls of Williamsburg, with art focused on the designated theme for that school year. He and his students have produced more than 10 murals in Williamsburg over the last decade, all addressing social issues that range from smoking, to abortion and asthma.

The school, on 250 Hopper Street, was created in 1993 by the chancellor at the time, José Fernandez, with the help of a former ballerina, Frances Lucerna. The idea was to combat the problems that come with very large high schools, and to motivate students to participate in their community. The school’s average student body is 500 students, and teachers point out that El Puente boasts an impressive 90 percent graduation rate.

El Puente takes a rounded approach to education, thanks to a syllabus partially created by Matunis, who has been a teacher there for more than 18 years.  “We take a yearly project and work on it in every subject. We explore the same theme in the arts, investigative, and science classes,” he explains. “The advantage is that it allows our students to become immersed in the subject.”

“Some of our murals are really aggressive,” Matunis explains. “We work on topics that are socially important, like sweatshops and smoking. But the most important part of our murals is actually the process”. The students, he explains, leave pieces of themselves in every mural.

“I remember one student, Stephanie Robles, She wasn’t the best painter or artist in the group but she was a great organizer and it was really powerful to watch her grow from this shy, unsure ninth grader to someone who was speaking in public,” he said. “She is part of the police force now and that makes me very proud… It is exactly what we want to have happen here.”

“When we see the things our kids go through, you realize how strong and resilient, but also how hard life is. Some of them are single parents, have parents in incarceration, live in homeless shelters. But they are all so funny and smart, every one of them.”

On the corner of South 4th street and Hewes, an asthma-themed mural that Robles helped to create in 1999 is the backdrop to the Southside Community Garden. Layered with bright colors and billows of dark polluted smoke, Living With Asthma recreates the theme of the evils of smoke, this time both in cigarettes and in the high levels of pollution in the community. “Toxic emissions in Williamsburg are 60 times greater than the US average,” it reads.

Ashley Davis, passing by on the street on her way to work, says she is too busy to absorb the meaning of the mural. But for others, such as Steven Tavares, the owner of the Williamsburg Deli across the street, the mural does not go unnoticed. Tavares has seen the asthma mural everyday for the past two and a half years.  “I’ll be honest: it’s easy to start and hard to quit” smoking, he says. “When I see television ads and murals like that it makes me feel very guilty. I haven’t been able to stop, but I have cut down. I smoke half a cigarette at a time instead of one now.”

“As a community artist you do want to reach out to your community,” Matunis stresses. But, after 10 years, the artist claims to have learned a more important lesson from working with students. “The funny thing is that I don’t really think that there is a lot of internal analysis going on when people see our murals” Matunis admits. “I remember when we created the smoking mural, we kind of expected people to be disgusted by the images they saw but instead, people would pass by and many of them would actually stop, look at the mural and take out a cigarette. The power of nicotine is just so strong that even our images reminded them to smoke.”

Where does one draw the line between vandalism and community art? “That’s an easy one,” the artist responds. “Vandalism is about scribbling on a wall. Community art is all about nurturing the community.”

Matunis’s love affair with public art began a long time ago. As a young graduate student at the Art Institute in Chicago, Matunis studied studio art and maintained his own studio where he catered for corporate clients and galleries. After spending a semester in Scotland at a public art program however, Matunis decided that it was time for a career change and abandoned the corporate “wine and cheese” art scene. “Cities in the 1980s were a big playground,” the artist says with a smile, “before gentrification you could out at night and paint on abandoned buildings and construction sites. If you wanted to make art there you could just go out and do it because no one owned the buildings.”

Inspired by the whiff of “revolution in the world of street art,” Matunis began and completed his first piece of public art in the summer of 1987. “I would go out painting at night,” he says. “It wasn’t legal, but I started painting earlier and earlier and after a while just started painting in the day time. That was when I fell in love with public art.”

“People don’t realize what you can achieve this through the arts,” Matunis says.  “I try to motivate everyone to move onto college and follow their talents. But some of our kids have never even left Brooklyn, they haven’t even seen Manhattan, so it isn’t easy for them. Some of them don’t make it. If there is anything I reproach myself about, it is not pushing some of them harder to go onto university.”

Sitting in the teacher student lounge on a Monday afternoon, Eric Acevedo, a senior, says he is confident that Matunis changed his career path. “The reason I ended up coming to El Puente was due to one of my poetry idols, named Lemon Andersen,” Acevedo explains. “During a lunch period in November or October in 2008, Joe asked me why I had come to the academy; I told him that I wanted to meet Lemon Anderson and Joe invited me to visit Andersen at a reading with him. I was able to attend the show and speak to Lemon. Joe made my dream come true.”

Acevedo never participated in the mural paintings. “I was too busy writing poetry,” he says. Four years after meeting his idol, Acevedo has completed his first project, a book of poems, El Rice is Cooking that features more than two dozen poems. He hopes to get it published soon.

All pet owners know that saying good-bye to a beloved animal companion is a painful and difficult process. The Hope Veterinary Clinic in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn helps local and out-of-borough residents come to terms with their loss through hospice care and on-site counseling.

Produced by Michael V’inkin Lee and Rebecca Ellis

The Egyptian community in Bay Ridge is concerned about the progress in Egypt, a year after the Arab Spring at Tahrir Square. They voice some of the pressing issues.

Produced by Purvi Thacker and Sarah Munir.

Residents gathered in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Not only did the festivities bring the Chinese-American community together, but it also provided an economic boost for local vendors.

Thomas Horrell of Bespoke Bicycles in Fort Greene, Brooklyn shows us how to “true” a wheel and why people say Bespoke is the “non-douche bag” bike shop.

Steven Thompson and his studio's color (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

I | Art, To Start

Locust Hill, South Carolina is not a town. The small community on the outskirts of Greenville has a population barely large enough to register on a Google map. There are two roads and one lake. There are houses, but not many of them. Steven Thompson spent his first 18 years along these winding narrow roads, where everybody knew everybody, and nothing seemed to change.

Then one day he opened his front door and walked out. Destination: Clemson University. There were massive libraries there – appropriate, for someone intent on majoring in literature. They had a football team – Thompson was a huge fan. But one month in, still fresh in his dorm, his journey began to slow. Feelings obscured. Anxiety set in. On his own for the first time, Thompson broke down.

“Everything just became so bizarre to me…things were fundamentally without understanding,” he says today, fiddling with the wheels of a toy skateboard in his cluttered Williamsburg studio. “I don’t think I’m an artist BECAUSE of the nervous breakdown, but it definitely helped.”

Indeed, it took Thompson five years (and a transfer to the College of Charleston) before he took his first studio art class – a one-month short course on printmaking. He spent those five years as a pendulum. Sometimes a recluse, sometimes gregarious. Always, though, with a deep, unabiding, and simply unexplainable internal pain.

Slowly, tentatively, Thompson applied oil paint to plexiglass for his first project. His inner dialogue, still turbulent years after his Clemson episode, began to calm. Each brush stroke brought Thompson closer to secret places in the deep recesses of his person. Each color sang to him. In art, he could get lost in discovery. Thompson took a deep breath.

“You could say ‘I’m going to walk out this door and go into the city. I plan to go to a bar. I hope to meet my friend.’ But when the day comes around, you never know,” he says. “You could walk out the door and get smacked down by a car, and you’re gone forever.”

“When I sit down to make a work of art, it’s kind of like I’m stepping out of my door. I don’t really know what is going to happen. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I don’t know exactly where I’m going to end up.”

20 years after his first class, and it’s others who discover Thompson. They see him at galleries in New York City. In Georgia. In North Carolina. And on a cold December day, a former exotic dancer from Austin, Texas will walk into Oslo Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn and discover Thompson herself.

Merget, Ben, and the bean machine (Alexander Abnos/The Brooklyn Ink)

II | Brooklyn’s Roaster

Downtown Williamsburg may be a brick-and-mortar neighborhood, but glass and metal are beginning to loom large. Their smooth, silvery surfaces provide the facade for many an upscale condo building popping up in the area, monuments to gentrification for a community in flux.

Things begin to change to the north and west of McCarren Park. Here, glass shards powder the streets, lined with nothing but warehouses. A faint rumble emerges from one building on the corner, with chipping grey paint and a creaking front door. Motorcycle logos plaster the outer wall, appearing faded in the afternoon sun. Inside, mountains of dead metal and tools lie scattershot throughout the concrete floors. The rumble loudens. It smells like morning. In a side room, a door slides open, and within a single step you find yourself at the epicenter of one of Brooklyn’s most successful independent coffeehouses.

“Coffee always changes. It’s never the same,” says J.D. Merget, the founder and owner of Oslo Coffee Roasters. He has to raise his voice to be heard above the din of the roaster, currently cooking beans from a far away land. “It has a life at each stage. It has a life when it comes to us, it has a life when it’s roasted, and it has a life when it’s been brewed. It’s constantly evolving…or devolving, as the case may be.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the roaster itself. The model in Oslo’s partition of this warehouse was made in the early 1980s, but the design has not been fundamentally altered since the early 20th century. Encased in dark red metal, a giant barrel rhythmically revolves. The coffee beans inside tumble like laundry, visible only through a tiny porthole on the front of the machine. Temperature and timing are paramount here. Cook the beans one second too long, one degree too hot, and the taste will suffer. Merget periodically removes a small metal bar from the front of the machine. It contains a sample of the beans within. Placing it near his nose, he inhales deeply. Not quite time yet.

Merget tuned in to this process some time ago. Formerly head of quality control and roasting at Kobricks Coffee in New Jersey, he started Oslo in 2003 at the insistence of his wife Kathy. The rationale for their shops location – on Roebling and Metropolitan in Williasmburg – was simple. It was cheap. Soon they found other advantages.

“It used to be you couldn’t get me to cross the bridge and visit my friends in Williamsburg. Now you can’t get me to cross the opposite way and go to Manhattan,” he says. “That happened pretty quick. Once we opened the store it was just like ‘What were we doing? This is such a great neighborhood.’”

Merget takes a sip of a new brew. This time, from the tiny African country of Burundi. Placing his nose inside the small glass tester cup, he inhales a sweet, floral bouquet. Taking a sip, the sensation turns to tart grapefruits, a short pause, and a finish of burnt sugar and tobacco. He nods approvingly, sets the cup down, and waits. In five minutes, he says, this same cup of coffee will taste noticeably different.

“The neighborhood is constantly changing, too,” he says. “It’s not what it was 10 years ago. It went from a sleepy little town that swelled on the weekends with visitors to the hustle and bustle of New York City.”

What has always remained, though, are the residents and their stories. When he started Oslo, Merget worked behind the counter all day, six days a week. He met customers from all walks of life, all pursuing their passions just like him. He got to know them. What they do. How they think. Where they’re going, and where they’ve been.

“At some point,” he says, “Brooklyn became this machine that attracts more and more and more creative people.”

The time has come. In one fell swoop, Ben (Oslo’s roaster operator) opens the door to the machine’s barrel, allowing an avalanche of steaming hot coffee beans to land on the platform below. Through air holes on the surface of the sifter, steam is sucked out while mechanical arms stir and jostle wave after wave of beans.

Merget observes this and takes another sip of the now-lukewarm Burundi coffee. The grapefruit is still there, but less pronounced. The pause between start and finish extends at least twice as long as it did previously. The taste experience ends with a new, flowery finish. In short, it tastes like a completely different cup of coffee.

“Ultimately, [the community] is simple,” he says. “It’s like-minded people coming together because we have passions and Brooklyn has the facilities for us to do what we want to do.”

A lever is pulled, and the now-cooled beans fall through a trap door in the roaster and into a grey plastic trash can. Another machine will sift through the beans to remove any rocks or debris that could ruin the grinders. Within a day, they’ll be up for sale in brown paper bags.

Brown bags and business (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

III | Fashion and Function

The acid-washed denim vest needed some spicing up. That’s all Nayantara Banerjee knew. It needed flash. Pizazz. Style. Something feminine and eye-catching. Something fit for a Barbie doll. Because that’s exactly what the vest was.

“It was basically just a tube of fabric,” Banerjee says of the doll’s garment, the subject of the first sewing project she ever completed. Using a needle, thread, and advice from her mother, Banerjee added lime green lace trim to the collar and arm holes. She was six years old.

“I was not a prim and proper type of kid,” she says now, at 27. “My little brother, a little boy, thought I was disgusting.” She places special emphasis on “I,” as if her brother had no room to talk.

“He used to make me wash my hands before I played his Nintendo.”

So Banerjee’s hands turned to sewing instead. Her personal wardrobe expanded to include custom creations – constructed by herself, still with the help of her mother. Even with a bigger canvas, the Barbie doll aesthetic remained.

“I started getting really particular about what I wanted,” she says.” I wanted really girly things like huge full skirts and puffy sleeves.”

She wore them all with sneakers, to run around in.

Banerjee says this seated on a chair in the middle of her studio apartment in East Williamsburg. She sips at a cup of Oslo coffee. Banerjee glances around and apologizes for the haphazard look of her front room. “I used to live across the street…I only moved in here a month ago,” she says. There is nothing to apologize for. Her apartment is well-kept, outside of the pins, needles, thread spools, and scissors that smatter the surface of a wide wood table pressed against the wall.

But those things are to be expected in the home of a door-to-door seamstress.

“As friends started to be bridesmaids, they would ask me for alterations, then friends of friends started asking and I got requests for custom made things. Then one day on a whim I was just like ‘I’m gonna quit my job and see if I can make this work.”

Her job at the time involved posting instructional sewing videos and managing the web site of a fashion design start-up. Before that, with the ink still drying on her degree in fashion design (Syracuse), she worked for a company making women’s suits. In both jobs, marketing and trends directed the work. Banerjee’s mailbox became stuffed with magazines, their smooth pages dominated by advertisements and the smell of various perfume samples. Her Twitter feed became a tangled web of “what’s hot now” and “the next big thing.” It became too much to handle. Banerjee cancelled her subscriptions, and embarked on a simpler path.

“I get fed up with the branding and marketing of clothing sometimes,” she says. “We live in a world where people want something new, something more, and somebody’s going to give it to them. But a lot of times they’re just expressing that they want to look a certain way, not that they are a certain way.”

Today she trades under the title “The Williamsburg Seamster” – a play on the “scenester” title bestowed on so many of North Brooklyn’s more fashionable, event-attending types. When she started the business six years ago, Banerjee was a bartender, too. Now, she is the same as when she was six. She sews garments, and runs around.

“I don’t know that I could do it in another neighborhood,” she says. “There’s something about this North Brooklyn area. People are open with their homes, I offer a unique service…it just fits in with everything this neighborhood is about right now.”

Banerjee hasn’t left the design game completely. But now she plays it on her own terms. Just after quitting her job and before The Williamsburg Seamster matured, Banerjee began custom-making garments again. This time, for her friends. This time, it needed to be simple. Functional. The antithesis of everything the fashion and design industry was marketing towards.

Within a year, she nearly sold out her batch of customized aprons.

“They’re like giant pockets,” she says.

Banerjee and the tools of her trade (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Ehlers adjustment (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

IV | To Learn To Turn

At one point, Barb Ehlers greeted her clients in full rock climbing gear. Rugged boots, thick pants, and, sometimes, jackets with untold amounts of pockets. Ehlers, 5 foot 11 inches with fiery red hair and relentlessly focused expressions, had climbed Mount Everest on a whim. People paid her to get them in top shape now, and with no company dress code to follow, she would wear whatever she damn well pleased.

Today, in a studio on the 16th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, Ehlers dons a light blue tank top and black tights that cling to her slim, toned frame. Hair up, her expressions remain focused, even while laughing at the scene she finds herself in. She stands well over 6 feet now, the extra inches courtesy of a pair of black patent leather platform heels that lace up nearly to the top of her knees. It’s Wednesday night – time for her stripper class.

“I’ve been a jock all my life,” she says. “I know how to use my body. I know the muscles. But there’s this sexiness to using your body that I was never taught.  I can do push ups and pulls ups with a guy. I can dead-lift 205lbs, but to do a little sexy turn? That’s work for me!”

Ehlers, a personal trainer living in Williamsburg, takes this class each week with seven other women. Their instructor, Kimberly Smith, leads them through an array of moves that involve gyrating hips, slow leans forward, and dipping tooshes. Ehlers’ partner sits on a low-lying wicker chair while Ehlers uses the back of it to lift her body up with her arms. Carefully, Ehlers places her knees across her partners lap and shifts the weight from hand to hand. The goal here is to bob enticingly over the subject, lift up with the arms, extend legs, place toes on the ground, and slide the torso down slowly. Very slowly. And very, very close.

This is a bicycle, into a James Brown, into a full body slide.

“It’s just like a mountain climber!” Smith says as she demonstrates for the class.

“Yeah, I know,” says Ehlers. “That’s what I’m good at!”

Born in Bremen, Germany, Ehlers came up in a family where even her grandmother biked from place to place. Time passed by with roughhousing sessions from her sister. Eating took place at regular intervals, in controlled amounts. Breakfast. Big lunch. Something small in the evening.

At six, she moved to Queens. The transition was easy, but the kids seemed…different.

“It was like ‘Why aren’t you rolling around in the mud? Why aren’t you riding your bike around like a race car?’,” she says. “I felt tomboyish. There’s more of a gender difference here than there was there.”

There’s an atmosphere difference as well. In Queens, the Ehlers lived close by JFK airport, where the roar of passing jets (and their resulting pollutants) imbued the air. Just after moving to a new country, Barb developed a severe case of asthma.

“It hit me like a truck,” she says. “I couldn’t play, and I loved playing. I loved being outside, and I couldn’t do it. It takes your childhood life away.”

Soon, regularly scheduled pills went along with her regularly scheduled meals. A new character – an inhaler – added itself to the cast in her pockets. By 12, Ehlers had enough. She would breathe when she damn well pleased. She became a vegetarian, and her mother enrolled her in a karate class. At the beginning, she couldn’t make it through without reaching for her inhaler.

“I just couldn’t breathe,” she says. “Every time I got active, it got worse.”

Her sensei, an imposing man named Lee Ireland, would have none of it. Even as Barb gasped for air on his mat, the message rang firm.

“Breathe it out,” he commanded steadily, regularly.

“Just breathe it out.”

She did. Ehlers has not touched an inhaler since.

“A good teacher can show you a vision of yourself that you didn’t know was possible,” she says. “That’s something that I try to do with my clients, too, as a personal trainer. It’s the gift that [Ireland] gave me.”

Today, Ehlers trains so much, so vigorously, and in so many different ways that she needs to have clothes adjusted twice a year to account for her constantly changing body shape. TRX training, for example, has taken in her abdomen a couple inches. This is good. But now her little black dress poofs out at the sides. This is not good.

So at 10 a.m. the morning after her stripper class, Nayantara Banerjee pays a visit to Ehlers’ cozy one bedroom apartment in one of the last-remaining old style walk-ups by McCarren. Standing in front of a mirror in her living room, Ehlers lifts her arms up over her head as Banerjee carefully marks her body’s outline with safety pins.

A series of dead weights lie neatly on the floor next to the mirror, ordered according to size.

Kimberly Smith at work (photo by Halston Bruce / courtesy StripXpertease) and Thompson's work at rest (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

V | The Cycle

The man carried stacks of money. Each stack contained one hundred dollars. All in ones. He sat in a low-lying chair in dim light, throwing bills on the strip club’s stage for whichever dancers he liked the most. Swigging vodka, the man leaned back in his seat. It creaked under his considerable girth. He liked Kimberly Smith. So when she came around to collect her tip, he told her a few things.

Smith looked at the man with wide brown eyes. She smiled with disarming grace. Then she walked away toward the manager of the club, demanding that the man be thrown out immediately. The manager remembered the stacks of money, and where his customer was currently spending it. He declined. The man would stay right where he was.

“Every single night there’s so much – you’re groped, you’re touched, you’re talked dirty to – there’s too much happening in one night to remember one situation,” Smith says, struggling to recall exactly what it was the man said that drove her to quit after 10 years of being a stripper. “That’s when I felt like I should move on. Nobody was on my side.”

Smith went home early, and angry. Sleep evaded her. At 3 a.m., she called the club, and told them to find a new dancer. Five years later, with StripXpertease, she teaches women from all walks of life the moves she learned.

There is an important caveat, though. Nobody is ever, in any way, encouraged to strip professionally.

“I get calls all the time from people saying ‘I want to be a stripper’ and my response is ‘Well, we can’t help you,’” she says. “I’m turning away money, but I just can’t justify helping some naive girl get into that industry, and then lord knows what happens to her. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

She knows all too well the cyclical, absorbing nature of the profession. Smith was in 6th grade in Austin when her drug-abusing mother moved them into a halfway house. Both of their housemates worked as strippers. One was still using. Both frequently strutted the hallways fully topless, as if it was the most normal, natural thing in the world. After all, they were just breasts.

“Looking back, it was bizarre to be living in that situation,” Smith says, emphasizing that she suffered no abuse or wrongdoing during her stay there. “I mean, they were strippers. It just wasn’t an ideal situation for a child to be in.”

But even as the women around her toiled in search of a better life, Smith couldn’t help but admire them a bit. These women were confident. They were in control. They had amazing bodies and exuded potent sexuality. In the comfort of the gaze of others, they could be the stars of their own intimate stage. For Smith, who long aspired to be an actress, these were significant qualities.

At the age of 18, she got a job as a dancer at a local club. Her 10-year journey through the seedy underbelly of strip clubs began.

“Girls are constantly getting evicted, getting their phones turned off, not being able to pay their bills, and they’re in this constant cycle,” she says. “That’s why girls dance to really sad music or really hard music. They’re angry. It’s just a horrible job. You’re getting paid to rub your crotch, your butt, your boobs on his penis. Nobody really wants to do that.”

Smith’s StripXpertease lesson plan simply removes money from the equation. Women, she says, want to know how to move, feel, be sexier. Victoria’s Secret rakes in countless millions based on that very concept. So do make-up companies. And hair salons. Buy this bra. Apply this mascara. Take on this expensive style. Even pole dancing classes, popularized by actress Sheila Kelley, market themselves as a physical fitness regime. There are tangible, physical results.

Smith’s aim is entirely mental. In the eyes of many, this makes it all the more dangerous. StripXpertease has been kicked out of multiple studios and received negative press, while pole dancing flourishes (despite the fact that most women do not have a pole in their homes). A YouTube video of Smith performing a routine with annotations explaining how she was moving and why was taken down by site administrators. Meanwhile the exact same video, without annotations, remained live.

“Apparently it’s more offensive to teach people how to do this nasty stuff than just doing the nasty stuff,” she says.

The solution would seem to be to open her own studio, but it’s easier said than done. The two main ingredients – money and time – are in short supply for Smith at the moment. In Williamsburg, though, she has a liberal, open neighborhood more likely to accept her enterprise with open arms.

“When I first moved out here I didn’t like it at all,” she says. “It’s like…everyone’s white. Everyone has a decent amount of money. Everyone’s ‘cool.’ It just seemed so pretentious. I said ‘If I’m going to live in the white suburbs, I’m going to go back to Texas where it doesn’t snow.’”

“It’s grown on me, though. I like the small, mom and pop feel here. I think a studio would do really great.”

Smith lives with her boyfriend in an apartment just off the hustle and bustle of Bedford Avenue. On a cold December day, she walks through the light drizzle into Oslo Coffee Roasters. The barista greets everyone who enters, including Smith, with a pleasant, familiar “hello.” Several pieces of art hang on the walls of the cafe, including one large web of wood and plastic suspended across from the front counter.

Smith’s eyes squint as she examines the sculpture. At first, it looks like little more than a series of translucent plastic bags suspended by planks. She inches closer.

“Oh!” She exclaims. It has become clear that inside the plastics are countless small woodcut figures, with intricate swooping patterns drawn in pen on top of them. Smith’s eyes settle back into their wide gaze. Her raised cheeks begin to relax with understanding.

“That’s a lot of work right there,” she says. “That’s so cool.”

There is a pause.

“What’s the artist’s name?”

Outside the Brooklyn College (Gloria Dawson/ The Brooklyn Ink)

Almost every Muslim I speak to at Brooklyn College tells me about Fahad Hashmi. They speak of him much the same way as they would about a terrifying urban legend. Each one of them tells me to “look at what they did to Fahad Hashmi.” Hashmi, an outspoken Pakistan-born American and self-identified Muslim activist, lived in Queens and studied political science at Brooklyn College. He graduated in 2003. But his story lives on as a cautionary tale handed down from junior to sophomore to freshman. The message is always the same:

If it could happen to him, it could happen to me.

In 2004, Hashmi was in England, pursuing a masters degree in international relations from London Metropolitan University. He allowed an acquaintance visiting from Queens to stay at his apartment for two weeks. The acquaintance, a fellow Pakistani immigrant named Junaid Babar, was carrying a suitcase containing what prosecutors would later call “military gear.” The suitcase contained raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks that Babar was going to take to Pakistan and supply to Al-Qaeda.

Two years later, in 2006, while trying to board a flight to Pakistan from London’s Heathrow Airport, Hashmi was arrested and charged with conspiring to send money and military gear to terrorist organizations. He became the first person to be extradited to the United States from Britain on terrorism charges. Federal prosecutors admitted they had no evidence to show that Hashmi was a member of Al-Qaeda or that he himself supplied materials to them. They did, however, allege that he knew where Babar was going, lent him $300 for a plane ticket and allowed him to use his cellphone to make calls to Al-Qaeda operatives. In a strange twist, Hashmi’s case was based on the testimony of Babar himself, who had been arrested two years earlier for his involvement in several terrorist plots. In an effort to reduce his expected 70-year-sentence, Babar had turned government informant. As a result, his sentence was reduced to “time served” after four years and he is free today, after spending most of the last 10 years plotting to kill people in terrorist attacks.

Hashmi, however, spent the next three years of his life in solitary confinement. Under the Special Administrative Measures for particularly dangerous inmates he was under lockdown 23 hours in the day and allowed one visitor once every two weeks. He got one hour of exercise every day, which he had to do in a cage. There was a story about Hashmi losing his visitation rights for three months for practicing martial arts in his cell. His lawyers protested what they called “inhumane” and “unnecessary” harshness.

Last year, Hashmi pled guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to Al-Qaeda. It was largely seen as a deal struck with the government for a reduced sentence.

To most of the Muslims students I spoke with, it was irrelevant that Hashmi pled guilty. Nor did it matter that when Judge Loretta A. Preska asked whether he was pleading guilty “because you are in fact guilty?” he replied, “Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God), yes.” What resonated for them was that Hashmi was a regular guy, someone just like them who held views that most of them shared and who had spoken about things most of them spoke about.

In his final research paper at Brooklyn College, Hashmi had written about the abridgment of civil liberties of Muslim-American groups in the United States after 9/11. At many student meetings he had condemned U.S. foreign policy. A 2002 story in Time Magazine quoted Hashmi, then a student activist, calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world.”

The U.S. government hadn’t charged Hashmi with acts of violence. But the prosecution used the charges against him to support an argument that he had a “proclivity for violence.” For that he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

 ****

If the Hashmi case helped establish wariness in the Muslim community in Brooklyn, what happened next established outright paranoia. In August, an Associated Press story reported that the New York Police Department was conducting a surveillance program on Muslims throughout Brooklyn. They were targeting local imams, mosque attendees and Muslim student groups in colleges.

A secret division in the NYPD known as the “Demographics Unit” was given the task of mapping and monitoring ethnic neighborhoods. They followed immigrants, mapping what restaurants they ate at, what mosques they prayed at and where they socialized. Most alarming to Muslims was the AP’s revelation that the department used undercover police officers to infiltrate Muslim student groups. Activities as mundane as paintball trips were flagged as potential terrorism training. Students who were particularly vocal about their political and religious beliefs were also noted. In many instances, the student groups claimed that they had encountered infiltrators, mysterious students who would pop up at meetings and social gatherings and try to encourage people to speak about radical views or have strong political opinions in an effort to entrap them.

According to the documents obtained by the AP, The NYPD had identified 31 Muslim student associations (MSAs) on college campuses in New York City that they deemed “MSAs of concern.” The NYPD scanned online chat rooms and their undercover officers monitored student meetings and kept an eye out for individuals with strong political views.

Six of these MSAs were at branches of the City University of New York: Brooklyn College, Baruch College, City College, Hunter College, La Guardia Community College and Queens College.

Not a single arrest has been made as a result of the surveillance program since 2006.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement that the police only act on leads and do not single out groups based on religion. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the NYPD’s actions, comparing it to screening for measles. “If you want to look for cases of measles, you’ll find a lot more of them among young people,” he told Newser. “That’s not targeting young people to go see whether they have measles or not. If there is a community where the crime rate is very high, to not put more cops in that community is ridiculous.”

I traveled to Brooklyn College to speak to the students right after the story broke. I heard varied responses. There were the liberal, white kids who expressed the predictable outrage at the racism and the invasion of privacy. Others argued that the NYPD did exactly the right thing and the surveillance program was justified and made them feel safer.

Muslims students reacted with predictable outrage. Soheeb Amin, the president of the Muslim Students Association at Brooklyn College said, “When we found out about the NYPD’s activities, it actually just confirmed what we already suspected. The rights of Muslims have been restricted since 9/11 in the name of counter-terrorism, but we find that the victims of such measures end up being innocent college students who are American citizens for the most part.” Amin blamed the actions on most Americans’ ignorance of his religion. “If only they understood Islam and its true message, or maybe if they had read the Koran in its entirety and not just selected verses, they would not be suspicious of someone just because they are a practicing Muslim,” he said.

“It’s definitely scary, it makes me think twice about what I say when I’m speaking to someone on the phone when I’m on campus,” said sophomore Faria Imtiaz, a member of the Muslim Students Association at Brooklyn College. “It shows that if it could happen to us, it could happen to anyone.”

Faria Imtiaz, Muslim student at Brooklyn College (Gloria Dawson/The Brooklyn Ink)

There was that refrain again. Imtiaz was one of the first students who mentioned Fahad Hashmi to me. She also told me how she suspected one of the teachers at her high school may have been an NYPD spy – an account I was unable to verify.

What she said next however surprised me. “What can you do?” she said. “Sometimes these things are necessary.”

I couldn’t help but be surprised. Why weren’t they more angry? Where was the outrage? I asked Imtiaz.

“Of course we’re angry,” she said. “But a lot of us are also scared of speaking out.”

Listening to first Hashmi’s story, and then the reaction to the surveillance left me feeling, at turns, alarmed, paranoid and guilty. I too am a Pakistani. I am a practicing Muslim who has lived for years and studied in the United States. I have on occasion criticized American foreign policy in conversations with friends. Which left me to wonder—if it could happen to him, could it happen to me?

The alarm and the paranoia were predictable. The guilt was something different. I come from a country where almost everyone is Muslim, a country founded, with great bloodshed, on that premise. My relation to the state is not framed by my faith; it is not a reason for me to be regarded as a person of suspicion. The students I met in Brooklyn College, were caught in a very different struggle. They were caught between the forces of assimilation and identity – between fitting in as loyal Americans and resisting the temptation to appear acquiescent. Their parents may have advised caution. And some of them heeded the warning. But others were still not sure how to live lives as Muslims in a country where the visceral response to their faith, my faith, was the inevitable connection to the extremists who had killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, and who remained the targets of the ongoing war on terror.

What was it like to be them, to be young and Muslim and living in an America where they felt not only alien but suspected of disloyalty?

I related to the fear these students were expressing. What surprised me was the degree to which they felt there was nothing they could do about it. I did not know whether they were simply afraid of speaking out and being labeled anti-American or whether they were not disturbed enough to protest. What was clear was their reluctance to attract attention for their views.

If they were going to hold their tongues, I would need to find those whose views, and whose work, captured the tension of being pulled between fear and outrage, between being accepted as yet another American and resisting the tug of trying to fit in.

 ****

 Cyrus McGoldrick, the civil rights manager at the Council on American-Islamic Relations-New York is 23 and not a typical young Muslim. In fact, until a few years ago he wasn’t even Muslim. Born to an Irish-American father and an Iranian mother, McGoldrick had grown up around Muslims but did not convert to Islam until three years ago. In his spare time, he’s a musician, rapping under the name “The Raskol Khan.” He speaks with a languid confidence, without the unease and the suspicion that I found in a lot of the Muslims who came from immigrant backgrounds. He wears a thick beard without its moustache, a white Muslim prayer cap and the traditional keffiyah or checkered cloth draped around his neck. I asked him why more Muslims weren’t reacting with greater outrage to the NYPD’s spying.

“Most Muslims feel that if they just keep their heads down, get on with their lives and show everyone that they’re just leading normal everyday lives like the everybody else, things will get better on their own,” he said. “They’ve been thinking that for the last 10 years, but they need to realize it’s not getting better.”

“The civil rights movement had the MLK’ers and the Malcolm X’ers. The Malcom X’ers always told the MLK’ers that ‘You’re always doing sit ins, you’re doing too much sittin’ down. You need to stand up!”

That is exactly what he does. Together with Ramzi Kassem, a City University New York law professor, McGoldrick has been conducting “Know Your Rights” workshops across schools, colleges, mosques and community centers. The workshops are sponsored by CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility), an initiative sponsored by CUNY that addresses the legal needs and concerns of communities in New York that are affected by the government’s counter-terrorism measures. McGoldrick says the workshops inform Muslims of their rights and how they should react if the police question them or if they suspect someone in their community is an informant.

It was a story published by the AP about these workshops that set off another war of words. In November, the AP ran a story under the headline “Angry over spying, Muslims say: “Don’t call NYPD.” The story suggested that in the wake of the surveillance program, community leaders were calling on all Muslims not to cooperate with the NYPD. New York Republican Congressman Peter King called this reaction “disgraceful.”

McGoldrick shakes his head and sighs at the mention of the story. He says he and Kassem never advocated refusing to cooperate with the NYPD. “The framing of that story was all wrong, in our workshops we explicitly tell people that if you see something (suspicious) going on, of course you need to report it,” he says. “It was not about what to do when you go to the police, it was about what to do when the police come to you.” Instead, he says, the workshops advised people not to speak to the police without knowing their rights or having legal consultation to avoid entrapping themselves.

Still, he added, he recognized the urge not to cooperate. “Pardon my language, but you can’t just shit on us and then expect us to cooperate with you,” he says. Even though the workshops hadn’t intended to send a message of non-cooperation, McGoldrick said he nonetheless could defend the sentiment. “To expect me to come forth and give you information about what people are talking about, what the imams are saying in their sermons, that’s pretty ballsy, especially after reports come out that you’ve been spying on all of us,” he says.

He had little faith in the various outreach programs that tried to promote interfaith understanding. They were, in his view, “mostly for show,” and accomplished little. In fact, his organization is boycotting Mayor Bloomberg’s annual interfaith dinner later this year and writing an open letter explaining their grievances regarding the actions of the NYPD and the mayor’s comments following them.

His attitude stands in marked contrast to what I had heard in the past from so many other American Muslims who believed that cooperation between faiths was the best way to improve relations with the rest of the community. But this was changing, according to McGoldrick. “The few Muslim leaders who are willing to attend these events and do the photo ops, even they are becoming more and more on the fringe now,” he says. McGoldrick points out that even though a large number of imams and community leaders have held regular dialogue with the police department and have maintained good relations with them, they’re still turning up in the list of people who are being spied on.

McGoldrick and his colleagues may be disillusioned with efforts at outreach. But I was not entirely convinced he was right. So I visited the Muslim American Society center on Bath Avenue to find out more about what those attempts at interfaith connection were, and what they were achieving. The center serves many functions; it has Koran classes; a prayer room; a large hall for community functions and activities for children, including karate lessons. It is also responsible for the building of many mosques and Islamic community centers in the city, an activity for which they’ve faced considerable opposition.

Ibrahim R. Mossallam arrives at the center to drop off his five-year-old son Ismael for one of those karate lessons. The 33-year-old Palestinian-American kisses his son and affectionately ties his karate belt around him, gently pushing him towards the instructor and a gaggle of other rowdy kids. I think of Fahad Hashmi and how his martial arts practice was considered a sign of insubordination.

Mossallam is the Muslim American Society outreach director for Brooklyn and Staten Island. He’s youthful, friendly and energetic, just what you’d expect from someone in his position. He’s dressed in baggy jeans and a hoodie, not at all looking like the grown up father of two young children. He speaks quickly and enthusiastically about the society’s efforts in reaching out to others in the community.

He tells me that one of his proudest achievements was the opening of a mosque in Sheepshead Bay. Much like the Park 51 episode last year where there were public protests against the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, local residents protested the building of the mosque. They first claimed that it would be a public disturbance and then argued that it was violating building codes. Courts struck down both the challenges. Despite the opposition, Mossallam said the actual opening went smoothly. “You can’t just open it up with hordes of people coming to the mosque and not expect any hiccups,” he said. “We decided to have a pre-Ramadan dinner, created invitations and letters, gave them to the neighbors, invited local politicians, local assemblymen, priests and rabbis and opened three days before Ramadan. The neighbors loved it.”

Mossallam says his job is to show Muslims how to interact with non-Muslims, live as law-abiding Americans but still maintain their Muslim identity. “There have been those who’ve gone behind a rock and don’t even know how to talk to a non-Muslim if they are approached and just view them with suspicion.” he said. But nor does he advocate complete assimilation.

“Most Muslims, especially before 9/11 all assimilated, they all tried to blend in, very few who had strong iman (faith) would go out and make time to pray. Most Muslims here won’t even do that, they won’t pray openly,” he said. “They’ve turned into a typical American religion where they’ve separated life from religion in a lot of ways.”

But in the wake of relentless scrutiny after 9/11, he says, Muslims in America were forced to evaluate their faith and identity. “Muslims wanted to find out ‘Where in the Koran does it say you can attack civilians? What could they have possibly taken and twisted to fit their thinking?” he said. “The more I read about Islam the more I realized half the stuff I knew was false.”

The younger generation of Muslims, he continues, is much better educated and is more likely to practice the true version of the religion. His parent’s generation practices a more cultural version of the faith, depending on where they immigrated from. The result is a new generation of Muslims who are much more open about their beliefs, not particularly inclined to assimilate and more likely to react to perceived prejudice. “The first thing is to not be ashamed of being Muslim,” Mosallam says. “You do want to fit in, but not too much. When you walk down the street you don’t want someone to say ‘Oh there goes John’ or ‘There goes David’, you want them to recognize and say ‘Oh there goes Muhammad’ or ‘There goes Ibrahim.’”

I never had to decide how “Muslim” I wanted to be. I didn’t have to choose between whether I displayed my religion openly or practice in secret. For me, Islam was always something very private, not something I tried to draw too much attention to, whether I was in the U.S. or in Pakistan. This would explain my unease when I returned to Brooklyn College, to attend an Eid-ul-Adha event organized by the student chapter of the Muslim American Society.

 ****

 This Eid celebration is unlike the Eid celebrations I’ve seen in both Pakistan and America. The women all sit on one side of the room, separated from the men by a wide aisle. All but a handful of the women wear headscarves. Almost every man has a beard.

A beaming young man named Majed is speaking at the podium. Again and again he punctuates his sentences with Inshallah (God willing) and Alhamdollilah (Praise be to God). Majed is preaching as the students sit in sober silence. He is the evening’s emcee; every trip to the podium is accompanied by a Koranic reference or a mention of the Prophet. I am slightly unnerved at the absence of non-Muslims. When I was in college at Ohio Wesleyan University, Eid events were opportunities to invite people of other faiths to join in the celebration. I’m also surprised that it is such a somber, religious atmosphere. Where I grew up, celebrating Eid is more about getting together with friends, family and food. There is very little sermonizing.

Not to say there aren’t any light moments. Majed introduces the night’s first performance, a young man, barely 14 years old whose specialty is singing pop songs reworded into songs about Islam. The kid can sing, but I cringe at his acapella renditions of Chris Brown and Ne-Yo songs that, instead of being about wanton love and dancing in a club, are instead about love for Allah and getting into Jannah (heaven).

Next up is Fadi Ebrehm, a 20-year-old Syrian-American convert who writes poetry. Ebrehm is fidgety and self-conscious, mumbling introductions to his verses. But his diction is immaculate when it comes to reciting his pieces, where the topics vary from the Iraq War, to Palestine to living in America as an immigrant.

“I learned from history/That puppet rulers never speak to the people honestly/We all carry contradicting ideologies/We don’t steal/But we don’t mind the robbery.”

Later, when I caught up with Ebrehm, he told me that he felt the same discomfort at the event. “They really should have opened it up to more people,” he said. “I think they missed a real opportunity here.” Ebrehm performs his poetry at many similar events and gets frustrated when the only people to listen to him are Muslims. “It’s not just for Muslims. My work is for everyone. Being Muslim is just one part of me. It doesn’t define who I am or my work.”

The evening’s main event is a sermon by Imam Siraj Wahhaj. Imam Wahhaj is an African-American convert to Islam and also the founder of Masjid-e-Taqwa. He has given talks all around the world and it shows in his commanding presence as he takes the stage, with an palpable buzz going through the audience.

Wahhaj is a charismatic, engaging speaker. He isn’t afraid to be funny and his command when quoting from the Koran in its original Arabic is flawless. He doesn’t focus on one topic in particular, instead touching upon several issues. “I am so proud of Muslim students in the time and age we live in” he says. The implications are clear: he’s warning the students about the culture in which they’re growing u.

He speaks about the predictable evils — drugs, alcohol and pornography. He warns the students about their urges and about sexually transmitted diseases. He narrates a story of the one Muslim girl who decides to celebrate her birthday with her non-Muslim friends, got drunk in a bar and got pregnant the same night.

He then asks how many people believe abortion should be allowed. There are furtive glances around the room as if students don’t know the right answer. A few raise their hand. Wahhaj doesn’t berate them. Or immediately state his belief. Instead he tells another story, this one about a black woman who was raped by a white man. That woman, despite tremendous pressure and social stigma, decided to keep the baby. That baby grew up and became mother to one Malcolm Little, later be known as Malcolm X.

Wahhaj pauses to let his message sink in.

****

 I meet with Imam Wahhaj a couple of weeks later at Masjid-E-Taqwa, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I take issue with some of his views, especially those on abortion. But I am intrigued by his experience as a Black Muslim. Cyrus McGoldrick had drawn parallels between the civil rights movement and the struggle of Muslims in America. As an American convert, Imam Wahhaj is free from the additional burden of being an immigrant. I’m curious to hear what he has to say.

For Wahhaj, the actions of the NYPD are nothing new. He isn’t fazed in the least, he says, because in the words of Imam Talib Abdul Rashid in Harlem, being a black Muslim means “being black twice.” He’s seen this all before. “I always thought we had this kind of surveillance on us,” he said, “especially on me.” He says the mosque’s phones are tapped, not unlike the counter-intelligence program under J. Edgar Hoover that targeted black people and leaders.” He says these situations repeat themselves. “It happens, it’s a phase right now, it’ll go away, but it won’t go away by itself. Muslims have to fight, just like black people had to fight for their freedom.”

Imam Wahhaj was born Jeffrey Kearse in Brooklyn, 1950. When he was 18, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “That was a turning point for me,” he says. “He was my hero and the one I loved. I went home crying. And I remember thinking to myself, at that point I wanted to be either a Black Muslim or a Black Panther.”

Wahhaj says his conversion was less about religion and more about Black pride and fighting against injustice. After Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, Wahhaj (whose name at the time was Jeffrey 12X) followed Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad and converted to orthodox Islam. He changed his name for the last time to Siraj Wahhaj (“bright light.”)

Like Cyrus McGoldrick, Imam Wahhaj is adamant in insisting that things aren’t going to get better on their own for Muslims in America. Change will only come when Muslims can show the rest of the country that their plight is not a Muslim issue but in fact a civil rights and civil liberties issue that affects everyone.

The young Muslims I met spoke of a growing sense of alienation, both from anti-Islamic comments and post 9/11 laws that they feel target them – as they targeted Fahad Hashmi. They’re tired of being in the news for all the wrong reasons and they’re tired of apologizing, having to keep repeating, “Islam is a religion of peace.”

Despite the efforts at outreach and interfaith engagement, there are voices in the community telling this generation that their anger is justified and being passive is no longer an option. If things will ever get better, it is going to be through fighting for their rights.

As McGoldrick put it, “They sit, and they wait, thinking that if we do nothing, things will just get better on their own. But they won’t unless we do something about it. Of course everybody wants peace, but we can’t have peace without justice.”

]]> http://thebrooklynink.com/2012/01/02/39856-muslims-in-brooklyn-a-community-on-the-edge/feed/ 4 http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/17/36985-slideshow-arrests-at-ows-day-of-action/ http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/17/36985-slideshow-arrests-at-ows-day-of-action/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:52:44 +0000 Andrew Katz http://thebrooklynink.com/?p=36985 ]]> http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/17/36985-slideshow-arrests-at-ows-day-of-action/feed/ 0 http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/17/36963-slideshow-ows-day-of-action/ http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/17/36963-slideshow-ows-day-of-action/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:14:39 +0000 Anna Hiatt http://thebrooklynink.com/?p=36963 ]]> http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/17/36963-slideshow-ows-day-of-action/feed/ 0 http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/16/36710-video-occupy-protesters-let-back-into-zuccotti-park/ http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/11/16/36710-video-occupy-protesters-let-back-into-zuccotti-park/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:43:49 +0000 Omar Akhtar http://thebrooklynink.com/?p=36710

At around 5p.m. Tuesday, the Occupy Wall Street protesters were let back into Zuccotti Park after being evicted early Tuesday morning by the NYPD.

The footage shows the NYPD issuing the conditions for re-entering the park and the protesters walking in through the NYPD inspection.

Shot and Edited by Omar Bilal Akhtar/The Brooklyn Ink.