He couldn’t make it.
While his wife began worrying about his delay, Alauddin lay dead only a few blocks away, where he had been shot to death by an unknown assailant.
Fifty-five-year-old Alauddin, from Habiganj, Bangladesh, was with his assistant Thara Miah, 64, who was also shot and later succumbed to his injuries. They both had been returning home from Al-Furqan Jame Masjid, a nearby mosque where Alauddin had been an imam for the past few years.
A day after the murder, police charged Oscar Morel, 35, who had been arrested for a separate offence. Police later traced various details of the murder scene to Morel’s home in Brooklyn, such as a revolver and clothes similar to the ones seen in the video footage of the murders.
Alauddin’s murder – both of the person that he was and the figure he represented in the Bangladeshi, Muslim community in New York – came as a huge blow to the locals.
Following the murders, relatives, friends, acquaintances expressed shock and anguish over the loss of such a figure from the community.
“Our community is totally broken; we’re very scared,” said Milat Uddin, 57, a retired lawyer.
“He was like a family member to me,” said Badrul Khan, secretary of the Al Furqan Jam-e-Masjid. “I’ve lost such a great imam; he was perfect at this job.”
Trump’s fingerprints
As the community mourned the murders, questioned arose as to the motive, the perpetrator and the driving force behind such an attack.
“We’re looking at it as a hate crime,” said Alauddin’s nephew Mohammad Moklesur Rahman, 39.
“You can’t blame us for thinking that it’s a hate crime,” added Noman Hossain, 22, a college student in New York.
They are not the only ones to feel so, and even though the police officials have said the motive is unclear, Robert K. Boyce, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, has told the New York Times that hate-crime as a motive is definitely “on the table.”
Moklesur, a cab driver who has been living in New York for 15 years, says he has never felt this threatened or unsafe.
He says he believes the current election rhetoric and the hatred spewed by the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign has encouraged such crimes.
“It’s especially since Trump’s election correspondence that
we’re noticing these crimes more and more,” said Moklesur. “We may not be able to claim it – but we feel it.”
“This year’s election rhetoric has perpetuated such hatred to some extent,” added Noman, whose father was close friends with the slain imam. “I can’t be definitive, but I think Trump’s rhetoric) has a part to play. It’s not just over here, it’s all over America.”
Trump has been in the news for his fascist views regarding not only Muslims, but minority populations across America. Last year, he called for a blanket ban on all Muslims from entering the United States, causing quite a bit of heat in an already intense election campaign.
“A lot of times people in the public do not know how to interpret those words and they just assume that all Muslims are his targets,” Zead Ramadan, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said while addressing a protest rally following the murder. “And therefore they target common Muslims walking down the street. And this sort of Islamophobia and the hatred towards Muslims is now mushrooming.”A bigger problem?
However, Trump’s election rhetoric against Muslims has come to the limelight only since last year. Following the murder, while many in the Bangladeshi community in Queens felt that Trump’s election rhetoric had a role to play in propagating such hate crime as this, some others have felt the threat from much earlier.
“Trump definitely exacerbated the problem that led to this senseless murder, but the climate had begun to worsen way before his campaign,” says Chaumtoli Huq, a civil rights lawyer and activist based in New York, who was arrested in 2014 while attending a protest rally for Gaza.
“While Trump is openly bigoted against Muslims, our laws had discriminated against the community way before his presence,” she says.
“Many people like the imam who wear traditional garb or women who wear hijab are sadly targeted, as well as others like Sikh community who are mistaken to be Muslims,” Chaumtoli, the activist who is of Bangladeshi origin, added.
A similar fear was expressed by quite a few others in the community following the imam’s murder.
“Usually when I come to the masjid, I always dress in Islamic garb, with my jubba and topi on, and now I’m beginning to feel threatened,” says Noman. “Especially our mothers and sisters, who dress in full Islamic garb- it’s a growing fear for them as well.”
“He was in his jubba when it happened; he was targeted because of his attires, his identity,” said Md Abdul Quayum, 50, a local store clerk.
At the same time, there are members of the community who feel that this same stigma should not befall the community the attacker belongs to.
“We can’t go out and look at the attacker’s nationality and start condemning all of them,” he says. “It’s just one person in the community who’s committed the crime and he’s the one responsible, not his race, not ethnicity, not his community.
“And that’s something that needs to be stressed – it’s very easy to take something like this and start blaming the whole community, just as is being done with Muslim communities. We can’t do that. We have to show that we’re above that.”
